Upn

Hoping to capitalize on the traditional December reliance on repeats by the networks, UPN is scheduling three specials during the month, including an hour-long look at the Spice Girls and a first-ever theme night. The Spice Girls special will air Dec. 2 and include interviews and clips from their new movie. UPN will let viewers pick episodes of its Tuesday night comedies to air on Dec. 9 and Dec. 16. As for the theme night, the common thread will be a snowstorm on "In the House," "Good News, "Clueless" and "Sparks.

WONDER HOW local R&B star Jill Scott ended up on Channel 57's "Girlfriends"? She asked them. "Girlfriends" creator Mara Brock Akil told TV critic Ellen Gray yesterday that "Last season, [Jill's] representatives called and said, 'Hey, Jill loves the show, wants to be on the show.' I met with her, along with my casting director . . . we talked about what she wanted to do, what we were thinking about doing. And actually I had another part for her, which she couldn't do because of touring and this character was created and I thought she'd be perfect for it, and we hammered it out, thankfully.

Philadelphia sister stations CBS 3 (KYW-TV) and UPN 57 (WPSG-TV) will relocate to an office building six blocks north of City Hall, a move that culminates a three-year search for a new home. The stations signed a 20-year lease yesterday with Amerimar Enterprises Inc. for 120,000 square feet at 1500 Spring Garden St. for its studios and office space. Financial terms weren't disclosed. The stations will move in March 2007, around the expiration of their leases at Fifth and Market Streets, according to Michael Colleran, the stations' president and general manager.

The folks in charge at the WB spent their day at the Television Critics' Association Winter Press Tour announcing new series built by big-name creators like Steven Spielberg, showing off new sensations like "Dawson's Creek," and bragging about the success of cult classic "Buffy the Vampire Slayer. " The 3-year-old network was practically as proud as a peacock about its effort to attract its target audience of teens and young adults, in much the same way Fox built its audience when it emerged on the network front about a decade ago. By comparison, the United Paramount Network appears to be scrapping its original plans and starting fresh.

One of the best new concepts of the TV season will premiere tonight at 9. It's called Nowhere Man. Unfortunately, its television address is also nowhere, man. Nowhere Man, about a guy who goes to the bathroom and comes out to a world in which nobody - not even his dog - knows who he is, deserves a bigger audience than it will find on the United Paramount Network (Channel 57), even if it does come right after little UPN's big hit, Star Trek: Voyager. UPN has done a magnificent job of finding entertaining television for its embryonic, four-hour-a-week schedule.

With only two nights of programming, UPN has been playing at the outside edge of the broadcast arena, along with the other would-be network, WB. Now, UPN moves to three nights, but no closer to respectability, as it expands from Mondays and Tuesdays into Wednesday. Tonight at 9, UPN fills a hole in its existing schedule with The Paranormal Borderline, a show that only underscores how close Paramount is to the borderline of failure. Next Wednesday, at 8, comes The Sentinel.

Waiting until the big kids left the playground, UPN hoped it would get more notice for its six new fall programs by premiering them in October, two weeks after the other networks had started their seasons. Now, because of a furor over the most ridiculous of the six, and certainly the No. 1 numskull show of 1998-99, UPN may feel that it is getting too much notice. Two African American advocacy groups in Southern California are up in arms over The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer, a show with all the subtlety of Hogan's Heroes, centered on a displaced black English nobleman who is hired as a butler in the Lincoln White House.

Fox's "New York Undercover" is going into hiding and Whoopi Goldberg is going to UPN. As the fourth and fifth (or sixth, depending who you ask) networks announced their fall schedules yesterday, there were increasing indications that next season will be pretty much like last season and the one before: Incredibly confusing. Fox plans to introduce five new series - three hourlong dramas and two sitcoms - as well as a weekly special of outtakes it calls "World's Funniest . . . " UPN, which, like the WB, will expand to a fourth night in the fall, announced four new sitcoms, including the ABC-canceled "Clueless"; a weekly sci-fi movie on Thursdays; and a midseason series, "Ruby," starring an animatronic puppet whose voice will be supplied by Goldberg.

UPN and Fox yesterday became the last of the major TV networks to announce their fall prime-time program lineups, with Fox introducing 10 series and UPN rolling out three. The new supernaturally inclined dramas Haunted and The Twilight Zone will try to do for UPN what Roswell, Special Unit 2, and Wolf Lake couldn't this season - hold onto the audiences from lead-ins Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Enterprise. Haunted will follow Buffy at 9 on Tuesday. Matthew Fox (Party of Five)

Fox added five new series and UPN four in new fall television schedules announced by the networks yesterday. But the biggest mystery surrounded two popular old series missing from the Fox slate: Living Single and New York Undercover. "They definitely will be back," said Fox spokesman Joe Earley. "When hasn't been determined. " Asked why neither is on Fox's September menu, Earley replied, "I haven't gotten an official answer to that. " Living Single, a situation comedy that aired this season at 8:30 p.m. on Thursdays, and New York Undercover, a crime series that followed it at 9, are particularly popular with black viewers.

