Television news briefs

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WB spreads premieres through fall

The WB will start rolling out its 2005-06 season before the official start of the season, and it won’t stop until several weeks in.

The network will kick off its fall campaign Sept. 13 with the sixth-season premiere of “Gilmore Girls,” which has a cliffhanger to resolve, and the debut of the new thriller “Supernatural,” which stars former “Gilmore” guy Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, late of “Smallville.”

The net’s Friday comedy block, which features three returning shows and the new series “Twins,” will open Sept. 16, also before the Nielsen-sanctioned start of the season on Sept. 19. Monday’s and Sunday’s shows will debut the week of the 19th, and the new-old Thursday lineup of “Smallville” and “Everwood” hits the airwaves on Sept. 29.

Wednesday night, with new anchor “One Tree Hill” and the freshman drama “Related,” will complete the rollout on Oct. 5. WB Entertainment president David Janollari says the network has ordered 26 episodes of “OTH” for this season, and the slightly late premiere will mean fewer repeats during the season.

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Pair joins Bowen in ‘Boston’

The firm of Crane, Poole and Schmidt will grow some more this season.

When “Boston Legal” returns to ABC in the fall, it will welcome three new characters. In addition to former “Ed” star Julie Bowen, whose casting was previously announced, Justin Mentell and Ryan Michelle Bathe are also joining the show.

Bowen’s character, Denise Bauer, is a senior associate at the firm who has her eyes on a partnership. She’s unwilling to let much of anything, including an acrimonious divorce, dissuade her from her ambitions.

Both Bathe (Showtime’s “Good Fences”) and Mentell (“Roll Bounce”) will play junior associates. Mentell’s character is a hard-driving lawyer who sometimes lacks an internal editor, while Bathe will play a woman who graduated at the top of her law school class but lacks some of the real-world smarts needed in her job.

“Boston Legal” has undergone a good bit of cast upheaval in its brief life. Lake Bell (now of NBC’s “Surface”) left midway through the show’s first season, not long after Candice Bergen joined the cast. Monica Potter and Rhona Mitra departed this spring.

“Boston Legal” will air at 10 p.m. ET Tuesdays in the fall.

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UPN’s “Love, Inc.’ gets Busy … Phillips

At 5:20 on Thursday afternoon, Busy Phillips received an important phone call.

“I was getting a manicure and a pedicure and I said, “Guys, I have to cut this short,”‘ Phillips laughs.

It’s less than three hours later and Phillips is chatting with reporters at a Television Critics Association press tour network party as the newest star of UPN’s fall comedy “Love, Inc.” She’s replacing Shannen Doherty, who was recast almost immediately after the show was picked up this spring.

“I had gotten the script before and I was really interested in it because I think Andrew Secunda wrote an amazing pilot, such an interesting idea,” Phillips says of the series, in which she’ll play Denise, a professional dating consultant who has problems with her own romantic life. “Actually, I had read the article when it was in the New York Times and I remembered thinking at the time “That’s going to make a great TV show.”‘

For Phillips, best known from regular stints on “Freaks & Geeks” and “Dawson’s Creek,” the whirlwind casting process – Denise was one of the last major characters for a new fall show without an attached actor – began just over a week ago with a reading and a screen test with co-star Holly Robinson Peete. Without ever watching the original Doherty pilot, Phillips responded immediately to the character.

“I think that she’s really fun and that she’s a little sarcastic and I think she’s a little goofy in a way,” gushes Phillips. “I think she’s a lot like me, honestly, a little bit bumbling trying to find her way. She’s a little young and she thinks she’s got it all figured out and she really doesn’t, which is something that I’ve struggled with in my life.”

The show’s producers agreed that the actress and the part were a perfect match and wanted to bring Phillips on. Of course, nothing is ever that simple in Hollywood. In the spring, Phillips shot an untitled ABC comedy pilot co-starring Peter Dinklage and even though that series (tentatively titled “Testing Bob”) hadn’t gone forward, UPN had to make sure the necessary steps were taken to free her, machinations that were in the works until late Thursday afternoon.

Not only did Phillips get to the UPN party on time (and under the radar of even the photographers on the press line), but she managed to show up in a dress that perfectly matched the netlet’s purple arrivals carpet. As the sun was setting, though, she still hadn’t met most of the show’s ensemble, nor could she anticipate how her character would change before shooting begins on Aug. 1.

