Fox: Selling Admen on... Fewer Ads?

Anna Torv (right) investigates strange biology in Fringe. / Mark Ben Holzberg/FOX

TV critics tend to focus so much on new programming that you might forget that the upfronts are, foremost, about selling ads. But though Fox had debuts to announce from a pair of big-name TV creators, arguably the biggest news it made had to do with the ads in those shows.

J.J. Abrams' Fringe and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, said Fox president Peter Liguori, would be part of an experiment Fox is calling "Remote-Free TV." These high-profile dramas will air with half the usual amount of commercials and network promos. The obvious reason: people hate commercials, have a lot of means of skipping them and it's becoming impossible for networks, and the people who give them their money to ignore.

You'd think this would not be a popular announcement to make in front of a roomful of ad execs, and it's true there was not a lot of wild cheering. The move is either waving a white flag to the TiVo army or a wily way of seducing them back into the ad-watching fold, and Liguori pitched it as the latter. (Just put the remote away, dearie... over on the other side of the room... you'll be so much more comfortable...) Viewers will be more excited about the programming, he said, and they'll pay closer attention to the ads that do air.

Me, I say: that much quicker to fast-forward through the commercials! But what do I know? First impressions, and bad cellphone photography, after the jump:

Eliza Dushku in Dollhouse. / FOX

As for the new programming itself, I don't have as much to say. Fox programming chief Kevin Reilly purports to be very high on both shows—the network has already begun a big PR blitz for Fringe, which included a herd of cows munching hay outside the theater where Fox held the upfront. (The animals apparently have something to do with the show's sinister-bioscience storyline.) But the trailers for it and Dollhouse, while interesting, were the kind of loud, dark, quick-cut jobs that made it hard to get a real feel for the dialogue and tone of the shows.

Either that, or the shows themselves just lack the wit and wow moments of Abrams' and Whedon's earlier work. But I'm going to blame the trailers. Yeah, the trailers.

[By the way, I freely recognize that I'm kind of putting Abrams and Whedon in an unfair bind. If the shows weren't different from what they've done before, I'd rip on them for repeating themselves, right? For instance, I might take a cheap shot at Abrams for making another show that begins with an airplane disaster... but I'm bigger than that, right? On a less-superficial note, my worry about Dollhouse—whose sci-fi premise involves a group of young people who have new personalities implanted in them every episode—is how do you build character interest in a show where several players literally have no characters of their own? But all this depends on actually seeing full episodes, so I'll shut up for now.]

Fox also screened a few minutes of Mitch Hurwitz's Sit Down Shut Up, a cartoon sitcom about teachers that combined animated characters with live-action backgrounds. It has potential, but apparently little of the animation is finished, so most of the scenes were videos of the cast's table reads. There is a reason no one has ever put on a sitcom consisting entirely of table reads—much as it would save on production costs.

A preview of the Family Guy spinoff about Cleveland was similarly scanty, but jokingly acknowledged it, with Cleveland Brown telling Peter Griffin about a character voiced by "a British guy" who wasn't in the clip reel because Fox wouldn't pay extra for it. Meanwhile, Do Not Disturb, the hotel sitcom directed by Jason Bateman (also a voice in Sit Down), looked eminently forgettable.

To offset the giant TV screens onstage at its upfront, Fox will need to reforest the entire Amazon basin.

Other news from the upfront, in hail-of-bullets format:

* Fox continues its green kick: the upfront proclaimed itself a carbon-neutral event, 24 is apparently the first carbon-neutral show on television, and News Corp aims to become an entirely carbon-neutral company by 2010. It will be like Rupert Murdoch doesn't even exist.

* Speaking of 24, there'll be a two-hour movie in November. Not speaking of American Idol, Idol's results show goes back down to a half-hour next season.

* Like the other big networks this week, Fox has been touting its ratings in the purportedly more accurate "C3" format. Memo to self: learn what C3 is, other than an explosive.

* Fox showed several clips from possible midseason shows still in development—sort of the TV equivalent of looking at a fetal sonogram. The creator of one, about experts at lie detection, boasted, "If you watch the show, you learn science. You can bring that to bear on real-life situations" to detect deception. Like at an upfront.

* Cows don't dig hanging out on 55th Street: