Television Programs

Rachel Zoe might be the in-demand celebrity stylist who made famous her own brand of bohemian chic several years ago among such partygoing celebutantes as Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan and Mischa Barton. But it was her two warring assistants, Brad Goreski and Taylor Jacobson, who found themselves at the center of the action during the first season of Bravo's buzzed-about reality series "The Rachel Zoe Project." Goreski, 32, a former Vogue magazine staffer with a penchant for bow ties, became the frequent target of Jacobson's fiery temper, leading to any number of emotional meltdowns that quickly relegated Zoe's eye for wearable haute couture to the background.

Friday's "20/20" finds Diane Sawyer in starkly different environs than the cheerily lighted Times Square studio she occupies each morning as co-host of "Good Morning America." In her latest ABC prime-time special, which examines poverty in Appalachia, Sawyer is scrubbed free of the glamour of morning television.

When 14-year-old Ashley Rosario went looking for her favorite Cartoon Network shows such as "Chowder" and "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack" and instead found reality programs, she did what any normal teenager does these days. She made a video complaining about it and posted it on YouTube. "I'm scared for Cartoon Network," said Ashley, of Melbourne, Fla., adding that she was "outraged" by the channel's new direction and that she wasn't "the only one who feels this way." She's right.

Nearly every television season, a storybook stork delivers a plot twist in the form of a baby to a teen drama. "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," created by Brenda Hampton of "7th Heaven," premiered last summer on ABC Family and introduced us to 15-year-old Amy Juergens, a scrawny, French horn-playing freshman at Grant High School who discovers she's pregnant -- though she's not even sure she actually had sex -- after a rendezvous with bad boy Ricky Underwood at band camp.

In one clip, viewed 14 million times on YouTube, family members stage a "puke-a-thon" to see who can hold off vomiting after guzzling ipecac. In another, the same brood performs a spirited song-and-dance routine about the joys of smoking marijuana. Welcome to the world of Stewie, the diabolical toddler at the center of "Family Guy," who's supplanted Bart Simpson as TV's enfant terrible and who's just pushed the often-staid Emmys into new territory.

Imagine a horde of children -- 10, actually -- at a local pizzeria. Tomato sauce on faces, clothes and the floor. There's yelping, burping, jumping, and trips to the potty. It's kiddie chaos. Now imagine all these youngsters are yours. For Eric and Betty Hayes, they don't have to try very hard -- it's their life, chronicled in "Table for 12," part of TLC's growing stable of docu-series about big families.

When they roll out their fall schedules, TV networks typically make their biggest headlines with new series. But CBS -- the only broadcaster to enjoy ratings gains in an otherwise glum television season -- on Wednesday raised eyebrows with gutsy moves for two returning shows. The network will shift "The Mentalist," television's most-watched new show this year, from Tuesday to a prominent Thursday spot behind "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

Despite a new prime-time perch and a larger audience, NBC comedian Jay Leno is fishing for guests from a substantially smaller pool of talent. Rival networks ABC and CBS are discouraging their stars from appearing on the prime-time talk show. They are determined not to let Leno's 10 p.m. program undercut viewership of their costly dramas when they are trying to build audiences at the start of the TV season. The boycott highlights an unintended consequence of NBC's decision to move the veteran late-night comedian into prime time: making it harder to book some TV stars whose appearances could boost Leno's ratings.

NBC Universal rolled out a cannon to shoot down a rebel Boston television station that says it will not carry Jay Leno at 10 p.m. when the comedian's show shifts to prime time in the fall. The media giant said Friday that it would yank all of its NBC programming from Boston's WHDH-TV if the station carried out its threat to ditch Leno -- who grew up outside Boston -- and instead run a local news broadcast at 10.

Forget the garlic, the crucifixes, the security of daylight. Nothing is holding the vampires at bay these days. With the wild popularity of movie, TV and literary properties including "Twilight" and HBO's hit series "True Blood," the bloodthirsty undead are dominating the pop culture landscape in ways Count Dracula could have never imagined, and the trend seems unlikely to abate any time soon. "The Twilight Saga: New Moon," the second film adaptation of the popular series of novels, is set for release in November, with the third installment to follow in June 2010.