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.

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.

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.

E! Online is reporting, direct from showrunner Bryan Fuller, that even if the strike were to end this week, his show, ABC’s Pushing Daisies, would not be back for more episodes this year. And I quote from E! Online:

“Lots of talk has been going down this past week,” Daisies boss Bryan Fuller told me earlier today. “Essentially, even if the strike is resolved in the next week or two, we wouldn’t be back until next season. There was a preliminary conversation that involved a plan to hit the ground running and try to get episodes on the air as soon as possible, but it no longer seems like that’s going to happen. It seems most likely that we will have a very short first season and then come back in the fall for a proper season two.”

Now, that’s a dang shame. Sure, it took yours truly until the strike break to find time to display a bunch of TIVO’d episodes of Pushing Daisies across my standard Sony WEGA sitting awkwardly atop my plasma tv mount, but once I found the show and realized it was from the same wonderful folks who brought us Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls, I was all over that show and it’s now in my personal Top 10 “Must Watch” list.

C’mon, Fuller… say it ain’t so! If the writer’s strike settles soon, I don’t wanna have to wait till September to see more of The Pie Maker and Dead Girl! That’s just wrong in SO many ways!

Now the WGA writers strike is getting ugly for the long haul; the kind of ugly that a simple exchange of religious jewelry cannot solve.

In a trend started last week by ABC and taken up this week by Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox TV, CBS Paramount Network TV and Universal Media Studios, Hollywood’s leading studios have decided to cut costs by axing the development deals of several writer-producer teams whose output has halted as a result of the strike.

The move is seen largely as a counter-move to the WGA’s decision to come to individual agreements between the WGA and certain studios, like David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, a deal which allowed the CBS late night host to return from hiatus with his staff of writers intact.

By axing the writer-producer deals with these studios, the studios are cutting their costs but are also freeing up a lot of creative talent from their current obligations, so that when the labor agreement is finally settled, there could be a lot of “free agent” producers available whose services could induce a bidding war.

But before that can happen, a labor agreement must be reached; unfortunately, the move of studio owners to ax existing deals in the middle of the strike is likely to result in a strike that is much longer, more bitter and increasing entrenched, rather than one that will be resolved more quickly.