Analyzing The 2014-2015 Schedule: The CW

CW shows are popular around these parts, and the announcement of their 2014-2015 schedule prompted a lot of discussion… so what did we think?

Continuing our “Analyzing the Schedule” series, today Craig Byrne and Shilo Adams look at the 2014-2015 schedule for The CW, coming out of a year in which the network finally reclaimed some territory. They lost a few fan favorites but also added a few new ones.

Here’s what we thought. Our original schedule predictions are listed above what we actually ended up with.

MONDAY

Shilo’s Picks: 8:00 The Flash, 9:00 Supernatural
Craig’s Picks: 8:00 The Flash, 9:00 Supernatural
Actual Schedule: 8:00 The Originals, 9:00 Jane the Virgin

SHILO: And here we have the first potential CW disaster of the season. While I respect The CW’s willingness to spread their assets out and avoid hoarding their power on certain nights, The Originals was the wrong Tuesday show to move next season. It had a decidedly rough spring, partially due to preemptions from The Tribune Company, and needed a season of stability to get it back near the ratings level it was in the fall. Now, it’ll be facing W18-49 killer Dancing with the Stars, W18-34 killer The Voice, and ratings giant The Big Bang Theory, as well as a cavalcade of female-skewing cable programming, so ratings recovery won’t be easy.

And that doesn’t bode well for Jane the Virgin, which is given a rough timeslot and a completely incompatible lead-in that will be crunched by the competition. It’s a night that The CW should have attacked, but they’re repeating the mistakes they’ve made for the past several years by scheduling a weaker veteran with a female-skewing soap. And I fear they’ll destroy one of their promising assets in The Originals due to said stubbornness.

CRAIG: I yammer on more about this later in this piece, but, while I don’t disagree with the notion of putting a show with a female following on Mondays at 8 (yes, I know The Voice and DWTS also target females, but a female-skewing drama is what I mean here), I think The Originals needed a bigger gun, like Supernatural, as 9PM backup. That would’ve put Supernatural in the Sleepy Hollow line of fire, but at this point, the Winchesters can handle anything. As it stands, you’ve got a show that is [hopefully] still growing, paired with a show people have never even seen yet. Even The 100 at 9PM might have been a better option.

And that’s not slamming on Jane the Virgin, which looks like it could be better than anyone had expected — but I think Jane needed to be on a night with Hart of Dixie, and Top Model, and the non-genre stuff. To put something so genre with something that’s not is just an awkward combo, and awkward schedule combos are the reason why, in my opinion, Hart of Dixie never broke out in the way that it deserved to, ratings-wise.

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