TV

In a case where quantity trumps quality, CBS has, at least in one way, already won the Fall season irace before it has even started by managing to muster one. At a press tour where the standard post-strike approach taken by most of its competitors has been to introduce a couple of new shows and talk about what an exciting opportunity it is to re-introduce last Fall's shows again, CBS is debuting four shows -- Worst Week, The Ex List, Eleventh Hour and The Mentalist.

What fate awaits them is another matter, but there's something to be said just for getting them on the air this fall rather than delaying their debuts to what has now become the default, post-strike pilot season, which is January or the even more vaguely delayed release of "sometime this spring."

How did CBS do it?

"The strike was a tough time for everybody," said Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment. "But we felt it was really important to get viewers back, win back their hearts and trust, and we approached that challenge in a very strategic, methodical way....

"That meant we had to have a pilot season and develop new content that viewers could look forward to. "To build viewers' anticipation of your new fall season, you have to first have a new fall season."

Of course, with that mission accomplished, the question becomes are any of the shows any good? It's a fool's gambit to judge the merits of a series based on its pilot, so let's go ahead and do that.

Two are comedies: Worst Week, a sitcom about a nice guy who always has bad things happening to him. It stars Kyle Bornheimer, the guy from that hilarious T-Mobile commercial where he's trying to leave a voicemail message to a girl he went out with the night before and keeps screwing it up ("gosh, you ate like a horse last night..."), so that's good. The pilot is a fairly frantic procession of physical-comedy gags so that could grow tiresome over time, but the core situation -- he's trying (and failing) to win the approval of his pregnant girlfriend's parents (think Meet the Parents as a sitcom) offers plenty of potential laughs.

The Ex List is all about a single woman (Elizabeth Reaser, Ava/Rebecca on Grey's Anatomy) who is told by a psychic that she has one year to get married or she will spend her life alone. The additional hook is that the man she should marry is someone with whom she's already been romantically involved. The pilot was as strained and limited as that set-up, but if the show can be half as funny and crazy-energetic as its creator, Diane Ruggiero, was in the show's panel on Friday, then it will be worth watching.

Two are dramas: Eleventh Hour is a science "fact" not a science fiction show from Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff, the creators of the Showtime series Sleeper Cell. Another plus, it stars Rufus Sewell as the biophysicist-investigator who goes to work for the FBI, solving crimes having to do with cutting-edge stuff like cloning and cryogenics. The pilot is good, but there's a lot of this kind of techy/edgy drama on television, so it all depends on the consistency of the show's execution.

The Mentalist is a drama starring Simon Baker (the callow hunk from Devil Wears Prada) who stars as former fraud-psychic who is now using the skills he perfected as a fake psychic ("his razor sharp skills of observation") to help the California Bureau of Investigation to solve the seemingly unsolvable crimes. It's got a kind of clever charm about it, but I wouldn't bet on it.