Animal Planet is doing a sitcom. ESPN and Comedy Central are producing original made-for-TV movies.

        Shows that have rerun on cable are being remade by the big networks: Dragnet (ABC), The Twilight Zone (UPN) and Family Affair (WB). And everyone is doing low-budget reality series.

        The six degrees of separation between the 50-year-old networks and cable TV channelsis down to one degree.

        It's all a blur, as cable rachets up the new programming. You literally can't tell the networks without a program guide:

        • Animal Planet's Beware of Dog talking dog sitcom is a live-action version of the old Family Guy cartoon on Fox.

        • Fox's Firefly science-fiction series looks like another version of the Star Trek reruns on TNN.

        • TNN's Oblivious hidden-camera show looks like the Spy TV show on NBC.

        • NBC's old Quantum Leap is being remade as a two-hour movie pilot for a weekly series by the Sci Fi Channel.

        • Sci Fi's 20-hour Taken miniseries, to premiere in December, is the longest TV miniseries since War & Remembrance (1985) on ABC.

        • ABC's Home Alone 4 movie is the first Home Alone sequel that won't debut on HBO.

        • HBO's The Sopranos has inspired Kingpin, a midseason organized crime drama on NBC.

        • NBC's American Dreams fall series uses old American Bandstand clips like what we see on Behind the Music on VH1.

        • VH1's new Liza & David reality series, filmed in the home of Liza Minnelli and husband David Gest, is like MTV's The Osbournes or the Anna Nicole Show on E! Entertainment.

        • E!'s Last Call with Carson Daly is exactly the same as the previous night's Last Call with Carson Daly on NBC.

        • NBC's newest Law & Order cast member, Lorraine Toussaint, looks familiar to Any Day Now viewers on Lifetime.

        • Lifetime's For the People legal drama looks like a knock-off of The Practice on ABC.

        • ABC's new late-night host, replacing Bill Maher, is comedian Jimmy Kimmel from The Man Show on Comedy Central.

        • Comedy Central's Crank Yankers puppet sitcom is like the Greg the Bunny puppet comedy on Fox.

        • Fox's Celebrity Boxing is returning with more bouts, though not as many as seen on ESPN.

        • ESPN's Beg, Borrow or Deal, the sports channel's first reality-game show about two teams competing to travel from Times Square to San Francisco, is similar to Amazing Race on CBS.

        • CBS' Presidio Med, a 10 p.m. Wednesday fall medical series set in a San Francisco hospital, looks a lot like MDs, a 10 p.m. Wednesday medical series set in a San Francisco hospital this fall on ABC.

        • ABC's Monk detective series starring Tony Shalhoub, which premiered on USA cable last month,is the first basic cable drama series to be “repurposed,” or rerun, on a broadcast network's prime-time lineup.

        • USA's Dead Zone drama, based on the Stephen King novel about a man with amazing mental powers, is like the new fall John Doe drama about a man with amazing mental powers on Fox.

        • Fox's The Grubbs blue-collar sitcom looks like Married. . . with Children reruns on FX cable.

        • FX's RFK made-for-TV movie looks like a movie-of-the-week you'd see on ABC, CBS or NBC.

        • NBC's summer Crime & Punishment series, usingreal San Diego court cases, looks likecourtroom video on Court TV.

        • Court TV's Forensics File about medical examiners and their cases looks at the real-life counterparts to the characters on CBS' C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation and the fall spin-off, CSI: Miami.

        • CBS executives hope The I Love Lucy Movie looks like the I Love Lucy reruns airing six days a week on TV Land.

        • TV Land's The Jeffersons has been remade by The Rerun Show, in which a comedy troupe restages old sitcoms using original scripts on NBC.

        • NBC's Love Shack reality seriesis like Temptation Island on Fox.

        • Fox's The Brady Bunch in the White House is an updated version of The Brady Bunch reruns on TV Land.

        • TV Land's 1960s Batman series is being updated in Back to the Batcave, an Adam West-Burt Ward reunion movie on CBS.

        • CBS' Gleason movie stars Brad Garrett (Everybody Loves Raymond) as “the Great One” seen on The Honeymooners on TV Land.

        • TV Land's Dragnet is being remade as a one-hour police drama by Dick Wolf (Law & Order) as a midseason series for ABC.

        • ABC's May Dinotopia miniseries, which becomes a weekly series this fall, looks like Walking with Dinosaurs on the Discovery Channel.

        • Discovery's Monster Garage, with mechanics racing against a clock to make weird things out of cars, is like Junkyard Wars on the Learning Channel.

        • The Learning Channel's World's Most Death Defying Stunts isbeing copied as Extreme Variety, a special this fall on NBC.

        • NBC's fall movies include Hunter: Return to Justice, a Fred Dryer-Stepfanie Kramer reunion of the police series rerunning on WTBS, and Three's Company Revisited, a docudrama about “unfunny side” of the old John Ritter-Joyce DeWitt-Suzanne Somers sitcom rerunning on TNN.

        • TNN's Ultimate Revenge is another low-budget hidden-camera video show like Comedy Central's Trigger Happy TV, Sci Fi's Scare Tactics (to be hosted by Shannen Doherty) and the Jamie Kennedy Experiment on WB.

        • WB's Family Affair with Tim Curry is a remake of an old 1970s TV show, as is the remake of Lorne Greene's Battlestar Galactica by Sci Fi.

        • Sci Fi's new Dream Team show is the human version of Pet Psychic on Animal Planet — and that brings us back around the dial to where we started.

        Contact John Kiesewetter by phone: 768-8519; e-mail: jkiesewetter@enquirer.com.
       

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