Catfight alert: The scheming fashion mogul played by Bo Derek in one of MyNetwork TV’s telenovela-like shows will have an equally devious rival.

Morgan Fairchild, the “80s icon and former star of “Falcon Crest” and “Flamingo Road,” has joined the cast of “Fashion House,” one of two serial dramas that will launch MyNetwork in September. She’ll play a character named Sophia Blakely, a power-hungry enemy of Derek’s Maria Gianni.

(“Fashion” formerly went by the name “Secret Obsessions,” which will now serve as an umbrella title for one of MyNetwork’s two strips.)

MyNetwork TV is a venture by FOX owner News Corp. and is made up largely of stations (including several owned by News Corp.) that were cast off when UPN and The WB merged to form The CW. It will launch Sept. 5 with two telenovela-style shows, “Fashion House” and “Desire: Table for Three,” that will run five nights a week for 13 weeks.

‘Blade,’ ‘Sunny’ off to solid starts

The premieres of two very different shows last week have executives at both Spike TV and FX smiling at the ratings they brought.

Spike TV’s “Blade” scored the network’s biggest-ever premiere for an original series on Wednesday. The following night, “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” began its second season on FX in a better place than it ended its first year.

“Blade” brought in 2.5 million viewers with its two-hour premiere, passing “The Ultimate Fighter” season three debut to become the top original series premiere in the network’s history. The show, which picks up after the three “Blade” movies, stars Kirk “Sticky” Jones as the half-human, half-vampire title character.

“It’s Always Sunny,” meanwhile, drew 1.6 million viewers to its premiere at 10 p.m. EDT Thursday, then followed up with 1.5 million viewers for the second episode at 10:30. While those numbers are still well below those of FX’s dramas, they’re an improvement over the show’s first season.

‘Sopranos’ drama ends happily

The “Sopranos” family will be staying together after all, thanks to some last-minute negotiations that brought two wiseguys back into the fold.

Steven Van Zandt and Tony Sirico agreed to 11th-hour deals over the weekend that will bring them back for the HBO show’s final eight episodes. The two were the last holdouts among the principal cast in a round of protracted negotiations over pay for the final batch of episodes.

Sirico and Van Zandt, who have the same manager, were negotiating together and asking for $200,000 per episode. The deal they agreed to comes pretty close to that; according to the New York Post, they’ll each get $1.5 million for the final eight shows, which works out to $187,500 per episode.

Their signing eliminates a potential headache for “Sopranos” creator David Chase and his writers. Van Zandt’s character, Silvio Dante, and Sirico’s Paulie Walnuts are both involved in ongoing storylines that would have been tough to write around in their absence.

-Zap2it.com