After back-to-back weeks of improving ratings, ABC has granted sci-fi thriller V a second-season renewal. That means more lizardy goodness in store for fans next fall, and a guaranteed post-LOST life for series star Elizabeth Mitchell.

In the meantime, the alphabet network isn’t sending out any high-hopes vitamins to the show they bet on to replace LOST, FlashForward. Ratings have been dismal and sinking, rather than rising, but ABC remains firm in their stance that they’ve not decided on the show’s cancellation just left.

Another presumed-dead series, Scrubs, apparently still has the slimmest of slim chances at renewal, though Twitter posts by former series star Zach Braff have indicated the prospects are less than zero for renewal. Still, with most of the expensive stars now gone, Scrubs was a half-decent performer in the ratings and less expensive than it had been to produce.

Better Off Ted, unfortunately, is dead.

ABC’s hoped-for LOST successor, FlashForward, returned to TV this past Thursday, but drew a meager 6.5 million amid heavy competition from the opening rounds of NCAA March Madness, NBC’s comedy lineup and reruns of Bones and Fringe on Fox. While no one expected FlashForward to blow away March Madness’ numbers, getting bested by NBC and nearly matched by Fox reruns is not the best way to return a show the network hopes will ease viewers’ grief over the impending end of LOST.

FlashForward is a drama exploring the mystery behind a worldwide blackout by everyone on Earth, and the glimpses of the near future they gained while unconscious. While there are no barcode scanners behind the scam, the show is like LOST in that it uses its concept to explore larger intellectual themes; the primary question behind FlashForward has been, “Is our future predetermined, or can we make choices that affect a real change to our0 future.

Following a couple of flirtations with becoming the titular mother on How I Met Your Mother, actress Sarah Chalke now has her post-SCRUBS career lined up; she’ll star as a freshman congresswoman who is politically successful but unlucky in love in the new ABC comedy FRESHMEN.

The role is not all political backroom deals and Paris vacations; the comedy will place Chalke at odds with the imbalance between her personal and political life. The show is the product of left-wing political blogger Arianna Huffington and former FRIENDS scribe Greg Malins.

Despite that origin, with the appealing Chalke in the lead role, once can only hope the focus of the show is more on the funny and less on the political stances.

FlashForward, arguably the freshest ABC drama this year, is on a three-month hiatus following last week’s episode. The word coming down from ABC is that by allowing for the big gap, FlashForward can air with no repeats or long delays between fresh episodes once it returns; in the meantime, ABC can avoid reruns and try out other shows waiting in the wings for the Winter Season.

Sure, the news is about as welcome as first communion invitations among the faculty at UC-Berkeley, but few people question such a move when Fox or USA do it; so why not ABC?

In all honesty, ABC is worried about FlashForward’s ratings decline; the show is shakey at best for a second season order, but given the limited-run nature of the concept, maybe it’s better off as a one-season-and-done proposition. After all, once The Date comes and goes and we see how things turn out for the cast, wouldn’t a second global blackout be a bit of a stretch?

The well-cast and witty EASTWICK, a dramedy in the vein of CHARMED, only with slightly older stars, is doomed; ABC has decided not to extend its initial order of 13 episodes of the freshman show. While I’ll admit the role of Darrel Van Horne was filled by an actor rather unworthy of Jack Nicholson’s shoes, the three women in the cast had developed a sharp comic chemistry.

Rebecca Romijn was appealing, Lindsay Price was the most promising new talent, and Jamie Ray Newman was the most relatable character in the show, though a bit too trim to be believable as a mother of five. I mean, what kind of fat burner is she using?

Anyway, all three women should go on to bigger and better things soon, and perhaps Paul Gross will find a role that Jack Nicholson hasn’t made impossible to walk into.

The new, recast version of Scrubs will arrive on ABC starting December 1, so someone tell Donald Faison to hold off on that bulk order of hair vitamins; he’ll continue playing the hairless Doctor Turk for at least another season.

Beyond Doctor Turk, John C. McGinley’s Docter Cox will also appear on the series, but the rest of the original cast will, at best, be only occasional guest stars. The new Scrubs will feature the work of Eliza Coupe, Michael Mosley, Kerry Bishe and Dave Franco as the new emotional centers of the show.

Although many of its familiar cast members may move on, ABC is seriously considering picking up Bill Lawrence’s comedy, Scrubs, for a ninth season – a possible second season on ABC after seven seasons on NBC. The network’s in-house studio, ABC Studios, produces the veteran comedy and with the likely exits of Zach Braff, Judy Reyes and probably more, the costs of production are sure to go down.

