Are you a movie star whose new movies don't even run as long as the American Presidential count at your local multiplex? Are you having more misses than hits in the top film chart? Is your big screen popularity, not to beat around the bush, on the slide?

Never mind, help is at hand. Try the small screen. Everybody in your position is doing it as an increasing number of movie stars turn on the TV to give their careers a boost.

The producers get a famous face, a brand name with which viewers are already familiar, and an automatic head start in the ratings race. While the stars of hit sitcoms like Friends are desperately trying (and mostly failing) to kick start their movie careers, former box office champs such as Bette Midler and Geena Davis are moving the other way.

And what American viewers see this week we'll be seeing in a few months. Midler's run of flops in the cinema must have caused her to take a serious look at her career path. The route took her to her own TV series based on her own life. Well, a fictionalised version of her own private and professional life rather like I Love Lucy was a distorted view of Lucille Ball's off-screen experiences.

Midler's husband, daughter and friends are all reflected in the show's characters. Even the set resembles her real house.

"I was pretty adamant I wanted to do something that had to do with show business," she says - and who better for inspiration than the Divine Miss M herself?

The opening episode raked in 16m viewers, giving the best comedy ratings for CBS's Wednesday night line-up for five years. Midler's gamble seems to have paid off. Whether Geena Davis, another refugee from the big screen, will be as successful has yet to be seen.

She stars in the imaginatively titled The Geena Davis Show. "From single girl to mother of two in six dates flat" is how the plot is summed up. Davis was last seen playing second fiddle to a computer-generated mouse and a cute bespectacled kid Jonathan Lipnicki in the summer hit Stuart Little. After a pair of expensive flops, Cutthroat Island and Long Kiss Goodbye, she had clearly lost some of her cinematic bankability. But TV was grateful for the use of a well-known name.

The small screen can also be used for rehabilitation purposes. Two of Hollywood's most famous users of illegal substances, Charlie Sheen and Robert Downey Jr, have joined successful US series.

Sheen follows his actor father Martin Sheen, who starred in Apocalypse Now and now heads the cast of the award-laden The West Wing, playing the US President no less. Son Charlie has taken over from Michael J Fox as the male lead in the hit comedy Spin City. He plays the new deputy mayor, a notorious reformed drunk and womaniser called Charlie. The words type and casting spring to mind.

This new role comes after the actor's much-publicised encounters with cocaine, hookers, guns and what one magazine described tactfully as "celebrity excess". He was, not to mince words, a bit of a bad boy in the late 1980s and early 1990s making a succession of bad movies while his private life spiralled out of control.

He's now on the AA - and we're not talking Automobile Association - programme, not touching a drink or drugs for two years. The hectic schedule of making a weekly TV series will leave him little time to get into trouble. He knows that the producers have taken a chance by casting him and he also realises the difficulty of stepping into the shoes of someone as popular as Fox, who has left to continue his battle with Parkinson's disease.

"Who the hell would want to step into this position? If it doesn't work I gave it a shot," says Sheen. "And it's a really good structure for me to be in right now, work-wise, psychologically, physically. It's right where I need to be. "

Downey has taken a recurring role in the legal series Ally McBeal after his release from prison on charges arising from his drug use.

He's receiving good reviews but the casting of movie stars doesn't necessarily reap rewards. One of the most promising new US dramas this season was Deadline with Oliver Platt, not exactly a movie star but certainly an impressive supporting actor, as a crusading New York newspaper columnist and crime solver. The cast also includes British actor (and Oscar nominee) Tom Conti and Lili Taylor, an actress highly-regarded in the world of independent movies. But the series has proved short-lived. Some TV actors are forced back on the box after their forays into movie stardom fail to pay off.

Kirstie Alley went from Cheers to a series of indifferent movies and ended up back in another sitcom, Veronica's Closet. Cheers co-star Ted Danson, after mixed fortunes on the big screen, resurfaced in a fresh comedy show.

These sort of moves are nothing new. US producers have always used "old" stars to boost the appeal on TV series. Hollywood legend Barbara Stanwyck starred in both the western series The Big Valley and later the glossy soap The Colbys, opposite another big movie name Charlton (Mr Epic) Heston.

When it comes to working, Hollywood actors realise that size doesn't always matter - that there can be life after the big screen on the small screen