This television season seems...different, somehow. Usually by this point in the year, the landscape would be littered with video corpses; those shows that just couldn't find an audience, or (the usual case), just weren't all that good.

To be sure, there have been a few early victims this year, but it seems like the networks - all of them - are giving their new shows some room to run. Usually, the lower rated networks like the WB and UPN *do* give their shows longer, but this year, it seems more pervasive.

Could this represent a sea-change in network thinking? Or is it just an anomaly?