This year, TV pundits didn't even get much of a chance to guess which of the new fall shows would be the first to get canceled.

It would appear that that question has already been answered. Barring some sort of unforeseen miracle, Fox's "Hollyweird" is already dead - this despite the fact that it wasn't even supposed to premiere until sometime in October.The show has led sort of a tortured life for months now. Fox placed "Hollyweird" on its fall schedule back in May, but within days Fox Entertainment President Peter Roth announced it was going to be completely revamped.

So the obvious question was - why order a series and then turn it completely on its side?

"First and foremost, the answer is because we have (creators/producers) Wes Craven and Shaun Cassidy . . . people that are able to execute," Roth said recently.

Still, he apparently didn't really like the show that former teen idol Cassidy (who created and produced "American Gothic" and "Roar") and horror-movie meister Craven brought him. Roth wanted to seriously restructure the series, which was about three young people who move to Hollywood and produce a cable show about the occult - and get involved in solving paranormal crimes.

"We took on what was a very, very ambitious notion in `Hollyweird,' " Roth said. "We didn't want another `X-Files.' We didn't want another `Millennium.' We wanted to find a new form. A new opportunity. A confluence of scare and comedy, as I believe Wes so successfully achieved in `Scream.' Our hope was to be able to replicate that in series form.

"But, frankly, we failed."

Roth said the show was neither funny enough nor scary enough and that there was no "legitimacy" to the characters putting themselves in harm's way every week.

"I think the audience would have, frankly, laughed at us and not accepted us," he said.

And then there were "casting issues" - issues so strong that the actors who appeared in the pilot (Fab Filippo, Melissa George and Bodhi Elfman) were invited to audition for new characters.

Apparently, the problems have not been resolved. While all the other fall shows - not to mention a number of midseason series - have gone into production, "Hollyweird" remains idle.

And Cassidy quit in disgust late last week, offering a decidedly different perspective on the show from the one expressed by Roth.

"Having spent much of the last year trying to fix something I never viewed as broken in the first place, I am withdrawing from the process of deconstructing `Hollyweird,' " Cassidy said in a prepared statement. "The pilot that Fox bought was as fresh and original as anything I've been involved with."

It would appear that we're never going to know if "Hollyweird" would have amounted to anything.

(And we don't know how Fox will fill the hour on Thursday at 8 p.m. yet, either.)

RERUN: Actually, this is the second year in a row Fox has dropped a show before it got on the air. The network had a sitcom titled "Rewind" (which featured Scott Baio) that was axed in August and never made it into our living rooms.

(Clips from the never-seen pilot looked pretty dreadful, however.)