Ellen Gray: Goodbye so soon? Ah, well: Au revoir, summer season

IT'S NOT even Labor Day, and though I've yet to see a single episode of CBS' "Big Brother" or ABC's "Shark Tank," I'm already starting to miss summer TV.

Yes, there's a slew of new shows headed our way, courtesy of the broadcast networks' back-to-school schedules, but for now, I'm focused on there being:

* No more "Nurse Jackie." At least until Showtime rolls out Season 2 of the best show - cable or network - I've seen in quite a while.

Last week's season finale, in which Jackie's lies finally began to catch up with her, may have been a long time coming.

But the strength of "Jackie," in which Edie Falco finally escapes Carmela Soprano's grooming regimen, lies in its portrait of a functional addict who's only gradually realizing that it might not just be the people around her who are out of control.

I'm looking forward to that message taking a while longer to penetrate.

* No more "Royal Pains." Though USA has ordered 16 episodes of its superdoc-in-the-Hamptons show for next season, up from 12 this summer, it's a long time to wait to find out how to perform your own open-heart surgery using objects from your kitchen junk drawer.

* Just one episode left of Season 2 of HBO's "True Blood." ("Blood," "Hung" and "Entourage" are taking the holiday weekend off, but the first two will return with season finales on Sept. 13, while "Entourage" sticks around until Oct. 4.)

* No more of TNT's "The Closer" and "Saving Grace" for a while. "Grace" will wrap up for good next summer with a nine-episode season, but at least I still have a few I haven't seen yet left on the DVR.

I'm grateful for what earlier had seemed like a frustratingly late start for Season 3 of AMC's "Mad Men," which will run into November this year.

Amazingly, it's Lifetime, whose television-for-women that people like me have been making fun of for years, that's occupying a disproportionate share of my time as I wait for the fall madness to begin.

"Army Wives" - which, let's be honest, is no more a soap opera than that critics' darling, "Mad Men" - is still in the midst of a third season that's dealing, earnestly but not cloyingly, with very real issues involving love and loss.

It's also the best work Roxborough's Kim Delaney's done in years.

The Sunday night "Wives" lead-in, "Drop Dead Diva," may approach those same issues from a somewhat fantastical angle, but thanks to Brooke Elliott, who plays a twinkie who died and woke up in a plus-size body (with a brain to match), it's been a welcome distraction.

Together with "Project Runway," which seems to have lost nothing in its move to Lifetime and to Los Angeles - even Mood Fabrics reportedly opened a "Runway"-only satellite store during production - that's three hours a week I'm giving to Lifetime.

But there's no way I'm handing over even a half-hour to the network's lame spin-off, "Models of the Runway."

Not, that is, unless it ditches the models and lets the judges explain just what Mitchell has on them that he's escaped being "auf"-ed two weeks in a row.

I'm thinking that pictures of Nina Garcia or Heidi Klum wearing Crocs might do it. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.