Handicapping the New Fall Season: Friday 9 p.m.

By Marc Berman

With a continued focus on the new fall 2002 primetime schedule what follows is a competitive overview of the Friday 9 p.m. hour. Next up: Friday 10 p.m.

-The Players:

ABC: *That Was Then
CBS: *Hack
NBC: Dateline
Fox: *John Doe
UPN: Movie
WB: Reba/*Greetings From Tucson

(*new series)

-The Scoop:

Although it's easy to assume NBC's Dateline will continue to ride the coattails of lead-in Providence and lead-out Law & Order: SVU for another season (or longer), two shows that could, and should, find an audience are new dramas Hack and Then Came You. If you like Tom Hanks theatrical Big, you'll probably enjoy Then Came You, which features a 30-year old man who wakes up one morning and is suddenly 16-years old again. And if you like good acting and miss CSI in its old Friday time period, Hack with Andre Braugher and long-suffering Boomer from St. Elsewhere, David Morse, will probably not disappoint. Aren't we all getting a bit tired of Dateline?

Also worth positively noting is the WB's Reba, which not only regularly built from its lead-in by about 1.5 million viewers each week this season, it proved that there is nothing multi-talented star Reba McEntire can't do. With UPN plugging up the night with a movie that leaves us with Fox's John Doe, which will not benefit from its potentially limited lead-in Firefly.

Look for NBC's Dateline to take the hour with CBS and ABC fighting for the leftovers. My pick for second place: CBS's Hack.

CBS' Hack, the first network drama ever to be filmed in Philadelphia, hasn't even hit the airwaves and someone's already making fun of the name.

Asked last week about TV's current crime-fighting wave, Law & Order producer Dick Wolf didn't mince words.

"Television eats its young," he said. "Whenever anything is successful, it's send in the clones...and the clones never work."