Analyzing the 2016 Fall Schedule: ABC

MONDAY

CRAIG’S PREDICTIONS: 8:00 Dancing With the Stars; 10:00 Conviction
SHILO’S PREDICTIONS: 8:00 Dancing With the Stars; 10:00 Castle
ACTUAL SCHEDULE: 8:00 Dancing With the Stars; 10:00 Conviction

CRAIG: I’m surprised Castle wasn’t renewed after the risk of bad PR they all went through with the Stana Katic debacle. With that said, it was time to go with something new for 10:00 Mondays and I guess Conviction is it. After seeing a trailer, I’m not sure it’ll have the same wide appeal, but I don’t think it’ll be a Wicked City-like disaster, either.

SHILO: The Castle cancellation is one of the most confounding examples of studio/network miscommunication that I’ve ever seen. The fact that after inviting mountains of negative press for the firing of Stana Katic and Tamala Jones, this show didn’t get another season after all is just bizarre to me; if you’re going to open up that can of worms and risk the controversy that comes with firing a co-lead, you need to take the money on the table and go after another short season. Because this whole thing just made ABC look really bad for what amounted to literally no reason. If they had went ahead with another season, it would have been unnecessary since the entire show was built around Castle and Beckett, but I would have understood the financial reasons that pushed them to order one more go around. This, though? I don’t really understand.

All that being said, I think things worked out for the best. Castle doesn’t have to go through a weird zombie period lacking one of its most important pieces and ABC can use the Dancing With the Stars lead-in on a new show. Just judging from the trailer, Conviction feels like a decent compromise between ABC’s serialized past and their procedural future, as it’s vaguely Shonda-esque in its composition while promising to keep the case of the week structure that the network only uses intermittently at best. Any other time slot would be a question mark for Conviction considering that legal shows tend to skew older, but it’s been paired with the perfect lead-in in Dancing With the Stars, whose older audience should take to Conviction pretty readily. I don’t know if this will be a huge breakout for ABC considering the late time slot and older skew, but ABC needs solid players right now and I think Conviction has a good chance at becoming a nice scheduling piece this season.