LOS ANGELES — Drew Carey has hit the wall.

For that matter, so have Barbara Hershey and Christine Lahti.

The wall is a series of gigantic picture panels lined up around a large meeting room. They’re glamour shots of The WB’s stars, their faces staring alluringly into space. All except for Merrin Dungey of "Summerland," caught frozen in time with her arm thrown overhead, contemplating the glory of her armpit.

If memory serves correctly, there are more experienced actors up there than starlets this time around. Usually, these walls are populated with the likes of "One Tree Hill’s" Chad Michael Murray, "Smallville’s" Tom Welling, "Everwood’s" Gregory Smith and Rose McGowan of "Charmed." Young fresh fellows who sink into a crowd of their yet-to-be-fully discovered contemporaries at a party.

But the presence of Hershey, Lahti and Carey, as well as Mitch Pileggi and Jeff Foxworthy, is a sign that The WB is interested in catering to audiences besides easily entertained youngsters.

Could it be that, after all this time and a particularly dismal season, The WB is really trying to get serious? Coming off its fourth-worst season, it sure needs to try. Like ABC, there has been a shift at the top, including the recent hire of "Six Feet Under" producer David Janollari as president of entertainment. One should expect changes over the next few seasons — and among those changes, we should hope, will /be/ more a diverse-looking network than the homogenous one (read: 90 percent Caucasian) presented this season.

Janollari arrived too late to take credit for the success of "Summerland," the most significant sign of returning life at The WB. (As of Wednesday, it was picked up as a midseason show.) Kudos won’t be his for the discovery of "Jack & Bobby," the sort of thoughtful drama the Weblet built its reputation upon, or Lahti’s new TV situation.

Then again, he has the luxury of blaming someone else for "Commando Nanny," proof of how dangerous it can be to tell a man like Mark Burnett that you’d do anything to work with him, or shrugging if the gorgeously cast, thinly scripted "The Mountain," the source of Hershey’s paycheck, doesn’t perform as well as expected.

For that matter, Janollari and WB chairman Garth Ancier unwittingly displayed their ignorance in regard to a couple of their own shows. Wonder if that’s part of the problem here.

According to them, though, they still know their 12-to-34 and 18-to-34 target audiences.

"We knew we did well with the 18- to 34-year-olds," Ancier said. "We wanted to invite more people into the tent."

We won’t have to wait long to see whether that strategy works. "Studio 7," a younger-skewing reality competition — think "Jeopardy!" meets "The Real World" — premieres next Thursday at 9 p.m.

Then, on Thursday the 29th, Foxworthy’s sketch show "Blue Collar TV" debuts. Both have eight-week orders.

This is one of the tent-broadening attempts that had critics scratching their heads, even if it makes perfect sense on paper. "Blue Collar: The Movie" gave cable’s Comedy Central its highest movie ratings in history, according to WB communications vice president Brad Turell, and the DVDs sold millions.

Appearing via satellite, Foxworthy was confident the show will work just fine.

"I think sometimes, especially in television, we look for things to be so cutting edge that we sometimes miss the obvious things that are right in front of us," he said.

You know you’re naive when you think your Southern-fried humor is going to work on the Hilary Duff army. These are the women who made "Felicity," not Foxworthy.

What about Carey, once the biggest comic on television? The man might not have enjoyed the best run of luck over the past season or two, as his sitcom death spiraled before disappearing into thin air, along with his improv series, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"

Give him his due for refusing to quit. As ABC burns off remaining episodes of the improv show and "The Drew Carey Show" — Carey likened it to being buried alive — he has taken his love of improvisational theater to another network. (He also appears to have entered his leprechaun phase, showing up with bright green hair.)

The difference in "Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show" is that the improv is further illustrated by animation behind the actors, drawn by a number of auteur artists such as Bill Plympton. So the off-the-cuff humor is for adults and the animation is for kids.