Three Rivers Canceled and CSI Will Get Better

CBS President sets the record straight, including the fates of Numb3rs and Medium

Good news for Moonlight fans. Well, maybe.

CBS President Nina Tassler fessed up this morning to TV Critics at the start of the annual press tour that Three Rivers is canceled.

"Um, you know what? Yes," Tassler said when asked if Rivers is officially gone. "We've all known each other long enough to say that when something is 'on hiatus' it's really something else."

Aww, thanks, Neener! (Too soon?) So any chance that Moonlight might come back now that Three Rivers and Moonlight star Alex O'Loughlin is officially unemployed?

Tassler gave no hope, sorry, but she did defend O'Loughlin's star quality, so chances are he will show up on the CBS network again somewhere, somehow, fanged or not.

Elsewhere in peeper-net news, Tassler defended the current season of CSI and insisted Laurence Fishburne's character (Dr. Raymond Langston) will get better.

"You can't deny that Fishburne is a powerful actor and a force to be reckoned with. Audiences have found that as he's more comfortable with his team the team is more comfortable with him, they are able to build more intimacy… You're going to find more irreverence, more iconic stories that we've done in the past and they'll really turn the whole Vegas experience on its ear…We're going to peel back the layers of who he is."

As for the rest of CBS' on-the-bubble slate, Tassler said Numb3rs "is considered for next year. We had to cut back the episodes to make way for [new drama series] Miami Medical but Numb3rs is absolutely in contention for next year." Ditto Medium which Tassler says "is doing fine."

And what about the recent news that Jay Leno is abandoning his current 10 pm slot? Tassler held nothing back, saying: "The unfortunate thing is that our creative community was somewhat bruised by this. A lot of people were put out of  work. A lot of people saw this as having a pretty negative impact on the business. But it allowed us to have a bigger piece of the revenue pie at 10."