CRAIG’S CHOICES
Most Promising Trailer: There’s really not a lot to choose from. I mean, Zack Morris Does Believe? Really, though, I think The Cool Kids was my favorite, because I like the actors involved and I guess I’m one of “the olds” I was referring to earlier, myself.
Most Anticipated New Show: Again, The Cool Kids is probably the only one of the Fall offerings that I’ll be really interested in seeing. I’d be curious if The Passage is better than the trailer, and I’m actually curious to see how Last Man Standing is presented. Will they follow in Roseanne’s footsteps and go all in on the Right-leaning Trump love? Or will they continue to be the apolitical show LMS always kind of really was? We’ll see.
Best Scheduling Move: 9-1-1 in the Fall, no matter where it goes, it good to me. But I think I’ll go with keeping Wednesday as-is. Too much change is jarring, and sadly the FOX Fall 2018 schedule is full of too much change.
Worst Scheduling Move: The Gifted is going to get killed on Tuesday, isn’t it?
Most Likely New Hit: Does Last Man Standing count as “new?” Meh. I don’t think anything’s really looking spectacular.
Likely First Cancellation: Rel will probably disappear to make way for something at midseason and FOX will replace it with the unaired Ghosted episodes. HAHAHA I’m funny.
What I’ll Be Watching in the Fall: The Gifted might be it.
SHILO’s SUPERLATIVES
Most Promising Trailer: For me, none of the FOX trailers were promising. So I’ll be polite and recuse myself here.
Most Anticipated New Show: The Cool Kids, solely on the pedigree of the cast and creatives. You have four TV veterans in a promising, underused setting with EPs from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia – it’s something that could very easily come together within a few episodes. The trailer was worrisome, to say the least, but it’s not a show that I think you can declare DOA just yet.
Best Scheduling Move: Keeping Empire and Star together. They thrive in proximity to the other and where there was so much upheaval elsewhere on the schedule, FOX needed the steadiness of Wednesdays to keep things from toppling over too badly.
Worst Scheduling Move: The one decision whose rationale I can’t really find is FOX not keeping a comedy backup on the bench. I know that there are off-cycle pilots that are still in contention, and FOX still has low-rated freshman LA to Vegas and Ghosted (which has been off the schedule for months) in limbo, but off-cycle pilots rarely, if ever, get ordered and put on in-season and neither LA to Vegas nor Ghosted have any type of upside or are sure things to get picked up. Frankly, putting both new comedies you ordered in the fall and cutting a half-hour on Sundays just feels like a middle finger to the studio as the afterlives of The Mick and The Last Man on Earth were gutted by cliffhanger cancellations.
Most Likely New Hit: The Passage feels like something that would have a big opening. Its trailer was splashy and its concept, though a little muddled, is still noisy amidst a very tame, very safe season for the broadcast networks. With the football winds at its back, I’m fairly confident that it’ll at least get sampled; it’s just a matter of how much of their core demo FOX can retain after a rough upfronts and how the show can hold up creatively in successive weeks. But in a slate that’s not really targeting the demo, The Passage is FOX’s Hail Mary to keep its genre audience around for at least one more season.
Likely First Cancellation: Rel. Despite the inherent difficulties that The Cool Kids will have with attracting a demo, as its cast is led by four actors over the age of 60, its sampling will be helped by the opening weeks of Last Man Standing, something that it should be decently compatible with. Whereas Rel is a multi-cam airing out of an animated comedy and Family Guy won’t have the type of fall boom that Last Man Standing could, so if it shows signs of weakness that negatively impacts the affiliates, FOX will act.
What I’ll Be Watching in the Fall: Bob’s Burgers remains one of the most underrated shows on TV and its current season has shown very little in the way of age, so I’ll just be watching it.
