Melrose! Glee! Vampires! Why So Many New Shows All at the Same Freakin' Time?

Melrose Place, The Vampire Dairies and a zillion other new shows are fighting for your attention RIGHT NOW. Here's why

Excited for Glee to start! But there are so many other shows I am interested in. Why does TV put out all its new shows at the same time? It's stupid.
—Kellen, Pittsburgh

Oh, quit whining. Child, when I was a girl, we had to pack all our fall-premiere watchin' into just two weeks. Two weeks! And we had no fancy DVRs or TiVos. And we had to walk barefoot uphill every day in the snow just to watch Cops.

Now, the world of fall TV is changing, just, it seems, for Glee fans like you...

In fact, the all-powerful superhumans behind The Vampire Diaries and the psychics who bring you The Mentalist seem to have read your mind, too. This season's new shows and season premieres are being staggered so widely that 30 Rock won't show up on your radar until October. That easy enough to punch into your iCal?

Here's the broader picture, aided by the capable Robert Seidman of TV By the Numbers:

Ten new TV show seasons debut this week, if you count Glee.

Aside from that show, though, only two of those series are new, Melrose Place and Vampire Diaries. Even if you need both fresh bloodsucking and backstabbing in your life, no need to have a nervous breakdown. The shows debut on different days—and, Seidman says, CW is also rebroadcasting its premieres like crazy.

So are other networks, including ABC and NBC.

The next few weeks all pretty much look like that: many returning series, three or four new ones. Lots of rebroadcasts.

"My guess is that historically, even going back five years, 98 percent of new shows" premiered over just a week or two, Seidman posits. "This year it's more like 75 percent."

Why this mild slowdown?

"About 30 percent of viewers have DVRs," Seidman says.

But that also means 70 percent don't, and we don't want them all cranky like you. Besides, Seidman says, "wanted to get off sooner in a start they didn't have as much competition when they launch their show."

As for why so many TV shows debut in the fall to begin with, it's a host of factors, including how America's summer vacation patterns. But it doesn't matter.

"In this day and age," E! Online's own crack TV reporter Jennifer Godwin says, "the archaic pitch/development/pilot/fall-premiere schedule is retro and weird."

Yep. Almost as weird as the actors from Glee performing "Gold Digger."

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