A tag-team Tuesday

CUTE sci-fi boys on Thursdays, African American comedies on Sundays, wrestling on Fridays: The CW’s schedule is Frankenstein’s monster, with salvaged parts from the WB and UPN contributing to the mishmash of a body.

On Tuesdays, the combination of “Gilmore Girls,” formerly of the WB, and “Veronica Mars,” born of UPN, is designed to provide the new CW network with both brain and heart. The shows are similarly smart and snappy with a dark streak and present sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking insights on coming of age with a single parent. And in a television landscape that is either fueled by testosterone (“24,” “Two and a Half Men”) or winkingly post-feminist (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Desperate Housewives”), the spirited, independent-minded female leads of “Gilmore Girls” and “Veronica Mars” offer a rare alternative.

Measured in business terms, the shows are at opposite ends of the success spectrum. And whether one show can help the other find a wider audience is a yardstick by which the success of the CW will be judged.

On Sept. 26, “Gilmore Girls” will begin its seventh -- and perhaps final -- season, having finished Season 6 with an average of 4.4 million viewers. As the second-most-popular show on the WB, there was no question that the mother-daughter fan favorite would be a key asset in the CW’s quest to corner the advertising market among 18-to-34-year-olds.

By contrast, “Veronica Mars,” entering its third season Oct. 3, has been nothing short of a ratings flop. The girl-detective series was renewed by the skin of its teeth after its first season, during which it attracted a small, fiercely loyal audience that included many television critics. But last year the show performed even worse than it had in its first: It ended Season 2 with an average of 2.3 million viewers.

What went wrong for “Veronica Mars” on UPN? Dawn Ostroff, the network’s former entertainment president who now runs the CW, sighed when asked that question in her West L.A. office. “So many things,” she said. Its incompatibility with its lead-in show, the reality catfight “America’s Next Top Model,” was one problem, Ostroff said. Another was that it competed with “Lost,” ABC’s popular island mystery that appeals to a similar fan base.

Rob Thomas, the creator of “Veronica Mars,” suggested a third reason for the show’s ratings woes: “I felt like ‘Veronica Mars’ was asking people who’d never tuned into UPN to tune into UPN,” he said in his North Hollywood office recently. “The WB had the corner on that young, and particularly young and female, market.”

The glib and boisterous Thomas added with a laugh, “This will either vindicate that theory or shoot it down, being on the CW.”

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LIFE ON ‘MARS’

IN the planning meetings before the CW announced its lineup in May, Ostroff said “Veronica Mars” had been very much on the bubble. “It could have been canceled,” she said. “It’s not like we walked into that scheduling room and it was a lock, it just wasn’t.”

Ostroff has associated herself closely with the show. When asked why he thought that might be, Thomas said: “Here’s an unscripted answer that makes me nervous: Dawn loves the show for the cachet it gives the network. I think she understands from the buzz of all her employees that it’s a quality show. And I think there are elements of our show that she loves. At her core, I don’t think she quite gets -- or I don’t know if ‘gets’ is the right word but enjoys -- the dark moments of the show.”

He was referring to the fact that the character of Veronica was raped, her best friend was murdered, and that in Season 2, a school bus with kids on it went off a cliff. When Thomas told Ostroff about that last plot development, he recalled that she clutched her head, as if in pain. He said: “She was like, ‘Oh, my God, Rob, I can’t believe you’re in here telling me this! You can’t be serious!’ But to Dawn’s credit, she can be convinced. We wouldn’t be on the air if it weren’t for Dawn’s passion for the show. Which I truly appreciate.”

When Ostroff not only renewed “Veronica Mars” but gave it the plum spot behind “Gilmore Girls,” she asked Thomas to simplify the show’s structure. In its two previous years, Veronica (Kristen Bell) pursued a seasonlong mystery, which prevented new viewers from understanding the plot. This year there will be three mysteries. “Rob has done an amazing job at still making the mystery a big part of the show but not making it so complex that it becomes insular, that you can’t get in,” Ostroff said.

Thomas agreed to the change and wants to do what he can to stay on the air. “I tried to start the season with no previous knowledge required,” he said. “The first episode is consciously a plea to the ‘Gilmore Girls’ audience to join in.”

On the Warner Bros. lot, the mood at “Gilmore Girls” appears to be one of calm, even though it too has undergone a major change in the past few months. Last April, Amy Sherman-Palladino, the show’s creator and force majeure, was unable to come to an agreement with the studio and left. In departing, she and her husband, Daniel, a “Gilmore Girls” executive producer, handed the series over to David Rosenthal, whom they had groomed as a successor, knowing that their relationship with Warner Bros. was tenuous.

The changeover has been smooth, Ostroff said: “I think the viewers will be thrilled to see what David’s done. He really does have that voice.”

That “voice” -- fast-talking and incessantly referential, emanating from the characters of Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and her college-age daughter, Rory (Alexis Bledel) -- was thought to be the creation of Sherman-Palladino alone. But Rosenthal, who joined the show last season as an executive producer, said: “It’s like learning a new language. At a certain point, you just find yourself fluent in that language. I just kind of learned to speak ‘Gilmore.’ ”

The show’s hard-core fans, the ones who analyze every word and plot twist on Internet message boards and spoiler sites, for the most part welcome Rosenthal rather than regard him as an interloper. His transition has been made smoother because of viewers’ discontent with the show last year, during which Lorelai acted uncharacteristically reticent in her romantic life.

“Independent of whether people were responsive to last season, I had to come up with my ideas for this season,” Rosenthal said. “The arcs, the storylines. That’s what I focused on.”

He said he is not thinking about whether “Gilmore Girls” will end its run this season. Bledel and Graham do not have contracts after the year is over, and the speculation is that they won’t want to continue. On this topic, the circumspect Rosenthal said: “It is their show, they are the heart and soul of the show. It is up to the two of them. If the two of them want to do one more season, we will absolutely do one more season. If the two of them don’t, we won’t.”

Ostroff said, “Obviously, internally we’ve started to talk about that.” Does she think there is a chance “Gilmore Girls” could continue? “I hope so, I hope so.”

As for the even less certain fate of “Veronica Mars,” Thomas offered a prediction.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “We’re either going to retain most of the ‘Gilmore Girls’ audience, which will keep us on all year. Or we drop precipitously and we’re going to get canceled.”

Later, he said of his constant reality checks, “There’s a whole lot of that that happens on our show that I don’t think they’re worrying about over at ‘Lost.’ ”