Abc Family

The TV series "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" opens with a 15-year-old girl coming home from band practice, reaching into her French horn case and pulling out a home pregnancy test. Her horrified look confirms the results. No less startled are some parents whose children watch the ABC Family cable program that revolves around the sex lives of high school students.

Sutton Foster appears to be putting her Broadway experience to good, or at least remunerative, use in "Bunheads," the new series on ABC Family that is set to premiere June 11. The network has released a first clip from the comedy-drama in which the Tony-winning actress not only demonstrates her dancing chops but also her experience enduring cattle-call auditions. Foster, 37, left the current Broadway revival of "Anything Goes" to star in the TV series, in which she plays a former Vegas showgirl who gets hitched and moves to a coastal town where she finds a job working as a dance instructor for her mother-in-law.

Paul Lee, the executive who revived Walt Disney Co.'s moribund ABC Family channel with shows that appealed to the sensibilities of the millennial generation, was elevated Friday to president of ABC Entertainment Group. Lee immediately takes over for Steve McPherson, who abruptly stepped down this week. The 50-year-old, London-born Lee, a former BBC television executive, will oversee creative and business operations for the broadcast network as well as ABC Studios, the company's in-house TV production unit.

SERIES The Voice: In this new episode of the singing competition series, team members perform dueling duets, after which each coach must decide which vocalist from the team will advance to the live shows (8 p.m. NBC). The Secret Life of the American Teenager: Shailene Woodley returns as Amy, who has just accepted a marriage proposal from Ricky (Daren Kagasoff), as the fourth season resumes with new episodes (8 and 10 p.m. ABC Family). Make It or Break It: The Rock girls are back for a third season of tumbling dramatics, heading to the U.S. Training Center to compete for a spot on the 2012 Olympic squad that will head to London (9 p.m. ABC Family)

Canadian actress Natalie Brown(actress) has really great eyebrows. Also, a lovely smile. In fact, she's very pretty all around, and no doubt has a bright and shining future. There, I've said something nice. "Sophie," the ABC Family comedy in which she stars, on the other hand, is painful to watch.

Serena and Venus Williams will be starring in their version of a tennis reality show. The sisters' off-court lives -- their family, friends and the glamour of big-time tennis -- will be featured in a six-episode show that is still untitled but set to premiere on ABC Family in July. "The series will provide our fans with an up-close, inside look at our lives away from the tennis courts," Venus Williams said. The sisters have won 11 major singles titles between them. Serena is ranked No.

A court hearing on Walt Disney Co.'s request for an injunction to prevent EchoStar Communications Corp., the nation's second-largest satellite firm, from dropping the ABC Family channel has been postponed. Attorneys for both companies agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Gary Feess to reschedule the hearing to Jan. 17 to allow the court more time to review additional briefs both sides are preparing for the hearing.

Walt Disney Co. has new allies in the fight to keep ABC Family channel on DirecTV. Fans of televangelist Pat Robertson's talk show, "The 700 Club," which appears several times each weekday on ABC Family, have flooded DirecTV President Roxanne Austin's corporate office with phone calls to protest its plans to drop the channel.

Walt Disney Co.'s ABC Family cable-television network lost $362.9 million in the quarter ended Dec. 31 after Disney wrote off the value of programming it will no longer use. The loss contrasted with net income of $8.49 million a year earlier, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. ABC Family Worldwide Inc.'s sales declined 27% to $134.7 million from $184.9 million.

Walt Disney Co. plans to cut about half the staff at its recently acquired ABC Family channel, according to sources at the company. About 300 employees at the cable channel's headquarters in Westwood will be laid off in the next several weeks, said an executive at ABC Family who asked not to be identified. The layoffs will cut across all divisions, but will fall more heavily on administrative and support staff than creative personnel, the source said.

