SHILO’S SUPERLATIVES
Most Promising Trailer: Filthy Rich looks very fun. The trailer might not have been as campy and over-the-top as I expected, but there looks to be deliciously Southern-fried soapy goodness in there with plenty of latitude for scenery chewing, crazy twists, and bad behavior from very rich people. I’m not quite sure about its scheduling, as it’s penciled in for Thursdays at 9:00 midseason following Last Man Standing/Outmatched, but its trailer made me hopeful that it could pull an audience on its own.
Most Anticipated New Show: Filthy Rich. Broadcast has all but given up on soaps like this, so I’m encouraged that FOX has taken a shot on something that isn’t a guaranteed success. If it can have a sense of humor about itself and keep its storytelling energetic and its feet on the ground, it could be a great show.
Best Scheduling Move: Bringing wrestling back could be good. It’ll have football promotion, name recognition, and a loyal fan base, so the transition from USA to FOX might go swimmingly. It also helps that SmackDown is a 52-week enterprise that can keep the night viable even during the lesser-watched months.
Worst Scheduling Move: Aside from the Tuesday mess, which I expounded upon earlier, I’m very curious what led to Last Man Standing being benched. I understand that they might’ve wanted to duck The Conners, and that the show will now air mostly uninterrupted once it premieres in January, but it’s strange to me that they would go to the trouble of reviving it this season and giving it a solid push thanks to football, only to hold it to midseason. There were other avenues where it wouldn’t have to face multi-cams (Tuesday at 9:00, all of Wednesday) and there’s a middle road between the stop-start scheduling it got this year and being held for January. Hopefully FOX deprioritizing live-action comedy is only an anomaly like this season not having a new fall drama and not a portend of things to come in the New FOX era.
Most Likely New Hit: It helps that FOX has set each of its newbies up in pretty good situations. Bless the Harts gets more of the football halo than it would’ve gotten at 9:30, Prodigal Son is behind FOX’s #1 drama from this past season, and Not Just Me is led into by a phenomenon in The Masked Singer. What’s FOX’s hit probably depends on episode counts and lead-in compatibility; Not Just Me might have the highest average in the fall, but I think Prodigal Son winds up as the steadiest show. If Not Just Me has the air without The Masked Singer and Bless the Harts is capped at 10-13 episodes and gets some good football lead-ins, though, the latter could pass it up.
Likely First Cancellation: Given that FOX has ordered 8000 new shows and that zero fall scripted shows were cancelled this season while they were airing, I think they let everything air out their respective orders and just sub in something else. It helps that all three of their scripted newbies are set up with big lead-ins, so unless one of them comes in with disaster ratings, I think FOX holds steady in the fall and reboots itself in January.
What I’ll Be Watching in the Fall: I’m still watching Bob’s Burgers, which had arguably its shakiest season creatively since its very early days this year. I might sample Bless the Harts, but I didn’t get a good enough sense of the show from the very brief preview FOX released, so I’m more in wait and see mode here.
So, in predicting the FOX schedule in our fantasy scheduling a few weeks ago, who got it the most right?
Giving a point per hour for getting it on the right not, splitting in half if it’s the right night, wrong time slot, Craig had 7.25 points out of a possible 13, and Shilo ended up with 7. There were some nights where we didn’t accurately predict anything at all, and Thursday and Friday were practically already given to us.
Stay tuned for the rest of the week to see how we did on other nights!
