New Year's Eve TV Leads the Way to 2007

Turn your TV to the networks for live performances and plenty of all-Eve-long celebration. ABC will be showing it's usual Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve, which has enjoyed tenure on the station since 1972. It's the network television version of The Song That Never Ends, and hopefully Clark will continue singing this tune for a while. New Year's with Dick has become its own institution, now a holiday-time tradition for most. Ryan Seacrest will join him in co-hosting duties this year. The event kicks off on ABC at 10pm ET, and will feature all kinds of celebs rockin' out. NBC will be showing a lot of football, then give none other than Carson Daly a little bit of New Year's Eve coverage, so viewers can ring in 2007 with the TRL host.

What would New Year's Eve be without all those outrageous countdowns? BET and VH1 will both be airing their versions of the best music videos for the year, though the BET version will take several hours to complete. TVLand will be counting down the 100 Great TV Quotes and Catchphrases, which will no doubt feature all our favorite TV faces from days gone by. The Disney channel will air their own version of a countdown, featuring hours of viewer's choice picks for their New Year Sing-Along Bowl-A-Thon special.

And everybody else? Well, that's another New Year's Eve tradition - the marathons. Long-running marathons allow viewers to sit back, relax, and enjoy, without even having to bother using the remote. Marathons allow network execs to take the night off and enjoy the no-fuss approach to planning programming schedules.

CMT brings country comedy with a Hee Haw marathon, while the SciFi channel takes a spookier approach by airing nothing but The Twilight Zone. Comedy Central hopes to cash in on ratings by showing their mega-hit animated series, South Park, all night long, while Food Network hopes to spice up ratings for their recent Ace of Cakes series with a long marathon.

The History Channel is pulling out all the stops with a very high-brow docu-style program called The History of Sex, which already sounds compelling enough to work. MTV is going with an old failsafe, The Real World, before airing their own New Year's Eve special. CourtTV gives viewers hard-hitting reality drama with their Cops marathon, while Nickelodeon keeps it light with many episodes of Roseanne.

Spike and USA both opted for dramatic programming, airing marathons of CSI and Law & Order: SVU repectively. The National Geographic Channel will broadcast their slightly strange Is It Real? for many hours, while TBS will stick with classic comedy in Seinfeld. TNT will show old episodes of Charmed, while the WE network goes for fresher programming in the form of a Platinum Weddings marathon.

Some networks, like GSN, aren't changing their programming schedule at all. Others, like FX and Life, will show movies all through the night. In the midst of it all is TLC's Resolutionaries marathon. Brand-new, these first few episodes of the new series will show coaches trying to help people with their own resolutions in life. TLC's docu-drama-style programming may hit a home run with this new series, and makes TLC one of the only networks airing anything other than re-runs on the last night of 2006. Resolutionaries looks interesting and inventive, and will continue to air in January.

Spending the Eve of New Year's at home isn't such a bad thing when you can curl up on the couch, click on the TV, and let the screen lead you into 2007. Resolving to watch less TV on January 1^st? You're still free to stare at the screen until midnight - and you'll have tons and tons of marathons to choose from, besides.