… and has been an indispensable character from the beginning. His presence was essential for the establishment of Sharon’s character, and without her everything would pretty much fall apart or at least would be far more ordinary, i.e. less interesting.

Thank you Naomi, for you insight. Your reasoning sounds very plausible to me. It all comes down to a numbers game, right? I sincerely hope that the conclusion you are drawing from the numbers will stand the test.
From a very personal point of view, I would just love to have this magnificent show around for a lot more seasons.

The canceling of R&I before seeing Animal Kingdom’s performance. The abysmal failure of Animal Kingdom. Even in demo, the freshman AK underperforms both of those shows in their senior years. Bring in total viewers and MC outperforms AK 3 to 1. This is on a show who is the first in a new direction. Very rarely does a show gain viewers. The pattern is to lose them. Plus, the very core of the demo tend to have the attention span of gnats. A balance is needed in total viewers. While AK saw the younger audience aspect that the other two didn’t have, it didn’t get the total viewers that the other two shows do. It is one of their worst performers in that area.

Even in all platforms, the senior MC outperforms AK by almost 2 to 1. According to TNT numbers, MC garners 10 million plus unique viewers while AK gets only 6 million plus.

Loss of Major Crimes would result in another loss of over 3 million viewers to the network. The MC fan base and efforts to organize them has been successful with the #renewmajorcrimesS6 movement.

Third, Reilly announced they would be bringing in another procedural in late 2017. Definitely a chunk in the armour of taking a network in a new direction. And this is the man who is saying the procedural is dead. To me, someone with a higher pay grade is saying they might have lost some faith and taking the decision out of his hands.

Of course, this is just my opinion, but it comes from studying articles from numerous sources on Levy/Reilly/TNT and 20 years in corporate strategy, primarily in turnaround.

Leverage in what way?

They didn’t renew officially until December of last year. My understanding is that WB is a difficult organization to negotiate with. Plus, WB has a whole lot more leverage this year than last year.

I know the Epic 5 did really well for them for sweeps, so I am figuring they will want to repeat that. That should have them starting up again in late January. What is your understanding on the reduced ad load? We know that Reilly likes to be a trend setter. You think MC will be a candidate for the reduced ad load? He was very vague in who would be included in his quote, but said it would ALSO include the new shows he has coming on. That tells me that he could be interested in looking at some of the shows that are currently on. MC has the highest and diverse audience of all the shows. Reilly stated the outcomes have so far been what they had hoped for. But a larger, more established audience (pool) would be needed to confirm those early results.

I can’t help but think that he would be interested in expanding that to an audience the size of MC since it is the #2 scripted on cable. I would LOVE to see an additional 10 minutes of MC.

I don’t think it holds any bearing on the episode count — TNT has often announced return dates earlier than other cable networks, so this could just be them settling back into the norm. They may also want to see what networks are doing in an effort to secure the show the best premiere date possible to maximize numbers.