Is this the beginning of the end of American Idol? The competition would trade anything for what one network boss calls the "Death Star," a show that destroys any program put up against it and commands ad rates four times higher than average, and one which, barring strange circumstances, could still have Fox singing sweetly in 2015. After constantly growing in ratings since its first season in 2002 and consistently lurking in the top 10 overall, Idol hit the No. 1 spot for the first time last year.

Philadelphia sister stations CBS 3 (KYW-TV) and UPN 57 (WPSG-TV) will relocate to an office building six blocks north of City Hall, a move that culminates a three-year search for a new home. The stations signed a 20-year lease yesterday with Amerimar Enterprises Inc. for 120,000 square feet at 1500 Spring Garden St. for its studios and office space. Financial terms weren't disclosed. The stations will move in March 2007, around the expiration of their leases at Fifth and Market Streets, according to Michael Colleran, the stations' president and general manager.

CBS and Warner Bros. Entertainment announced yesterday that they will merge their UPN and WB networks to form a new network, the CW. Each of the entertainment giants will own 50 percent of the new network, which will begin broadcasting in the fall. UPN and WB will go off the air at that time. In the Philadelphia market, the new network will have its home on Channel 57, currently a UPN affiliate owned by CBS. Channel 17, which currently broadcasts WB programming, will become an independent station in September.

Every fall, the broadcast networks throw a big handful of new shows against the wall, hoping most will stick, but knowing that many an overcooked noodle will slide to the floor. It's the third week of the new season, and the linguine's already dropping. Losers are being discarded, moved, or shelved. Winners - My Name Is Earl on NBC and Everybody Hates Chris on UPN - have been given full-season commitments. And network hopes are high for Fox's death-row drama Prison Break, ABC's alien series Invasion, and the WB's ghostly Supernatural.

WITHIN ONE week of Britney Spears going public with a tirade over the tabloid media's obsession with her alleged pregnancy, Spears and her layabout husband Kevin Federline have agreed to star in a UPN reality series that documents their courtship, engagement and wedding. So it's not so much that Spears and Federline want their privacy - you know, to meditate on life's deep mysteries and commune with nature - it's merely that they hadn't yet figured out the right vehicle to put their privacy on sale.

Weary of relying on tawdry people like the cretins at "Newsmakers" to tell their life stories, Britney Spears, 23, and husband Kevin Federline, 27, are taking matters into their own gifted hands, people.com and Variety report. The couple signed with UPN for a six-episode reality series about their incomparable lives, due to premiere before the end of May. "From the day that Kevin and I met, there [has] been . . . inaccurate speculation about our lives," Spears said. "I am excited about showing what really happened rather than all the stories which have been misconstrued by journalists.

Don't love him because he's beautiful. Sure, Taye Diggs is manifestly, famously handsome. He's the actor who put the groove back in Stella. The straight-up stud who made Ally McBeal's skinny little heart beat like a kettledrum. A guy who has the same effect on women that a microwave does on butter. But he'd rather be known for his work. So he's gratified by the reviews he's getting for his smart new UPN drama, Kevin Hill, which airs at 9 p.m. Wednesdays. Hal Boedeker of the Orlando Sentinel praised his "dynamic performance.

The television world has turned upside down. In a fall season of about 35 new broadcast series (with Fox cranking 'em out and holding 'em back erratically, it's impossible to be precise), four rise far above the crowd. Two of them are on UPN. Perennially the tail of the TV dog, with only a 10-hour weekly prime-time schedule of wrestling, dim dramas, and predictable African American sitcoms, UPN is no longer the Ultra-Pathetic Network. Warmhearted and tinged with humor, Veronica Mars and Kevin Hill demonstrate conclusively that you can craft entertaining drama from even the dumbest-sounding premise.

It's too bad The Player, which premieres at 9 tonight on UPN-57, wasn't around when the whole looking-for-love-on-camera thing began. Because the one thing this reality dating show has going for it is racial and ethnic diversity. If The Player had been one of the first to step into the romance arena, it probably would have set an admirable standard for other shows to follow. Unlike every other dating show on the air, The Player dares to mix and match ethnicities, social classes and race.

When it comes to "romance reality" television, you may think you've seen everything. There are bachelors offering roses to beautiful women, and bachelorettes selecting Mr. Right from a field of hunks and average schmoes. There are ersatz millionaires lying about their worth, grown children choosing mates for their lonely fathers, and anxious parents strapping their kids' suitors to lie detectors. But there's one thing America still hasn't witnessed - an interracial couple locked in a happily-ever-after embrace.