Issue Date: September 7, 2008

In this article: Picking which shows will be hits Is TV getting better or worse? Tell us.

TV's New Season

Which shows will be hits?

A top E! reporter looks beyond the critics to these unconventional prime-time prognosticators.

By Kristin Dos Santos

Want to know which new TV series will break out this fall? We turned to three seasoned professionals who tell the future for a living -- an oddsmaker, a psychic and an investment broker -- for their predictions on which freshman shows will score big.

A little silly? Of course. But it was also a lot of fun to see the results.

Normally, we leave new season predictions to the TV critics (you can read their forecast in our Sept. 19-21 issue), but the lasting effects of the writers' strike have delayed the critics from seeing all the shows, leveling the playing field for our trio of future tellers. As oddsmaker Benjamin Eckstein points out, the amateurs may even have an advantage. "We can't have favorites," he says. "Sometimes the critics can be biased from relationships or false hype, but we have to be objective or we fail."

Eckstein is the writer of America's Line, a nationally syndicated odds column that appears in 130 newspapers, and is joined in our future-telling experiment by Vicki Wells, a psychic and spiritual counselor based in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and Patrick Lafferty, a principal at Capital Trading Group, a futures investment firm in Chicago.

As you can see from their picks, this trio ended up with starkly disparate views on how the cards will fall this season, agreeing on a potential positive outcome for only three new series: "Crusoe," NBC's adaptation of the Daniel Defoe literary classic; ABC's untitled Ashton Kutcher/Tyra Banks project, a reality series about a beauty pageant with a twist; and "Life on Mars," ABC's British import about a detective transported back to 1970s New York City. And Lafferty gives the last one a lukewarm "might work," quipping, "Didn't the same series fail last year? It was called 'Journeyman.'"

The contrast only deepens from there. Eckstein's oddsmaker pick for the biggest hit of the season, CBS' "Eleventh Hour," a thrilling drama about an adviser to the government trying to save people from the worst abuses of science, was a miss for Wells and Lafferty. "I'm getting a very definite no on that one," psychic Wells says. "And I get that someone higher up didn't want it to happen in the first place."

The oddsmaker counters that "Eleventh's" time slot after "CSI" shows the higher-ups have big faith in the show and consider Jerry Bruckheimer (who produces both shows) to be "something of a King Midas. Everything that guy touches seems to turn to gold."

The psychic and the oddsmaker do agree that Fox's "Fringe" will be a hit. The sci-fi drama stars Joshua Jackson (Pacey from "Dawson's Creek") and has "Lost" producer J.J. Abrams at the helm. But investment broker Lafferty insists, "Count me out," predicting that viewers will refuse to invest in another Abrams series with "overriding mythology" (ˆ la ABC's "Lost").

Surprisingly, CW's "90210" spinoff actually ranked well with the boys, but not with our female psychic Wells. "This show shot up my list when I heard Shannen Doherty was returning," says oddsmaker Eckstein, who admits he's a big fan of the original. Still, Wells sees a mixed bag: "'90210' is half-and-half. Half of the people will love it, and half of the people will not. There is a funk surrounding that show."

So are the future tellers right? We'll all find out in the coming weeks, but at this point, the answer all depends on who's peering into the crystal ball.