Fans of the new comedy Modern Family should be happy today: after another winning episode last night, ABC has announced that the show's been given a full-season pick-up. Also given ABC's green light for a full season today: the sitcoms Cougar Town and The Middle (but, tellingly, not Hank). Meanwhile, the sputtering NBC is headed in the opposite direction. Today the news broke that NBC has cancelled Southland, the day before its second season was scheduled to debut (and with six episodes already in the can). This comes a week after NBC announced that their much-hyped spring '10 sci-fi series Day One is being cut back from a 13-episode series to a 4-hour miniseries, and a few months after the network let the expensive (and sporadically brilliant) Kings die. It's one thing to cut costs (as the network is doing with its Jay Leno experiment), but lately NBC seems to be spending lots of money and then not making use of what they paid for. As critic Alan Sepinwall tweeted when he heard the Southland news: "Why the face?"
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