Ratings: Last Man Standing slips, still wins; Fresh Off the Boat, Speechless struggle

The ratings for Friday night are officially in, and they absolutely do paint an interesting picture.

Remember when ABC noted a year and five months ago that they wanted to move away from Friday comedies, hence the decision to cancel Last Man Standing? Well, there’s a serious amount of irony to this now. While Last Man Standing did decline significantly for episode 2 (1.3 in viewers 18-49, down more than 25% from the premiere), it still was a big-enough rating for the Tim Allen series to win the night. Even still, it also more than doubled the start of Fresh Off the Boat (0.6) or Speechless (0.5) over at ABC, who decided to get back into the Friday-comedy space this year. (The Cool Kids on Fox also performed well with a 1.1, which makes us think that it is going to be around for at least the entirety of the season — it’s a good compliment to the lead-in and it also has a pretty good cast to go along with it.)

Airing comedies on Fridays has been a struggle really ever since the days of TGIF, so we’re not sure why ABC thought they could succeed this year in airing shows up against Last Man Standing, really one of the few Friday comedies in the past 15 years to really make it work. It was too much of a mountain for them to climb.

Meanwhile, over on CBS Hawaii Five-0 and Blue Bloods slipped slightly with a 0.8 rating, though the decline may be fairly negligible all things considered. The bigger thing of note here is that MacGyver, with a 0.7, is one of the few shows on the night that actually stayed fairly steady week-to-week. This is a lineup that is almost always going to deliver for the network, even if there are some little dips here and there. It’s just done so well for so long that we cannot say we’re surprised that it is withstanding most of the current competition once more.

What did you watch on TV Friday night? Be sure to share right away in the attached comments!