By: Valerie Milano

Today at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, NBC held their executive session with updates for the network. Jeff Gaspin, Chairman of NBC Television Entertainment and Angela Bromstad President of the network’s prime time entertainment, addressed a few bits of comedy programming news. Rob Lowe will be joining the regular cast of “Parks & Rec” and the well loved “30 Rock” will be doing a live episode on October 14^th. Kathy Bates will be returning to “The Office” but Steve Carell will be leaving. Ms. Bromstad said, “Well, it’s just publicly become known that Steve’s leaving, but obviously we and the producers have been preparing for it for some time. Greg Daniels and Paul Lieberstein — they do have a plan in terms of who’s going to replace Michael, and so there will be a lot of storylines leading up to that, and there will be some mystery as to who that will be.”

Having learned from the past but not wanting to totally leave the audiences, “Heroes” is gone but “The Cape” will debut. One “Law & Order” ends and “Law & Order: LA” begins. There are returning favorites and a few new shows including “Prime Suspect” and “Outlaw”. Gaspin said ,“first, we want to take advantage of the success of “America’s Got Talent,” the final few episodes, so we’re going to actually premiere a few series early. We’re going to premiere “Parenthood” on September 14^th after the second-to-last episode of “America’s Got Talent” at 10 o’clock. And then it will continue its regular run the week after that. On Wednesday, after the finale of “America’s Got Talent,” we’re actually going to premiere “Outlaw.” We’re going to give it a sneak preview, the Jimmy Smits drama. ”

The fall season for the network promises to be fresh but solid as well. Mr. Gaspin commented, “You know, we’ve said several times we’re trying to rebuild, and we recognize some of the mistakes that we’ve made over the past several years. We put a lot more money into development this year. We picked up quite a few series. We’re taking more shots, certainly. We feel very good, though, about the progress we’ve made over the past year. And we believe we have a lot more stability at the network than we’ve had in quite some time. So I think about this past year, that’s a lot to accomplish, and we’re very proud of that.” Bromstad added, “I feel that this development season really represents a lot of hard work in terms of really defining the type of shows that we want to come out with. And, you know, we want to improve on time periods and hopefully build some nights. And we do feel better. Just like we feel great about “Community” and “Parenthood” returning from last season, we hope that we have a crop from this season that will carry on as well.”