CW favors hot 'Gossip Girl' over WWE

By DAVID HINCKLEY
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Wednesday, July 23rd 2008, 4:00 AM

LOS ANGELES - Want to know how TV works?

Dawn Ostroff, entertainment president of CW, told the Television Critics Association that the network loves the low-rated "Gossip Girl" because it gets great buzz, much of it from the Internet rather than traditional TV airings, with the right people: women 18 to 34.

Conversely, it's dropping one of its highest-rated shows, Friday night's WWE, because it attracts the wrong people: men.

"There was virtually no flow between the audience that watched WWE and anything else on CW," she said. "We decided the most important criterion is branding the network."

Now CW is moving its last two "urban comedies," "Everybody Hates Chris" and "The Game," to Friday nights, which have the fewest viewers of the week.

Ostroff denied that CW is moving away from "urban" comedies, long one of its mainstays.

Gary Scott Thompson, executive producer of the revived "Knight Rider" on NBC, admitted that "even Ford said the product placement in [last year's movie] was too much."

But he's not backing down.

"It's a show about cars and they're giving us the cars and we're on a budget."

Paula Malcomson, who co-stars in "Caprica," a pilot that the Sci-Fi Channel is considering for pickup, reflected on her last series, "Deadwood."

When it was abandoned before its planned fourth and final season, Malcomson says, "I felt like the audience had been robbed. I had done what I wanted with the character [Trixie], but I left her in a bit of a bind. About a year later, I found I missed the show very much."

Ian McShane, the central character in "Deadwood" and now a star of NBC's 2009 drama "Kings," said he was also annoyed when it became clear "Deadwood" was dead.

"It was a great show," he said. "Everybody came with their A-game every day. [Creator] David Milch is a genius. And God bless HBO for putting it on."

But he knew the end was coming, he said, "when we started hearing things like, 'Well, it's so expensive, maybe we could do eight episodes, instead of 10.' When you know what they were really saying was, 'Why don't we do f-ing none?'"

John Madden, on NBC's football panel, predicted that former NFL star Warren Sapp will win the next "Dancing With the Stars."