LOS ANGELES - A fall schedule heavy on reality shows yielded "mixed results" for Fox, said Gail Berman, the network’s president of entertainment.

"I think we had a substantial amount of our schedule be unscripted and certainly that was problematic for us," Berman told members of the Television Critics Association yesterday. "I think...we relied too much on the unscripted side."

More than half of Fox’s fall schedule was reality fare and much of that did not click with viewers - including "The Next Great Champ" and "Richard Branson’s Quest for the Best."

Berman blamed those failures in part on a TV landscape that is awash in reality programming.

"I do think that oversaturation in the marketplace of any form is going to have audience rejection," she said. "It happened in drama. It happened in comedy. And it happened in unscripted. The best generally survive and others get just swept away."

Indeed, Fox’s attempt at reuniting adoptees with their birth fathers was a colossal blunder. The network filmed six episodes of "Who’s Your Daddy?," in which an adopted woman tries to guess which of eight men is her birth father. The show drew the ire of adoption advocates and was rejected by viewers. Fox now has no plans to air the remaining episodes.

But Berman defended the show.

"I don’t think ’Who’s Your Daddy?’ was a mistake," she said. "You put all kinds of programming on and you try things. I think the audience expects loud things from Fox. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. And in the case of this particular show, it just didn’t work."

Berman pointed to Fox’s signature reality series "American Idol" as an example of what is working.

"[’American Idol’] is a very big and important part of our schedule," she said. "We anticipate a good return for ’Idol.’"

She also held up scripted series, including the Golden Globe and Emmy-winning "Arrested Development"; "Point Pleasant"; "24" and "House" as examples of the network’s commitment to "quality" scripted television.