AS the fall TV season officially kicks off this week, one of the new series that jump-started with a summer debut has already made it into Nielsen Media Research’s top-20 list.

‘I’d say The O.C. [was] the big success for CTV this summer,’ comments Sherry O’Neil, managing director at Toronto-headquartered OMD Canada.

Meanwhile, at CBC, speculation that much of the heavily asterisked programming announced in June would never appear has turned out to be wrong. Spokesperson Ruth Ellen Soles confirms that all of the network’s proposed shows ultimately received funding, albeit way late.

The only special that will be delayed is Trudeau II, which may have to be bumped to next season because its star, Colm Feore, is so heavily booked for other projects.

CBC’s only other switch was prompted by the Ontario election, Oct. 2. Hence the film version of Timothy Findley’s hit play Elizabeth Rex aired elsewhere in Canada on schedule that evening, but ran on Sept. 25 in Ontario.

Since the fall lineup announcement in June, most of the skeds have stayed relatively stable, although the untimely death of John Ritter, star of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, has raised many questions about the future of ABC’s linchpin sitcom (airing on CTV in Canada). While the U.S. net immediately halted production with three episodes of the new season completed, the new season launched Sept. 23 as scheduled. ABC has since said the series will go on.

There was also ABC’s abrupt cancellation of The Real Roseanne Show, which never even got out of the gate because of its star’s emergency hysterectomy. However, buyers weren’t exactly trampling each other to buy time on the offbeat series anyway.

Other changes include CH pulling The Stones from Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. and replacing it with Becker, presumably because that known quantity stands a better chance against its competition, The West Wing and The Bachelor.

Train 48 is continuing on Global at 7 p.m. weeknights, and CTV is doing likewise with e-TALK Daily, substituting it for the previously announced Wheel of Fortune.

The 30-plus new shows media people did invest in for this season include 20 sitcoms, 17 dramas and absolutely no new reality shows.

Reality fans will just have to make do with another season of Survivor, Joe Millionaire and The Bachelor. The latter show will encompass a four-hour miniseries depicting the upcoming wedding of Trista, of The Bachelorette fame.

Premiering at the end of September were non-reality newbies Two-and-a-Half Men, One Tree Hill, Navy NCIS, The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H., Hope & Faith, Joan of Arcadia, Luis, The Handle and Miss Match, followed by Punk’d, Las Vegas, I’m With Her, It’s All Relative, Karen Sisco and Married to the Kellys.

New series that won’t air until late October or early November include: The Ortegas, Arrested Development, Tru Calling, Skin, Tarzan and Jane and A Minute with Stan Hooper.

Finally, several new series arrived in early September: Whoopi, Happy Family, The Mullets, All of Us, 1-800-Missing, Jake 2.0, Run of the House, Eve, Rock Me Baby, Steve Harvey’s Big Time, Threat Matrix, Like Family, All About the Andersons and the graphic plastic surgery drama Nip/Tuck.

Nip/Tuck is far and away the most controversial new series among family-friendly advertisers, who are leery of the show’s graphic surgery scenes and even more explicit sexual shenanigans.

‘Everyone’s bashing on Nip/Tuck for its sheer sensationalism,’ says Caroline Gianias, VP/DR broadcast at Toronto’s Carat Canada.

Even so, the show’s premiere episode came within a whisker of being CTV’s top-rated show that night, drawing a 4.4 rating nationally in the 18-to-49 demographic and 1,061,000 viewers overall.

(A version of this story appeared in the Sept. 22 issue of Strategy Media.)