Well into the fall schedule, here are TV's new seasons on my five-star scale. Supplemental information also provided by TiVo and TV.com on how they're fairing with the general TV-watching population.

Cane: *** -- Ranked 99th most watched show on TV today but with a lowly 6.8 TV.com user-voted rating.
> A good addition, if a bit esoteric. A pinch of melodrama and a dash of unbelievability.

Pushing Daisies: **** -- 7th highest ranked show (of all time) -- 62nd most watched show -- 9.3 TV.com rating.
> Quirky, yet hip. Tim Burton-macabre-style with artistic cinematography and narration.

Bionic Woman: *** -- 17th most TiVo'd -- 42nd most watched show -- 8.3 TV.com rating.
> It's good, but not that good. A little dry with bad acting -- watch only if you need some gratuitous violence.

Private Practice: **** -- 11th most TiVo'd show -- 80th most watched show -- 8.7 TV.com rating.
> Slower paced than its TV-parent, Grey's Anatomy, but surprisingly quite good, especially for a slightly older audience.

Dirty Sexy Money: * -- 376th most watched show (not kidding) -- 8.9 TV.com rating.
> Only ranked so high because no one watches it -- it's simply already been done.

Moonlight: ** --58th most watched show -- 8.3 TV.com rating.
> Film noir meets vampires -- a little predictable (read: boring), but not half bad.

America's Psychic Challenge: ***** Full Five! -- abysmal 6.1 TV.com rating (it's bad, but OH so good!)
> Debuted last week as the BEST-BAD reality show on TV. In the premiere, the first group of four psychics had to find a living man in an abandoned mental institution, give a reading of a hidden celebrity, and describe the events of an unsolved murder. As the show progressed, the first four contestants (of sixteen) were rated and two were given the psychic boot, begging the question, why would audition if you knew you weren't going to win?

Tune in this Friday to see two more "psychics" kicked off. Playing Fridays 9 p.m. on Lifetime (Sunflower Broadband ch. 2).

> Last night in ratings, the freshman series Cane shut out ABC's Boston Legal, a multiple-Emmy-Award winning series -- and it's about time something canned that show!

The second episode, The Work of a Businessman, delivered stronger actor performances and a much better, if melodramatic, script, but it's still not a homerun for CBS.

When a disgruntled employee of Duque Rum Factory sets a scorpion loose in his home, Alex Vega (Jimmy Smits: NYPD BLUE) banishes him back to Cuba -- apparently the ultimate punishment for this show, even superseding death.

Sudsy from all the soap -- Cane might just be the new Knots Landing or Melrose Place, except with a restorative (that is, revitalizing) reversal of stereotypical roles -- vilified whites.

CBS began treading new advertising territory for their Fall TV Ticket. Last week, grocers were bombarded by advertisements in all parts of their local supermarkets -- ranging from sugar packets promoting Cane to Chinese-food containers promoting Survivor: China.

But the "freshest" gimmick imagineers at CBS constructed was a "magically-appearing frost image" applied to the doors' insides of the freezer aisle vaunting the vampirically-film-noir thriller, Moonlight.

Why freezers? According to the series' new protagonist, Mick St. John (Alex O'Loughlin), that's where vampires sleep. But if CBS wants to boost Moonlight's ratings, they'll have to "vamp"-up their advertising efforts, because if the pilot is any indication of the quality of the series, the lifeblood of this thriller will be sucked clean before episode 3.

CANE, a newbie in the CBS fall lineup is off to a good, if slow, start. The series debut tonight wasn't above expectation, but CANE promises to add some much needed color to the Fall Season.

The acting in tonight's episode wasn't terrifically riveting and some of the lines were underdeveloped -- but the Spanglish-style-soap served up a refreshing "ethnicity" to the dominating "white" population of shows this Fall -- and it did so with a lot of twists and turns.

Following the premiere, we previewed a disturbing quantity of clips from future-episodes, but like with any freshman series, garnering new viewers is the flesh and bones of Television. Watch it here:


Cane plays Tuesdays 9 p.m. Central on CBS (Sunflower Broadband channel 13).