Lethal Weapon season 2 timeslot: Should Fox pair it with Empire season 4?

Should Lethal Weapon season 2 receive some sort of schedule swap? It’s a worthy question, but also one that even Fox executives don’t have an answer to right now. What we can say, one week removed from the end of the first season, is that they’ve got a great deal on their minds to think about.

For the entirety of season 1, Lethal Weapon aired at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesdays. While there, it flourished for the most part. It averaged in total a 1.6 rating in the 18-49 demographic in the live+same-day ratings, which is the second-best average for any Monday-Friday series on Fox. The only series that was performing better is Empire, which was its timeslot companion for the first part of the season.

There is one very-obvious reason for Fox to want to keep that timeslot the same as we go into Lethal Weapon season 2 — the lack of a desire to shift away from a good thing that’s clearly working rather well. When you have a show that is drawing good ratings, why in the world do you want to back off of that? You’re getting good numbers, and any move is a risk. It could hurt Lethal Weapon, and if you saddle Empire in the fall with a timeslot companion that doesn’t work, it could end up hurting your biggest hit as well.

On the flip side, there’s a legitimate case for moving Lethal Weapon to one of Fox’s weaker nights, such as a Thursday or even a Monday — it’s got a pretty established audience as it is! It’s aired for the entirety of 2017 without Empire around and fared decently as a result of it, so we do think that it should be able to continue to do that without concern. We know that Rosewood lost a great deal of steam without having Empire around with it, but this is somewhat of a different situation. It’s an established franchise, and even without Empire it tended to post around a 1.3-1.5 in the demo.

You’ll get your answer as to the scheduling for Lethal Weapon season 2 at Fox’s upfronts this May. Personally, we would like to see the show remain in its current timeslot, but we do understand the network’s interest in risk-taking if they think they’ve got another potential property that could work.

What do you think the Lethal Weapon season 2 timeslot should be on Fox? Let us know some of your advance thoughts now with a comment!

Meanwhile, be sure to click here if you are interested in reading some more of our Lethal Weapon season 2 premiere-date speculation without further delay. (Photo: Fox.)