Try branching out, viewers

I was watching "Samantha Who?" the other night, because I like to, and reflecting on how Hollywood's current labor problems -- or management problems, if you prefer -- might abbreviate, or at any rate interrupt, its life. And I felt a little bit sad, suddenly, not just for the "Samantha" people, but for all the people of a newborn TV season whose shows might be cut down in their prime time. (Well, for many of them -- I did not feel that sad for the big shots behind "Big Shots.")

It is already hard enough to get a series going in this distracted world, between an audience that has many other (if not necessarily better) things to look at, and networks still addicted to big results in short order. There is something actually quite delicate about an American network television series; it continues to gestate after birth. (British series, by contrast, and the domestic cable series that ape them, emerge more fully formed -- they get right up and walk, like calves and foals.) Though the highly competitive, fear-saturated, Nielsen-monitored nature of big-time TV show business initially prompts safe choices around even the stranger series, most get less conservative as they go along; they find their legs over time. But time is increasingly what they are not allowed.

Ironically, while the strike looks sure to shorten the season of most every scripted series, it also means that the networks are more likely to air everything they have in the can, and to shoot everything they have a script for. For the moment, and until the stuff runs out, Death takes a holiday.

This bodes especially well for ABC's "Men in Trees," another show I watch because I like to, and would like you to, too, so I can continue to watch it. It has, in spite of less-than-stellar ratings, lasted into a second season -- although technically we are still coming to the end of the first: Unceremoniously pulled from the rotation last March to make room for the lesser "October Road," the show banked the last five episodes of its first season and moved them into the second. (A little confusingly: Events in the series that take place in spring are taking place in the real-world fall.)

We are only just now coming to the climax of that first-season arc, as the little town of Elmo, Alaska, prepares for a wedding, and Marin (Anne Heche) and Jack (James Tupper) noncommittally circle each other yet again. (The intended two-part first-season finale begins tonight at 8 and concludes next week.) With 10 new episodes already shot, and four completed scripts to shoot, "Men in Trees" has the potential to be the longest-lived series of the 2007-08 TV year.