Ratings! The Enemy Within tops The Fix premiere; 911 season 2 down
We’ve got a jam-packed edition of Monday Ratings to talk through! There are impressive victories, utter disappointments, and of course constant eye-rolls in the direction of ABC that they think that airing American Idol opposite The Voice is a good idea. Why would you ever — and we repeat, ever — want to air these two shows with similar fan bases up against each other?
Let’s go ahead and get some of these numbers out of the way so we don’t waste a whole lot of time on them — The Voice generated a 1.7 rating while American Idol got a 1.2 in the 18-49 demographic. We do think that Idol is a profitable brand, so we do continue to wonder why ABC wants to self-sabotage themselves by doing battle against the highest-rating singing show in all of the land at the moment. Beyond just that, how are they going to afford this beastly production with some of these ratings? Getting big names to be judges is what most of this budget goes to but is paying them the big bucks for middling ratings really going to keep this show on the air?
All right, so let’s talk now about the epic battle for 10:00 p.m. Eastern — okay, maybe it’s not epic, but it’s at least interesting given that we have three shows that are all posting roughly the same sort of ratings and none of them are sure things for renewal. For The Fix, it’s almost unfair to really dive into the “will it get a second season” talk since it just premiered! Despite having Marcia Clark on board as an executive producer, the ABC show couldn’t muster much more than a 0.7 rating in the demo. That’s not exactly paving a road to renewal heaven, where network executives greet you with champagne and a bag of money to make more episodes; you’re basically stuck in TV purgatory instead, waiting to see if you suffer the sort of week 2 drop that the vast majority of new shows take on. It’s almost impossible to convince every single viewer you had for one episode to stick around.
As for The Enemy Within, our confidence is a tad higher. While last night’s new episode generated just a 0.8 rating (its lowest rating so far), we at least have seen some of them customary declines happen already! We know more of the floor, so we know that the show’s not jumping off a cliff here. We also still feel like this Homeland / The Blacklist hybrid has some potential if viewers stick with it and it gets a little bit more promotion. It’s a good show with some meaty twists and two awesome leads in Jennifer Carpenter and Morris Chestnut. We’d actually give it renewal chances mostly on the odds with Bull, which drew a 0.7 rating and won the night in total viewers. Bull is a rare case where we think that a network is probably going to look at more than ratings when handing down their verdict. Unlike the sort of courtrooms Dr. Bull finds himself in, CBS is the judge, jury, and the executioner and there are some other factors weighing in here.
One last thing worth noting
Last night’s 9-1-1 midseason premiere generated a 1.2 rating, tied for the lowest rating of the season — consider this another reminder that Fox’s super-long midseason hiatuses aren’t always a good idea and we really don’t know why they don’t just consider airing all eighteen episodes at once and premiering them a little earlier in the winter. You’re basically waving viewers goodbye in the fall and telling them “hey, go get hooked on another show airing in our same timeslot! It’s totally okay!”
Spoiler alert: It never is okay.