Broadcast Rat Race Week 5: “The Player”, “Blood and Oil”, “Truth Be Told” Catch Episode Cut Epidemic; “Limitless” Given Back-Nine Inoculation – As Has “The Grinder”?!

We’ve had a veritable spate of episode-order cuts this year; Fox started it by cutting “Minority Report” to ten episodes, and every show listed as “cancelled” on the chart below has had their episode order cut. This is the latest evolution in how networks deal with flops. Once upon a time, flops would simply be yanked off the schedule and replaced with something else coming out of the bullpen, but new shows were doomed to failure if they were plugged in to a random flop’s time-slot at a random point in the season rather than being given significant advance promotion and debuting at a point where audiences were ready for new shows, readying veteran shows with established audiences wasn’t much better and posed additional risks, and putting veteran shows in interim spots on the schedule like Fridays, to be plugged in when a new show flopped, didn’t fool anyone for long and cost the networks upfront money contingent on the originally advertised time slot. In recent years, then, networks have taken to letting shows finish out their initial 13-episode order, no matter how horribly rated (so long as reruns wouldn’t do any better), and then finding something else to fill the time-slot at midseason.

Last year, the first thing resembling a cancellation came in mid-October, and was similar to what we’ve seen this year: Fox cut “Mulaney”‘s episode order from an unusually-high 16 to 13. ABC yanked “Manhattan Love Story” at about this time last year, replacing it with double-runs of “Selfie” (which wasn’t that much higher rated), and in mid-November pulled “Selfie” in favor of repeats and “Dancing with the Stars” clip shows. NBC gave a Halloween spook to “A to Z” and “Bad Judge”, announcing on October 31 that those two shows would not receive more than their original 13-episode orders, but that all the episodes ordered would air. CBS announced it wouldn’t go forward with sophomore “The Millers” in mid-November, something of a surprise considering the support CBS had seemed to show it by renewing it in the first place and their evident desire to get one of their own sitcoms to syndication. NBC’s “Constantine” and Fox’s “Red Band Society” were the only other shows to be announced not to get back nines by the end of November, with Fox pulling “RBS” off the schedule after ten episodes, taking it a week into December. Only “Manhattan Love Story”, “Selfie”, and “The Millers” failed to hold on to their spots until holiday specials and repeats took over the schedule.

This year networks seem to be adopting the tack Fox took with “Mulaney” and “Minority Report” by cutting episode orders. Several shows in the past week have effectively had production shut down after the current episode, pointing to what may be behind the latest strategy tweak: regardless of the opportunity cost of pulling a new show, networks may not want to incur the cost of producing more episodes of shows that will deliver miniscule ratings, which may mean they may prefer to run repeats once the produced episodes have finished airing even if the repeats would deliver smaller ratings, since repeats don’t incur production costs. Shows that have been produced will air in their originally scheduled time slot, because they might as well if repeats won’t do any better, and they’d collect better numbers there than if they were burned off on Saturday or in summer.

Rookies “Supergirl” and “Wicked City” and veteran “Grimm” make their bows this week.

How to read the chart: First box shows current time slot, second box current season number. Eps: Total number of episodes aired / total number of episodes ordered (if known). Last: 18-49 rating of the most recent episode. Raw: Average of first-run 18-49 ratings. Adj.: Average of the most recent episode and the previous Adj. rating. WklIdx: Last divided by the network scripted show average for the week. RawIdx: Raw divided by the network scripted show average for the season. Index: Adj. divided by the network scripted show average for the season. In general, >1.1=certain renewal, .85-1.1=probable renewal, .7-.85=on the bubble, .6-.7=probably cancelled. Anything substantially less than .6 for rookie shows indicates a dead show walking. Prod: Production company that produces the show (ABC=ABC Studios, CBS=CBS Television, Fox=20th Television, NBCU=Universal Television, Sony=Sony Pictures Television, WB=Warner Bros. Television). Incorporates ratings through Sunday, October 25; write-ups do not take into account Monday’s or Tuesday’s ratings. Weekly averages used: ABC 1.71, FOX 1.64, CBS 1.61, NBC 1.23, CW .58. Network averages used: ABC 1.83, CBS 1.70, FOX 1.68, NBC 1.43, CW .66.