Sunday, January 1, 2017

Best Case/Worst Case: The Mick, Ransom, The Wall and more!


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



The Mick
Tuesdays at 8:30 on Fox

Lead-in: New Girl (0.92 A18-49)

This Year's Timeslot Occupants:
New Girl (0.92 A18-49)

In a Nutshell: Fox's winter begins on New Year's Day with the premiere of new comedy The Mick, which will start right after The OT tonight before ultimately settling on Tuesday at 8:30 after New Girl (and later Brooklyn Nine-Nine). It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia lead Kaitlin Olson takes on a network comedy that will try to play in the same ballpark tonally.

Best Case: It's Always Sunny is one of those shows that has a lot more pull/awareness culturally than the Live+SD ratings indicate. This show is exactly what that audience is looking for, and it's also a pretty decent fit with New Girl. It has a fairly similar premise to the surprisingly respectable Uncle Buck from last summer, and like that show it will be elevated by a well-cast and recognizable lead. It skews very young and builds from New Girl on the regular. 1.25, including a big boost from tonight's post-NFL episode.

Worst Case: Does Fox realize that Sunny gets like a 0.3 rating? And its super-young audience doesn't watch much TV, so it hasn't seen the ads and won't show up. Also, New Girl had a fairly soft late fall, so it's not gonna be a good lead-in. It does wayyy worse than a typical The Simpsons episode tonight and drops about half of its New Girl lead-in on Tuesday, basically becoming another The Grinder. 0.54.

Likeliest: Fox appears to have the better late NFL slate this afternoon, so The Mick should get a good raw rating tonight. On Tuesday, this is probably not going to work unless Kaitlin Olson can draw some audience, but admittedly she's pretty much the ideal lead for this kind of show. I think it'll do pretty decent retention out of New Girl, but you can only go so much lower than New Girl and still be able to claim success. A 0.91 average, inflated nearly a full tenth by tonight's rating. Not a huge fail, but its best hope may be that the larger Fox company has enough affinity for Sunny to give it another shot.



Ransom
Saturdays at 8:00 on CBS

Lead-in: local programming

This Year's Timeslot Occupants:
crime drama repeats (0.57 A18-49)

In a Nutshell: CBS is taking an extremely rare shot at Saturday scripted programming with Canadian co-production Ransom. As far as I can tell, this is the first time a new broadcast scripted series has been initially scheduled on Saturday since 2010 (when CBS tried it with another Canadian co-production called The Bridge). Before taking on Saturday, Ransom will try to benefit from NFL exposure, as it airs after a football-delayed 60 Minutes tonight.

Best Case: Broadcast networks have been doing relatively well on Friday in recent years, since a lot of the traditional broadcast audience is watching on the night. So taking back Saturday, which is kind of in the same boat, is actually a logical step at this point. It gets a nice charge from the NFL tonight and is pretty close to MacGyver ratings in its regular slot. 0.92.

Worst Case: There has been some promotion, but it's a struggle to see how these promos would really make anybody show up for something on a long-left for dead night. It'll get very little interest with a bad NFL lead-in tonight, and then do far worse than crime drama repeats (which at least have some name recognition to lean on). 0.30.

Likeliest: There just doesn't seem to be any interest, so I don't think it does any better than the usual Saturday drama repeats, and is more likely to do worse. CBS also seemingly has the short end of the NFL stick this afternoon, but the preview may still give it just enough hundredths to get close to the crime drama repeat average. Still, I think it ends up at 0.4ish within fairly short order on Saturday. 0.52. No season two, at least on CBS. It's gonna take a little more effort than this to crack Saturday night.



To Tell the Truth (Sunday, 1.03 A18-49, 71 A18-49+ last year)
 
The Bachelor (Monday, 2.36 A18-49, 162 A18-49+ last year)
 
Celebrity Apprentice (Monday, 1.91 A18-49, 113 A18-49+ in 2015)
 
The Wall (Monday/Tuesday, 1.6 for preview on December 19): NBC's game show had a strong preview in December and also repeated very well in its regular Tuesday 8/7c slot last week. Granted, it's the kind of show that should repeat very well, but everything seems to suggest this is gonna be quite respectable on Tuesday. I think it's close to the preview rating for the two airings this week (including another preview tomorrow after Celebrity Apprentice), and then settles with about the same kind of low-1 raw number that Hollywood Game Night had in the Voice filler role in early 2016. Likeliest (including the Monday eps): 1.33. Renewed.

Bones (Tuesday, 0.99 A18-49, 68 A18-49+ last year): The Fox crime drama was the banner of consistency for nearly a decade, but it's had a rough last two seasons and now comes back for a 12-episode announced final season. With just 12 eps, it's gonna air in a fairly high-viewed part of the season, but it'll also have to deal with This Is Us and Bull for most of the run. It may break 1.0 without This Is Us this Tuesday, but it settles in high fractionals and is a bit up in Plus from last year. Likeliest: 0.90.

No comments:

Post a Comment

© SpottedRatings.com 2009-2022. All Rights Reserved.