“With most shows – let me rephrase that – with most good shows, there’s always a certain element of tailoring a character to a particular actor or actress,” she explains. “I think that I obviously bring a different energy than Shannen, even though I didn’t see her take on the character. I know that we’re very different people and very different actresses.”

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Willow vs. Xander vs. Angel

The fall TV schedule will have a distinct Sunnydale feel to it. Alyson Hannigan (CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother”), Nicholas Brendon (Fox’s “Kitchen Confidential”) and David Boreanaz (Fox’s “Bones”) are all starring in new shows, while Charisma Carpenter has landed a recurring part on UPN’s “Veronica Mars.”

Hannigan and Brendon will be competing directly for viewers – their shows are opposite one another at 8:30 p.m. ET Mondays. The former Willow says “How I Met Your Mother” and “Kitchen Confidential” film on the same lot, so she and Brendon have had the chance to talk some good-natured trash about which show will win the ratings battle.

She also says that at least in Brendon’s mind, the two shows might have different audiences. “Nick said to me, “I think your show goes for the younger crowd, and ours is sort of for older, gay men,”‘ Hannigan says. (We’ll see what Brendon has to say about that when the FOX portion of the tour rolls around next week.)

Hannigan does say that she and Brendon have found one common cause: A plan is afoot to TP Boreanaz’s car while he’s shooting elsewhere on the lot.

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UPN isn’t a CBS farm team

It’s become a semi-regular question at the semiannual Television Critics Association press tour: Whenever UPN has a strong-looking show on its schedule, someone asks an executive from CBS – UPN’s sibling in the Viacom empire – whether the Tiffany network is going to poach the show.

It happened this week when a critic asked CBS Entertainment president Nina Tassler whether “Everybody Hates Chris” – widely regarded by those attending press tour as the best new comedy this season – could end up on CBS if it first performs well on UPN. Tassler said no, but her UPN counterpart, Dawn Ostroff, made her own case Thursday.

“I want to be perfectly clear that UPN is not a farm system for CBS,” Ostroff says. “We’re our own vibrant network. … We have our own development team, and they’re a very talented one at that. Believe me, we’re thrilled that all of you like (Chris’) enough and think it’s good enough to put on the number-one network. But we’ve got it, we produced it and we are broadcasting it.”

The lingering notion of UPN as small-time stems from the fact that a few years ago, it pretty much was. But with “Chris” and returning shows like “America’s Next Top Model” and “Veronica Mars,” it’s carved out its own niche.

Ostroff says she doesn’t take such questions personally, noting, “You can see that we produce good shows on our own.”

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NBC reaps midseason ‘Windfall’

NBC has added another component to its midseason roster, picking up a drama called “Windfall” that was originally a pilot at Fox.

The show, which stars Luke Perry (“Beverly Hills, 90210”) and Jason Gedrick (“Boomtown”) will follow a group of 20 friends who collectively win a $386 million lottery jackpot, and the changes it wreaks in their lives. Fox developed the show as part of its pilot slate last spring but ultimately passed on it.

“With its dueling themes of dreams coming true and “be careful what you wish for,’ “Windfall’ is both fun and provocative,” NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly says. “We feel like we found a diamond in the rough when this pilot became available.”

The pickup of “Windfall” gives NBC four shows it can plug in at midseason. Last week the network ordered “The Book of Daniel,” a drama it developed about a pill-addicted minister (Aidan Quinn, “Legends of the Fall”) who has conversations with Jesus (Garret Dillahunt, “Deadwood”), and it previously picked up the comedies “Four Kings” and “Thick and Thin.”

In addition to Perry and Gedrick, the “Windfall” cast – which remains pretty much intact from the Fox version of the pilot – includes Gedrick’s fellow “Boomtown” alum Lana Parrilla, Sarah Wynter (“24,” “The Dead Zone”), D.J. Cotrona (“Skin”), Jon Foster (“life as we know it”), Alice Greczyn (“The Dukes of Hazzard”) and Jaclyn DeSantis (“Luis”). Laurie McCarthy (“CSI: Miami,” “Felicity”) created the show.