3rd Place CBS Yanks Tuesday Sitcom Lineup

CBS-TV, certain to end the season in third place for the first time in its history, said Wednesday it is yanking the low-rated Tuesday night block of comedies that it had launched only 15 days earlier. The network will henceforth air movies on Tuesdays.

The four exiting but not necessarily canceled comedies are “Trial & Error” and “Coming of Age”--which had aired only three times--”Frank’s Place,” a first-year series that had been transferred from the Monday lineup, and “My Sister Sam,” which CBS was trying to revive after pulling it from the Saturday schedule last fall.

In a prime-time shuffle aimed at trying to compete in the May ratings sweeps, CBS also returned “Houston Knights” to the schedule, this time on Tuesdays, effective April 26, and shifted “Cagney & Lacey” from Tuesdays back to its old home on Monday nights, starting April 18.

CBS said it had taken “Wiseguy” off its Monday roster to make room for “Cagney & Lacey,” but added that “Wiseguy” “will return to the network shortly” on an evening still to be determined.

In a statement that spoke of daring and disappointment, CBS Entertainment President Kim LeMasters said this of the Tuesday four-comedy schedule that he and other CBS executives had put on the air March 15 with much hoopla:

“It was a high-risk programming strategy, and it simply didn’t work as well as we would have hoped.”

That seemed to understate the case. Nielsen ratings for last week showed the four comedies at the bottom of the pile, with the lowest-rated show, “Trial & Error,” drawing a minuscule 8% of the audience in its time period.

Although it said its critically acclaimed “Frank’s Place” would return to the schedule “shortly,” CBS had no comment on when or if the three others would do so. “Frank’s Place,” “Trial & Error” and “Coming of Age” had their final Tuesday airings this week; “My Sister Sam” will leave on April 12, CBS said.

LeMasters, seeking to put an optimistic spin on the situation, said in his statement that CBS’ TV-movie development and performance this season has been “superb,” and that “we have a large number of new movies ready to go.”

Those films, along with theatrical films, “are being moved into the Tuesday night time period immediately and will run through the May (ratings) sweep,” he said.

“Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” is scheduled to air Tuesday, followed on April 12 by “Murphy’s Romance,” a theatrical film starring James Garner and Sally Field.

The hasty installation of movies to CBS’ Tuesday schedule gives it two movie nights, the other being Sunday.

CBS officials already have conceded that their network, for the first time in its history, will be third in prime-time ratings when the so-called official 30-week season ends on April 17, with ABC moving up to No. 2 and NBC winning for the third year in a row.

Once-dominant CBS is averaging a 13.5 rating so far this season, while ABC has a 13.9 and NBC a comfortable 16.2.