SUNDAY In the new series "Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates, Jr.," the Harvard professor uses genetics and genealogy to shake the family trees of such famous faces as Robert Downey, Jr., Samuel L. Jackson and Harry Connick, Jr., below. (KOCE, 8 and 9 p.m.) The gang's all here: The dapper Don Draper (Jon Hamm, below), plucky Peggy, sneaky Pete, pretty Betty, juicy Joan and all of your "Mad Men" favorites are back when the stylish 1960s-set drama finally — finally — returns for its fifth season.

ABC Family — or, as I think of it, ABC "Family," given its relative lack of interest in small children, adults or boys of pretty much any age — is a network in large part dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing better to be in this world than a hot teenage girl with a large clothing allowance. (It makes even your troubles glamorous.) This may in fact be true. The latest show to support this notion is "The Lying Game," which premieres Monday and comes from the same cross-platform content packagers that brought you "Pretty Little Liars," "Gossip Girl" and "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Raven-Symoné, the adorable moppet of "The Cosby Show" who years later became a squeaky-clean fixture on the Disney Channel, is so not that Raven anymore. In one scene on her new ABC Family show, "State of Georgia," Raven-Symoné's character, aspiring actress Georgia Chamberlain, tries to seduce an obnoxious casting director into letting her audition for the devil/vamp role of Lola in "Damn Yankees. " At one point, she presents him with a fried chicken dinner, even making suggestive jokes about breasts.

Although it lives in a brightly lighted, immaculately groomed, all-smiles world of its own making, ABC Family's new hour-long drama "Switched at Birth" takes an emotionally wrought high concept — who hasn't wondered what it would be like to find out those irritating people weren't really your parents? — and raises tantalizing questions about family, identity and the responsibilities thereof. And if creator Lizzy Weiss can't quite bear to hear any answer that doesn't have the word "love" in it, she and the show's very talented cast manage to repeatedly provoke the question: "What would a person do in this situation?"

Pretty Little Liars infobox 1/31/11 'Pretty Little Liars' Where: ABC Family When: 8 p.m. Monday Rating: TV-14-DL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14 with advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language)

The curt antagonist on "Pretty Little Liars" — known only as "A" — terrorizes victims by way of text messages and the Internet. ABC Family is using the same weapons to lure its audience. The network is banking on Twitter's 140 characters and Facebook's "like"-ability in an effort to generate buzz and strengthen the fanbase of the freshman series. And it doesn't end with social networking. Whether it's iPhone apps or text alerts, TV networks are finding that they have to keep up with an ever-changing social media landscape to keep young viewers interested.

Sharpening their attack on Walt Disney Co. and its chief executive, former directors Roy E. Disney and Stanley P. Gold have accused the company of concealing from shareholders the diminished value of one of its key cable channels. But outside experts say the Burbank conglomerate seems to be operating within the scope of federal accounting rules, despite questions that for weeks have been swirling around the finances of the ailing ABC Family Channel.

Although it lives in a brightly lighted, immaculately groomed, all-smiles world of its own making, ABC Family's new hour-long drama "Switched at Birth" takes an emotionally wrought high concept — who hasn't wondered what it would be like to find out those irritating people weren't really your parents? — and raises tantalizing questions about family, identity and the responsibilities thereof. And if creator Lizzy Weiss can't quite bear to hear any answer that doesn't have the word "love" in it, she and the show's very talented cast manage to repeatedly provoke the question: "What would a person do in this situation?"

The TV academy, criticized for years as staid and out of touch with what viewers actually watch, swept in a new era Sunday night with a live-across-the-nation Emmy show that handed a total of six prizes to ABC's first-year "Modern Family," including best comedy, as well as trophies to first-time winners Kyra Sedgwick of TNT's "The Closer" and Archie Panjabi of CBS' "The Good Wife. " But Emmy voters didn't totally dismiss the past: AMC's little-watched but much-acclaimed paean to 1960s advertising culture, " Mad Men," took home its third straight award for best drama.