It's time to line up for the cancellation roll call

By Kay McFadden

In a rational and righteous world, ABC would have killed comic lintball "Dharma and Greg" long before canceling the classy "Once and Again."

Ratings for both shows have been equally inadequate. And it's not like ABC has much else to crow about. So why not at least show respect for a quality program that won critical praise and some very ardent fans?

Trouble in Alphabet City clearly runs deeper than finding a hit. For ABC, the top attention-getter of its 2001-2002 season has been a series not of dramas or sitcoms, but of mishaps.

The "Chasing Letterman" fiasco exposed the network's low opinion of its own news division. That contempt earned a final comeuppance last week when the Peabody Awards people honored "Nightline" and ABC News for their Sept. 11 coverage.

The Oscars set the wrong kind of record, garnering the smallest audience ever for a telecast that was the longest in history. Yeah, yeah, the viewers who watched loved it -- strangely, there just seem to be fewer of them each year.

At ABC, even victory has been a bust. Let the joyous news be spread that the FCC finally determined last November's much-ogled Victoria's Secret fashion special was not, in fact, officially indecent. Between the April 15 finale of "Once and Again" and the third week in May, when 2002-2003 fall lineups are unveiled, ABC will be busier than most networks. It has many aging, low-rated programs and half-hour gaps to fill, thanks to the collapse of the overused "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?"

On the bright side, the Alphabet network has proved it can create good shows (even if it subsequently kills them with bad scheduling). And ABC actually did no better or worse than its peers with new series last fall, as a glance at the scorecard reveals. [rest snipped] __ Seattle Times (April 1, 2002)

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