FOX WILL LAUNCH NEW SHOWS IN JUNE

Fox Broadcasting Co. is taking another step toward year-round original programming by launching five new series and a retooled “The Simple Life” in June, and in the process accelerating a trend that’s upending traditional TV schedules.

The network announced Monday that “The Casino,” the latest unscripted one-hour series from producer Mark Burnett (“The Apprentice”), will air at 9 p.m. Mondays starting June 14. Self-deprecating party girls Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie will return in “The Simple Life 2” on Wednesdays starting June 16.

Fox, which successfully launched the youth soap “The O.C.” last summer, will also trot out two new scripted dramas: “The Jury,” a legal show from director Barry Levinson and writer Tom Fontana set for 9 p.m. Tuesdays, and “North Shore,” which involves the lives and loves of young people at an upscale Hawaiian resort and is eyed as a Monday lead-in for “Casino.”

Two Wednesday comedies, “Quintuplets” and “Method & Red,” round out the June premieres. The first stars former Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter as a harried father of five; the latter is a fish-out-of-water concept with rappers Method Man and Redman living in a tony suburb.

Series launches during the summer are not new. NBC, for example, has made a cottage business out of such summer series as “Meet My Folks.”

Yet Fox is attempting to switch to a truly year-round schedule, and its summer premieres come as the overall television business is grappling with enormous changes in technology and audience tastes. Faced with declining market share and stiff competition from cable outlets, network executives have gradually abandoned their tradition of treating the hot weather season as a dumping ground for repeats. The push to launch new series between June and August has especially intensified since 2000, as so-called “reality” series such as “Survivor” and “American Idol” became hits over the summer.

But Fox has unique reasons for unveiling a fresh summer lineup. Due to its sports programming commitments, the network is forced to interrupt its fall series launches for postseason baseball. Fox’s ratings for new fall shows over the past two seasons have cratered, only to be rescued in January by “American Idol.”

Gail Berman, Fox entertainment president, hopes the new summer schedule will lend the network more stability -- and hopefully provide at least one or two new hits. She emphasized that the new series are not simply “summer shows” but rather contenders that the network hopes will become long-term players on the network’s schedule. She pointed out that, on average, the network will pay just as much in license fees for the June series as they would for shows launched in the fall.

“This is 52-week-a-year programming,” Berman said. “It requires a different type of thinking” than the traditional September-May season of years past.

How this will affect Fox’s lineup after baseball wraps in October is not clear. To make way for the new series, shows such as “The O.C.” and “24” will not be on the June schedule but are slated to return later. In a news release Monday, the network said additional launches are coming in July, September and January. Some of these will be announced next month at the network’s traditional programming presentation for advertisers.

Indeed, it may take a while for Madison Avenue to catch up with this and other new programming models being offered by the networks.

Jon Nesvig, Fox’s ad sales chief, pointed out that most of the ad spots that will air during the new June series were actually sold late last spring, during the network’s typical “upfront” selling season.

John Rash, of the Minneapolis-based ad firm Campbell Mithun, said Fox was bowing to the reality that viewers are looking for new programming year-round, not necessarily during the traditional season.

While Fox may or may not get hits from the new lineup, “it does recognize that there are viewers available [during the summer], looking for alternatives.”