Spring Fever: It’s Upfront Week!

This week the networks unveil their Fall 2010 schedules for advertisers, giving them and us eager television viewers a look at what we’ll be watching in a few months. There are always some surprises during this week, whether it’s a show unexpectedly getting axed, a bubble show getting picked up, or that totally buzzed about pilot getting passed over. So far only NBC and FOX have announced their schedules, but we’ve already had a couple of shockers.

Law & Order: The Mothership is done. NBC canceled it after 20 years, giving executive producer Dick Wolf the shared record of longest-running scripted program, along with Gunsmoke. One more year and he’d have held the record. He’s understandably pissed. Will NBC regret this in the end? Hard to say, but with L&O’s less than stellar ratings over the last couple of seasons and NBC’s need to do a lot of housecleaning in an attempt to rebuild the network, it seems like a smart move right now.

Chuck lives! NBC renewed the series for a fourth season, and there was much geek rejoicing.

Heroes dead! NBC put the former network savior out of its misery after ratings fell to a mere fraction of its former glory. There’s a possibility of a two-hour movie or maybe a mini-series to wrap up loose ends, but otherwise it’s gone.

Fox renewed both Lie To Me and Human Target, contrary to what most pundits were predicting last week (they predicted an either-or situation, not both). In addition, Fox plans to air the rest of Lie To Me‘s second season beginning in June, then flow right into the third season, giving the show a run of new episodes from June 2010-January 2011. I’ll be interested to see how that works out for them. As a fan of the show, I’m certainly happy to be getting such a long stretch of new content.

What other surprises await us this week? Since Chuck is safe and Ugly Betty was canceled months ago, I don’t think there are any shows I’m worried about not returning. Instead, I’m eager to find out what my next new obsession will be!