The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the agents are drinking. It's upfronts season in New York! This is the week the broadcast networks throw fancy parties to announce the new shows they'll be cancelling in a few months and celebrate the returning veterans whose survival was brokered through a bruising backroom combination of studio strong-arming, dumb luck, and blind optimism. Over the next few days I'll be posting my thoughts on all the announcements with the giant caveat that I haven't actually seen any of the new shows in question yet. Which isn't such a big deal because, odds are, you won't be seeing them for very long either.

Finally: CBS

The Situation

For a long time, it seemed curious to me that some comic-book supervillains spent so much time trying to destroy the world. Lex Luthor, for example, is the richest man in Metropolis. What reason could he possibly have for picking a fight with a flying alien demigod? Why not sit back with a bottle of Krug, a couple tubs of scalp moisturizer, and enjoy the spoils of success?

As I grew older and not at all rich, it eventually occurred to me: Lex's archrival wasn't Superman. It was boredom.

I imagine it's much the same way for CBS president and CEO Les Moonves. Since taking the reins of the former Tiffany Network in 1995, Moonves and his team have redefined the rules for television dominance, winning the ratings race for total viewers year after year with a carefully curated schedule of breathtaking consistency. CBS airs the shows that Twitter doesn't talk about but America actually watches, joke-heavy sitcoms larded with howling studio audiences, and cop shows with tough-sounding acronyms in which the bad guys get theirs and the good guys wear sunglasses. Every spring, when his rivals are scrambling and cancelling, Moonves is smiling and renewing. Openings on the CBS schedule are as rare and coveted as vacancies on the Supreme Court. I'd make a joke about the candidates for the latter being roughly the same age as the target audience for the former, but Moonves has even triumphed over that stereotype. This past year, CBS won not just in total viewers, but also those in the much-coveted 18-to-49 demographic for the first time since 1991. At this point, CBS isn't just crushing its competition, it's excelled its way into a Champions League of one.

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the agents are drinking. It's upfronts season in New York! This is the week the broadcast networks throw fancy parties to announce the new shows they'll be canceling in a few months and celebrate the returning veterans whose survival was brokered through a bruising backroom combination of studio strong-arming, dumb luck, and blind optimism. Over the next few days I'll be posting my thoughts on all of the announcements, with the giant caveat that I haven't yet actually seen any of the new shows in question. Which isn't such a big deal because, odds are, you won't be seeing them for very long either.

Next up: ABC

The Situation

On the surface, ABC (which, it must be disclosed, shares a corporate parent with Grantland) would appear to have three major advantages going into the 2013-14 season. Scandal, its sudsy Thursday-night body wash (as in adult soap; I'm not giving this up until it catches on), is TV's hottest drama, the rare modern show given time to find its audience that actually went ahead and found it. Modern Family, though now more sour than sweet, remains a ratings giant and Emmy magnet on Wednesday nights. And rival NBC is still around, hemorrhaging viewers and doing things like this, making it the easy and obvious target for the jokes of easy and obvious TV critics.

But dig a bit deeper and it's clear: ABC is in a situation more desperate than a housewife and one not even Olivia Pope could fix. Despite the above-mentioned tentpoles — and including reliable reality performers The Bachelor and Dancing With the Stars — ABC has actually spent the last two seasons in an epic-fail-off with the Peacock punching bag, spending most of 2013 in last place among the 18-to-49-year-old viewers that advertisers care about. President Paul Lee's highly touted 2012 crop of new dramas — Last Resort, 666 Park Avenue, Zero Hour, and Red Widow — all detonated faster than a nuclear missile from a rogue submarine inadvisably parked on Thursday nights, and the non–Shonda Rhimes hours that survived (weakened Revenge, word-of-mouth-fueled Nashville) are teetering. Still, Lee's plan to stop the bleeding is a good one: He intends to broadcast most of his dramas as two uninterrupted blocks of 12 episodes in the fall and spring, à la Lost. The only issue? These new shows aren't Lost.

