CW Dumping Entire Sunday Line-Up

The CW's entire bottom-rated Sunday night line-up, including the unwatchable romantic fantasy Valentine, will be purged as part of the network's break with the independent media company it hired to take over the evening's bloc of shows, according to a report in The New York Times.

The good news is that The CW, with access to the programming of its parent companies CBS and Warner Brothers, is using reruns of the outstanding first season of Jericho to help plug the hole on Sunday nights, airing the canceled CBS postapocalyptic drama at 7 p.m. Eastern starting Nov. 30. Also filling the gap will be shows from season 1 of Everybody Hates Chris and season 2 of The Drew Carey Show.

Media Rights Capital contracted with The CW to control the network's five hours of Sunday programming for a full year, including three hours of original programming. But the new shows produced by Media Rights – Valentine (Greek gods move to L.A. to help humans find love), In Harm's Way (a reality show featuring dangerous jobs), and Easy Money (a dark comedy set at a family-run short-term loan company) – are scraping the bottom of the ratings, getting fewer viewers than any other shows on any of the five broadcast networks.

Valentine's ratings were never strong and have been sinking rapidly. The numbers for Sunday, Nov. 2, for example, tallied a mere 772,000 viewers for Valentine. That's the entire population of Fiji. (I'm imagining the whole island running home to watch Eros searching for his "love gun," which was, no joke, part of the storyline that night.) The show was down 70,000 from the previous week and nearly a quarter million from its debut. (For comparison, NBC's My Own Worst Enemy was just canceled for bringing in only 5 million viewers.)

Even considering The CW is by far the smallest network, the Sunday ratings are enough of a failure for The CW to pull the plug on its venture with Media Rights after three months. Media Rights says it still controls to time-slots and is negotiating the future of its deal with The CW.

Valentine and Easy Money were put on what Media Rights called a "planned hiatus" in mid-October. Production was shut down and now seems unlikely to resume.

Valentine stars Jaime Murray (a regular last year on Dexter as a obsessive, conniving junkie) as Aphrodite, Kristoffer Polaha (from North Shore) as Eros, Autumn Reeser (Taylor from The O.C.), and Christine Lakin (the "nottie" from The Hottie and the Nottie). Reviews have ranged from tepid to derisive.