• by Don Seaman , Featured Contributor, May 21, 2010

It's Thursday morning of Upfront Week. Those of us who have survived NBC's footballs, Fox's blinding spotlights, ABC's rainfalls and CBS' infernal theme music are ready to do this thing. Let's get the CW up there and bring it all home.

But first - the CW shares a number of tweets about how excited the CW's audience is about their shows. The CW displayed a rotating selection of tweets, status updates, and texts from their constituency. And I generally try not to nitpick over how the Twitterverse allows (nay, encourages) the mangling of our native language, but seriously, "I can't wail for the new season!!!" is just sad.

Reigning #1 Maxim babe of the moment, Katy Perry, comes out and plays a few uptempo numbers for us. While she encourages us that "it's not too early to get the [f...] up on your feet, is it?," a fair amount of us sit politely. LL couldn't get us to listen to him last year either, Katy. Don't take it personally. It's not you -- it's us.

She's so very proud to provide the official song of something that is associated with the CW. I'm sure that one will put her "over the top," finally. Next she intros Rob Tuck, the CW's executive vice president of sales, who gets a quick kiss and makes the inevitable "kissed a girl" joke. Katy goes backstage to shop from the CW display case of boy toys.

Onstage, Rob claims that the CW is "Television for Generation D" -- for Digital.

Dawn Ostroff, the CW's president of entertainment, comes out to tell us that the CW is "TV to talk about," and that they're "more than TV," with a 360° outlook of TV, online, mobile, etc.

She also tells us that "90210" is the top DVR-ed show for women 18-34 -- that its Live+7 rating for one recent week was over 100% above the live rating delivery. That's great -- unless you're actually interested in the commercial audience delivery, which was much less. But let's not ruin the party, Captain Bringdown.

But the CW viewer is all about convenience. They watch the CW's content where they want, when they want. They won't be restrained, so the implication is to follow the viewer, gentle advertiser. So you should buy the entire Happy Meal, not just order a la carte.

CW is also a broadcast leader in apps and Twitter accounts. So they're good with the social media thing that their young demo seems to love. If you're going to look for program engagement, that's probably where you'll find it. But you'd better like your women 18-34 target to get that.

So the new shows that the CW is offering are pretty much on target: "Hellcats" (an underfunded college student reluctantly joins the cheerleading squad to keep her dream of law school alive), and "Nikita" (a reboot of USA's "La Femme Nikita" and the movies that spawned it -- Maggie Q stars as the title character, who has now become a government-hunted rogue agent.).

They'll also have "Plain Jane," a summer makeover reality series about helping the girl get the guy, and "Shedding to Wedding," which leverages wedding dieting mania.

So with that, the CW closes out their presentation so their casts can do their math homework. I'm not saying that they're incredibly young, but when they asked one of their stars what the biggest change his newfound celebrity had done for him, his reply was that "his mom could get better dinner reservations." (Yeah, that was pretty much Clooney's response when "ER" first hit, too.) That might also explain why they don't throw an after-event -- none of the stars had their fake IDs to get in.

One more thing. Katy? Could I talk to you for a minute? I could really use your help here. Can you help me get this incessant "Hawaii Five-0" theme song out of my head? I promise, I'll even stand up.