USA Network has its dramedy formula down so well that you can diagram it out — so-and-so is great at his/her work but terrible at life! this fish-out-of-water may actually be just what the system needs! these unlikely partners bicker constantly but when the time comes, they get the job done! Beyond making the channel the highest rated on cable, being able to occupy this consistent niche has made it such that shows can feel like they live comfortably on the network indefinitely, until the stars are ready to move on.
But it’s looking like that won’t be the case for “Common Law,” the first season of which ran from May 11 to August 10 of this year. Deadline reports that the series is “is not likely to continue,” and that some of the key crew members have already moved on. The show, which features Michael Ealy and Warren Kole as LAPD detectives who are assigned to couples counseling due to their inability to get along, was the lowest-rated of USA’s current scripted series. It was nice to get to see the talented Ealy, who had a great small screen role in Showtime’s 2005-2006 series “Sleeper Cell,” back in a regular role, but he seems headed for better things.
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Deadline list the odds of mediator drama “Fairly Legal” and sports therapy series “Necessary Roughness” at 50/50, while the high profile miniseries “Political Animals” is unlikely to return thanks to its ratings. But not to fear — USA announced its development slate at the upfronts in May, and among the offerings are a program about a lawyer who becomes a public defender and “quickly realizes that the system is more screwed up than her own crazy personal life,” a dot-com entrepreneur who’s happy to head to Silicon Valley until his “colorful, blunt and unrefined extended family arrives to ‘offer their support'” and MIT pranksters who “reunite amidst the upstairs and downstairs of New York society.” The formula lives!
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