ABC’s ‘The Quest’: Do finale ratings help or hurt season 2 renewal odds?

We now know the official ratings for the finale for “The Quest” (we wanted to wait for the finals to come in yesterday, given that things can sometimes be a little crazy in the summer), and the news is both good and bad.

In terms of total viewers and the 18-49 demographic, the 1.97 million people who watched Lina become the One True Hero, coupled with the 0.5 demo rating, are the best numbers that the show has put up since moving to its new format of airing two shows a night. Unfortunately, they are also not good enough to get a second season on ABC, unless the network is either really blown away by the median viewer age or the DVR figures that they are getting for the show. Every now and then, something happens that you can be genuinely surprised by. Take The CW renewing “Beauty and the Beast,” citing young viewers and also international popularity.

We like to be relatively solutions-oriented here, and with that in mind, we find ourselves asking an interesting question right now: Why not shift the show to The CW? Given that the audience seems to be pretty internet-savvy, this seems to be a fairly ideal home for it. They already program a great deal of scripted genre programming, so putting this into the fold when they have things like “Reign” or “Supernatural” shouldn’t be that far out of the realm of possibility. These ratings would be enough to thrive there, and they may even have an opportunity to market towards that crowd. This isn’t The CW of a few years ago when “Gossip Girl” ran the show.

Anyway, we still have to wait and see what ABC’s formal decision is … and it’s always possible that they could just quietly bury the show and never officially cancel it. This is what they did with “Whodunnit” last year.

We’ll have some further updates on a possible search for another hero if or when it happens, so stay tuned.