Monday, October 12, 2015

Best Case/Worst Case: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin


Best Case/Worst Case lays out possible scenarios for broadcast primetime TV seasons yet to premiere. Here's what's premiering tonight!



Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (NEW!)

Timeslot OccupantsThe Originals
Avg Orig Avg
0.48 0.58 0.58 0.64

In a Nutshell: The CW is only premiering one new series this fall, and it's the Monday lead-off series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It had a very unconventional road to this point, starting as a half-hour comedy pilot on Showtime. Writer/star/co-creator Rachel Bloom's character quits her Manhattan job and moves across the country in search of love, occasionally breaking into song along the way.

Best Case: Even busted pilots on the premium channels are high end quality-wise on broadcast. This show's musical angle is big and attention-grabbing, putting it a solid step ahead of what Jane the Virgin did last year and actually ahead of last year's The Originals' raw numbers. 0.65.

Worst Case: The whole thing smells of desperation borne out of a simply miserable CW development class. If they were gonna do this, they should've waited for midseason rather than rushing all of this retooling for an October premiere date. It may be a "splashy" premise but it's also utterly ridiculous, and there's no way people are gonna show up for this on a self-starting basis. 0.23.

Likeliest: Pedowitz seems to have an OK feel for these female-skewing shows, so I'm getting kinda weary of continually predicting huge doom for them. (With my luck, that means this will be the first one that bombs really hard...) Anyway, I don't have it doing better than Jane did last year, but I have enough belief in another set of highly positive reviews to feel it won't do much worse either. 0.40. Should be an interesting race among this and iZombie and the Thursday vampire shows.



Jane the Virgin
0.48 A18-49+True2014-15 Slot
29 0.53 Monday 9:00

Timeslot OccupantsJane the Virgin
Avg Orig Avg
0.39 0.46 0.48 0.53

In a Nutshell: It had a lot of positive buzz and acclaim, but the family dramedy Jane the Virgin seemed to be completely on an island when it came to the CW leading out of The Originals. But it attracted some of its own audience, growing in total viewers from The Originals on premiere night and ultimately settling in as another significant improvement on recent Surrender Monday lineups. The show's uncommon amount of critical love by CW standards culminated in a Peabody for the show and a Golden Globe win for Gina Rodriguez.

Best Case: The critical love is just too significant to ignore. A whole new swath of viewers discover Jane in season two, and it doesn't take a lot of raw numbers to produce huge percent growth when you're in middling CW world. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend succeeds at 8/7c and is a much better fit with Jane. Up 25% to 0.60.

Worst Case: This show was supposed to get some huge surge of viewership due to streaming viewers... but it's not even hitting Netflix until today. It didn't really do much ratings-wise late last season and is only able to bring the low end of that audience back for the fall, soon going lower. And it's also got a far worse lead-in as The Originals trades out for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It takes a Reign-esque sophomore slump to 0.31.

Likeliest: This is another show like Arrow and maybe even The Flash that had its worst points early in the season. So even if all this buzz adds up to no more actual ratings heat, it could have some pretty decent year-to-year trends in the fall. But the winter heat didn't really seem to go anywhere as the spring developed, so it will do worse in the winter/spring and thus be down just a bit in Plus overall. -13% to a 0.42.

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