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the agents are drinking. It's upfronts season in New York! This is the week the broadcast networks throw fancy parties to announce the new shows they'll be canceling in a few months and celebrate the returning veterans whose survival was brokered through a bruising backroom combination of studio strong-arming, dumb luck, and blind optimism. Over the next few days I'll be posting my thoughts on all of the announcements, with the giant caveat that I haven't yet actually seen any of the new shows in question. Which isn't such a big deal because, odds are, you won't be seeing them for very long either.

Next up: Fox

The Situation

Fox established itself in the '80s by acting brash, but it's only in the past few seasons that it began to seem cocky. Aided, as always, by its reduced schedule (Fox programs six fewer hours per week than its competitors), abetted by the stability of its Sunday-night animation block, and rocket-fueled by the dominant presence of American Idol — a ratings brontosaurus in a post-meteor world — Fox was able to take chances, make mistakes, and still come out on top. Not in terms of total viewers, of course — CBS owns that metric like its viewers own Life Alert alarms — but in terms of the much coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic. When network chairman Kevin Reilly successfully launched New Girl in 2011, he was not only thumbing his nose at his former employers at NBC (New Girl is precisely the kind of smart, urban single-cam sitcom that the Peacock used to make hay with), he was suggesting that Fox's brand was no longer a savvy mix of action-packed hours, reality singing, and general coarseness. He was suggesting that Fox's new brand was success.

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the agents are drinking. It's upfronts season in New York! This is the week the broadcast networks throw fancy parties to announce the new shows they'll be canceling in a few months and celebrate the returning veterans whose survival was brokered through a bruising backroom combination of studio strong-arming, dumb luck, and blind optimism. Over the next few days I'll be posting my thoughts on all of the announcements with the giant caveat that I haven't yet actually seen any of the new shows in question. Which isn't such a big deal because, odds are, you won't be seeing them for very long either.

First up: NBC

The Situation

If Eskimos have multiple words for snow, then surely Comcast, NBC's new corporate overlord, must have cultivated at least a dozen synonyms for catastrophe. At this point, the Peacock's stumbles are legendary, and we're not talking the good kind of legends, either — those tend to have happy endings. Entertainment president Bob Greenblatt was hired in early 2011 to lead NBC out of the basement to which its previous caretakers — Jeff "Super Size Me" Zucker and Ben "White Tiger" Silverman — had abandoned it. But two years into his reign of errors, Greenblatt has only managed to dig himself in deeper. Yes, The Voice is a legitimate hit with a pronounced halo effect, but, if anything, its outsize success could also be seen as a hindrance. Last fall, the bleating of Christina Aguilera and friends drowned out a lot of obvious cracks that became all too obvious in the spring. Revolution, one of the network's 2012 success stories, cratered without its lead-in, and NBC went from winning the fall (at least in the coveted 18-to-49-year-old demo) to losing the year yet again.

Upfronts week is a propagandist’s dream, a nonstop cavalcade of lofty promises, shining stars, and room-temperature mock-maki. In lavish ballrooms extending from midtown Manhattan to the other side of midtown Manhattan, the broadcast networks trot out talent and psyche themselves up in an attempt to sell advertisers, and an increasingly attentive public, on their latest bill of goods (or at least mediocres). So why does it more often sound like they’re selling themselves too? “Why just watch when you can feel?” enthused emo ABC chief Paul Lee at the Alphabet’s shindig. It was a well-constructed bit of hokum that could be repurposed for nearly any of Lee’s rivals (CBS: “Why just watch when you can doze?"; The CW: “Why just watch when you can [SKRILLEX BASS DROP]?" NBC: “Why watch?”). ABC may be peddling a brand strategy that attempts to draw bright lassos of linkage between its tradition of heart-tugging Body Washes (you know: like soaps, but classier) and head-scratching array of newcomers, but the truth is that none of the networks have any real idea what they’re doing. In an atmosphere where an afterthought could redefine a company and a heavily hyped investment could cost everyone onstage their jobs, can those in charge really be blamed for playing it safe? Any of their new shows could fail, a very few could succeed. But anyone who tells you they know which is which before Labor Day is lying. On Tuesday, ABC led their clip package with the words, “When we share great stories, they touch our hearts and feed our souls.” Last year, the same people were touting the soul-nourishing properties of Work It. La plus ça change, la plus c’est la meme merde.