Kevin Bacon’s gritty FBI drama, Charlie Sheen’s return to television, Hayden Panettiere’s country music soap and a final season of Flashpoint anchor CTV and CTV Two‘s upcoming lineups.
Bell Media says it’s bolstering its twin TV schedules with a mix of weighty dramas and light laughers, although much of the new material won’t be seen until 2013.
Just four programs – amounting to 2.5 hours of new material – are being added to CTV’s fall schedule, while sister station CTV Two is getting three new dramas.
CTV’s additions include three comedies: Anger Management, in which Sheen plays an unconventional therapist; The New Normal, about two gay men who enlist a surrogate baby mama; and The Neighbors, with Jamie Gertz and Lenny Venito as a couple who move to a gated community where aliens live in disguise.
The channel’s sole new drama is The Mob Doctor, with Jordana Spiro as a young surgeon split between her promising medical career and a lifelong debt to Chicago’s Southside mob.
CTV Two’s new dramas include: Nashville, with Connie Britton as a music icon struggling to maintain her career against an ambitious newcomer played by Panettiere; Arrow, with Canadian Stephen Amell as a vigilante superhero known by day as billionaire industrialist Oliver Queen; and Emily Owens, M.D., about a young surgical intern who learns that working in a hospital is no different than the dynamics of high school.
CTV programming president Phil King was to outline the 2012-2013 grid at a daylong event Thursday featuring appearances by Panettierre, Smash star Megan Hilty and The Big Bang Theory co-star Kunal Nayyar.
Earlier this week, Citytv announced a fall and winter schedule that bet heavily on comedies while Global said it would lean on star-packed primetime dramas.
King took a veiled swipe at his competitors’ strategies in promoting his own lineup.
“Our schedules are not heavy on comedy, nor are they heavy on drama. What they are heavy on is hits, in every genre, on every night of the week,” King said in a statement.
“For 10 years running now, our powerhouse lineup has been continually refreshed, resulting in the most stable and balanced schedule out there.”
CTV is the market leader with a deep roster of performers including The Big Bang Theory and Grey’s Anatomy.
King says they’ll be back this fall, along with CSI, American Idol, Dancing With the Stars, Castle, Blue Bloods, The X Factor, Once Upon A Time, Grimm and Whitney.
A final season of Flashpoint will get a coveted 10 p.m. slot on Thursdays, where it will be up against Global’s buzzy Sherlock Holmes drama Elementary and Citytv’s Scandal.
Meanwhile, six new series will rev up in mid-season:
• the psychological thriller The Following, with Bacon as an FBI agent chasing a network of serial killers
• the Canadian drama Motive, about a female Vancouver homicide detective who must piece together the hows and whys of horrific cases
• Zero Hour with Anthony Edwards as a man who must unlock a centuries-old conspiracy to rescue his kidnapped wife
• the Jekyll-and-Hyde drama Do No Harm, with Steven Pasquale as a charming neurosurgeon battling a borderline sociopathic personality
• the cop-drama Golden Boy, which charts the rapid ascent of an ambitious NYC officer played by Theo James
• and The Family Tools, a comedy about a habitual screw-up, played by Kyle Bornheimer, who is forced to take over the family handyman business.