Of course, a renewed Scrubs could benefit from its new lease on life by focusing on the inexperienced interns introduced this season, which would return the show back to the roots of its comedy core: inexperienced doctors learning what medicine is all about. While the cast exit could make Scrubs: The Next Generation seem like a comedy on the best diet pills, it could also move on to produce a second generation of stars.

The real question is whether the show can hold its core audience without Braff and company around to anchor it.

Matthew Fox, who plays Dr. Jack Shepherd on ABC’s Lost, believes the show, when it concludes in spring 2010, will be the last “TV thing” he ever does. The actor, whose previous TV work was on Fox’s Party of Five, hopes to move into movies full-time, rather than acquiring a job installing, say, gas tankless water heaters.

Of course, many a star before Fox have uttered the same words and nearly all of them come back to TV eventually. Perhaps the movie career doesn’t take off and they need the work. Perhaps ten years goes by and they change their minds.

Or perhaps, Matthew, some drug-addicted, frazzled-looking doctor will turn up on your door one night screaming, “We made a mistake, Matt. We… we have to go back. We have to go back to prime time television!”

Sounding about as sincere as a Seattle injury lawyer, Stephen McPherson, president of ABC’s entertainment division, mock-mourned the cancellations he ordered for both Pushing Daisies and Eli Stone. (Dirty Sexy Money was also mentioned, which just goes to prove his insincerity.)

Daises and Stone are two of the freshest shows ABC has aired since debuting LOST several seasons ago, and yet declining ratings – which are linked directly to the writer’s strike and viewer apprehension over a threatened actor’s strike – were his excuse, even though he talked about how poor a tool the current Nielsen system is for measuring total viewership, considering all the ways and venues a show can now draw viewers from.

Of course, the grief expressed might have been more convincing if McPherson hadn’t been so evasive on the subject of when the final episodes of Stone and Daisies would air – speculation is that, at best, they will burn the episodes off over the summer; at worst, that they’ll be posted for online viewing at ABC.com and never make it to air, although they will surely show up on the expected “Complete Series” DVD/Blu-Ray collections sure to follow.

Success in a quick weight loss program is far easier than success in television, but producer Greg Berlanti is preparing a new hour-long drama for the Alphabet network.

Titled The Return, the show is a science fiction concept that examines the impact at the White House and around the world when a group of aliens land. Berlanti’s credits include Dirty Sexy Money, Eli Stone and Brothers and Sister.

His co-creator is Rene Echeverria, whose credits include Medium, Star Trek, The 4400, Dark Angel and Now and Again. With his SF cred and Berlanti’s quality control, The Return could be the most intriguing show to land on ABC since LOST.

Although it’s on tap as a replacement series for next season, rather than the official fall schedule, series creator Rob Thomas and ABC are full-steam ahead on the big remake of the late 90s dramady, Cupid. A person could put up a small business for sale trying to guess the whims of Hollywood execs, but at least the show is in full-on casting mode.

The latest member added to the cast is Sarah Paulsen, who most recently appeared as Harriet Hayes on Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and previously had appeared on several series in supporting roles, most notably on the old WB Network’s dramady, Jack And Jill. Paulsen will reprise the role of Dr. Claire Allen, the pyschiatrist assigned to look after former mental patient Trevor Hale, who is convinced he’s the god of love.

Allen was originally played by actress Paula Marshall; when Cupid was canceled after less than a season on the air and she joined 2-3 other series in their final season, Marshall gained the reputation of being an actress who was “the kiss of death” for any show she was cast in. Paulsen has no such reputation.

Actor Bobby Cannavale is taking on the role of Trevor Hale, originally portrayed by the charismatic Jeremy Piven. The remake of Cupid promises to be one of the more interesting remake/relaunch stories of the coming TV season.

ABC’s critically-acclaimed murder mystery series, based on the novels of James Patterson, Women’s Murder Club, has landed a showrunner just in time to crank our four more episodes before season’s end, giving the show a shot at renewal next fall. The Angie Harmon-fronted drama, based around the efforts of four female friends in positions of power in San Francisco to solve the city’s toughest crimes, has been teetering on the edge of cancellation largely due to losing its show-runners over the course of the 100-day writer’s strike, recently resolved.

Now, Robert Nathan, a veteran show runner on NBC’s Law and Order, has been tapped to come on board for at least the last four episodes this season and try to gently retool the show enough to get a ratings bump and secure a season renewal. Word is, if the network hadn’t found a show runner, the drama was doomed to see its sets struck, right down to the bathroom fixtures, and grind toward slow, painfel non-renewal death. At least now, it has a shot.