The made-in-Utah series "Touched by an Angel" - a show almost no one expected to succeed - is playing a bigger and bigger part in CBS's plans for the future.
How important? Enough so that CBS Entertainment President Leslie Moonves is moving the series to what he calls "probably our most important time period," Sundays at 7 p.m. - right after "60 Minutes."And what he's hoping "Touched by an Angel" does there for CBS is do more than just draw good ratings in its time period.
"One of the reasons we did that . . . is to see what would happen to our movie-of-the-week that night," he said. An experiment that put "Touched" in the Sunday time slot a few months back succeeded rather well.
"Touched . . ." "finished No. 9 in the week, but the most important thing was that the movie that ran with this, `Harvest of Fire,' became the highest-rated television movie of the season," Moonves said.
And that's also why CBS is planning more TV movies that appeal to that same audience.
"I think, clearly, CBS sees a difference in our direction from the other guys'. They have much more of a hard edge," Moonves said. "We have more female-oriented, much more family-oriented (movies). . . . And, hopefully, that strategy will work for us."
And not just on Sundays. The upcoming "Touched by an Angel" spinoff - which has been retitled "Promised Land" - will air Tuesdays at 7 p.m. And it's no coincidence that "Promised" (which is also being made in Utah) will air before CBS's other weekly movie.
"We have put shows that are very compatible with our movies of the week," Moonves said.
CBS NOTES: In addition to Lili Tomlin, comedian Sue Costello will join the cast of "Murphy Brown" as the new bartender.
- Over at "Chicago Hope," Mark Harmon will come aboard as an orthopedic surgeon who is coaxed out of self-imposed retirement. And Rocky Carroll ("Roc") joins the cast as the new chief of the trauma unit.
Also, Ron Silver will be around in a recurring role as Tommy Wilmette, the ex-husband of Dr. Kate Austin (Christine Lahti) and the man who just put together an investment group to buy the hos-pital.
Oh, and expect a few guest appearances by Mandy Patinkin as the ever-colorful Dr. Jeffrey Geiger.
- CBS has announced four more midseason replacement shows, all featuring familiar faces:
- "Orleans," an hourlong drama, stars Larry Hagman ("Dallas") as a judge and the patriarch of a powerful family "whose friends include mobsters as well as priests."
- "Feds," another hourlong drama, stars Blair Brown as a U.S. attorney. It's from the producers of "Law & Order."
- "Life and Stuff" is a sitcom with Rick Reynolds and Pam Dawber as a married couple with two young sons.
- "Temporarily Yours" is another sitcom, this one with Debi Mazar and Joanna Gleason running an employment agency.
CBS had previously announced that it picked up the canceled NBC series "JAG" as a midseason show.
UNFRIENDLY: When Les Moonves was running Warner Bros. television productions, he loved seeing those "Friends" ratings. (Warner Bros. produces the show.)
But since going to CBS a year ago, he's not so crazy about the numbers anymore. Which may have prompted this:
"Our first major announcement today is that we're paying the cast of `Friends' $150,000 not to show up," Moonves joked.
(The cast, of course, is holding out in an attempt to raise their salaries to $100,000 per episode. Each.)
Actually, Moonves doesn't expect much to come out of the current "Friends" negotiations - except higher salaries for the stars.
"I think the `Friends' situation is just normal operating procedure," he said. "I think it hit the press a little earlier than some of the other ones, because it's such a high-profile show. I will be very, very surprised if, within a couple of weeks, there is not an announcement that they've come to some agreement somewhere in between where Warner Bros. was and where the actors were. And I don't expect there to be anything unusual about it.
"Although I can hope."
MAYBE MORE: Kathy Najimy isn't scheduled to return to "Chicago Hope," but on the other hand she's not ruling it out.
Najimy played a manic/depressive psychiatrist in a three-episode story arc on the CBS medical drama this past season, and she wouldn't mind playing the character again.
"I don't want to be a regular, but I would love to come back if they could come up with an arc as rich as the one that they gave me last season, which was from heaven. I would do it," she said.
In the meantime, she's doing the voice for one of the main characters in the upcoming Fox animated series "King of the Hill" and preparing for her first child. Najimy is 4 1/2 months pregnant with a girl.