ABC Reshuffles Lineup as It Launches More Reality TV

ABC’s prime-time schedule, already heavily reliant on alternative programming thanks to one show, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” is benching another of its freshman comedies, “Madigan Men,” in a shake-up that makes room for another reality-based game show, “The Mole.”

Beginning Jan. 9, when “The Mole” makes its premiere Tuesdays at 8 p.m., the network will move its Tuesday edition of “Millionaire” to Friday at 8 p.m., where it will be followed by the sitcoms “Two Guys and a Girl” at 9 and “Norm” at 9:30. ABC, which scrapped its young-adult-themed “TGIF” Friday night format after last season, had hoped to build an audience there with established and new sitcoms this season. But the new series “The Trouble With Normal,” pulled at the beginning of the November sweeps period, and “Madigan Men,” starring Gabriel Byrne as an Irish American father, have struggled.

The pedigree of “The Mole,” which is produced by Stone Stanley Entertainment, is much like CBS’ highly successful “Survivor” and its less successful “Big Brother”--a European import (in this case, Belgium) in which everyday citizens are drafted into extreme situations and compete for cash. In “The Mole,” 10 contestants work to complete a set of physical tasks while trying to figure out who among them is sabotaging their efforts. “The Mole” will run for nine weeks.

ABC executives, meanwhile, have been rigorously disputing that their in-house juggernaut, “Millionaire,” is wearing down. Though ABC commanded the largest viewership during the November sweeps, for instance, it did so at a reduced margin from recent sweeps periods, and NBC took home first place among the coveted 18- to 49-year-old viewership. Given that “Millionaire” airs four nights a week on ABC, the show’s performance goes a long way toward determining the network’s overall ratings performance.

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The current reshuffling puts “Millionaire” on Fridays, a less competitive night for the broadcast networks. But Stu Bloomberg, co-chairman of the ABC Television Group, said moving “Millionaire” to Friday was done simply to repair a struggling night, and would give “The Mole” a jump-start in a higher-profile slot on Tuesdays.

“We really need to bolster Friday,” Bloomberg said, adding that ABC hadn’t made a final decision on “Madigan Men’s” future.

At least two other announced reality projects at ABC--”The Runner,” in which contestants have to travel across country without being identified, and a series in which real-life reporters work at a dot-com start-up--are still in the works, Bloomberg said. “When they’re ready, we want to put them on. If they’re ready for the summer, they’ll go on,” he said.