Ahead of the game

Stay tuned: This fall's new shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and The CW will be previewed on Friday, Sept. 15.

Well, you certainly can't accuse Fox of procrastinating. The network premieres its six new fall series between Aug. 21 and Sept. 7; no other network debuts a new show until Sept. 19.

The big reason for that is the baseball playoffs and World Series, which air on Fox and have, over the years, wreaked havoc on the network's fall launch. New shows would premiere, air a couple of episodes, then disappear for weeks while the playoffs played out. Other new shows wouldn't premiere until October or November.

But Fox Entertainment president Peter Ligouri thinks she's "kind of figured out how to manage baseball . . . Last year, we premiered basically all of our shows (several weeks) before baseball. It worked."

So Fox is going to do it again with its six new series — none of which are awful, but none of which really stand out, either. Here's what to expect:

VANISHED is the lesser of two new shows that feature seasonlong kidnapping stories. (NBC's "Kidnapped," which debuts Sept. 20, is the better one.) In this one, the wife (Joanne Kelly) of a U.S. senator (John Allen Nelson) disappears, FBI agents (Gale Harold and Ming-Na) set out to find her, a TV reporter (Rebecca Gayheart) complicates matters and it's all part of a "sinister conspiracy . . . that could rock the foundations of American society."

The pilot episode, which is supposed to draw you in, is rather dull. Fox's announcement that it's part of a "centuries-old conspiracy" came as a bit of a surprise after the fact, because there's no indication of that in the first hour.

Most of us only have so much time to devote to shows you have to watch every week. There are already a lot of good ones on the air, and several promising newcomers. "Vanished" isn't one of them.

Premiere:Monday 8 p.m.

JUSTICE is "CSI" lawyers, which isn't a bad thing. From the producers of that CBS hit comes this legal drama about a team of high-profile Los Angeles lawyers (Victor Garber, Kerr Smith, Eamonn Walker and Rebecca Mader) who take on high-profile cases and employ high-tech forensics (complete with "CSI"-like re-creations), media savvy, shadow juries and old-fashioned legal smarts to defend their high-profile clients.

And, after the verdict is in, viewers see a re-creation of what really happened.

While we certainly don't need more legal shows or "CSI" clones, "Justice" looks like a good one.