Thursday, August 16, 2018

The Breakdown: Fox Friday in 2017-18 (Hell's Kitchen, MasterChef Junior, The Exorcist)




It's time for a journey through the Fox Friday schedule in 2017-18...


fall

Year8:008:309:009:30Avg
2016-17Hell's KitchenThe Exorcist70
8555
2017-18Hell's KitchenThe Exorcist56 (-20%)
74 (-13%)38 (-31%)
VsAvg+44%-9%+20%
Rank4/1710/176/17

Gordon Ramsay split time between Friday and Thursday in 2016-17, but this year his shows were kept on Friday all season. Even in these fairly apples-to-apples comparisons, Hell's Kitchen looked a decent amount weaker than last year. But its declines didn't get a ton of attention because sophomore lead-out The Exorcist was bombing out even harder at 9/8c; it took a 31% year-to-year Plus decline in the same timeslot.

winter

Year8:008:309:009:30Avg
2016-17RosewoodSleepy Hollow46
5142
2017-18Hell's Kitchen9-1-1 (R)70 (+52%)
88 (+72%)53 (+27%)
VsAvg+58%+4%+32%
Rank1/179/171/17

Fox didn't even try to program the 9/8c hour after the new year (except for some spring MasterChef Junior episodes). When repeats of Wednesday hit 9-1-1 can do better raw numbers than year-ago Sleepy Hollow originals and fall Exorcist originals, why bother?

spring

Year8:008:309:009:30Avg
2016-17RosewoodSleepy Hollow40
4238
2017-18MasterChef Junior70 (+73%)
70 (+64%)70 (+83%)
VsAvg+54%+56%+55%
Rank1/171/171/17

And the network had another period of massive Plus growth in the spring, with MasterChef Junior (even at somewhat blah levels) absolutely routing the year-ago flop dramas. Junior aired four two-hour episodes late in the season.

Rating the Ratings

NameLoAvgHiy2yPlusLabelPlusy2yResults
Hell's Kitchen*0.70.871.1-21%79hit(Fri)-11%detail
MasterChef Junior*0.70.790.9-24%72solid(Fri)-15%detail
The Exorcist0.30.410.5-38%38flop-31%detail

Hell's Kitchen: Even considering they had Thursday airings last year, it was kind of a "meh" year for the Ramsay shows. But they get a little break relative to the trends above since they were kept on Friday all season. Grade: C+.

MasterChef Junior: Same story as Hell's Kitchen, except in this case MasterChef Junior actually aired the entire last season on Thursday, and much of this season very late in the spring. So it gets a bit more of a break than Kitchen and ends up with a Grade: B-.

The Exorcist: This was a low-end bubble show at best last year, and it dropped 31% in Plus from that level. And usually when a show drops this hard, it makes up some of the losses in delayed viewing; The Exorcist actually became a much smaller DVR gainer in season two. (It generally got 80%ish boosts in Live+7 ratings last year, and more like 50% this year.) It looked like a dubious renewal last year but it went even more disastrously than I would've imagined. Grade: F.

The names in this last table link to the shows' War of 18-49 pages. Links with an asterisk(*) have been updated with the new info. Updates to younger shows will come later in the summer.

Here's the now updated Schedules Plus for Fox Friday.

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