CRAIG: 8:00 Lucifer; 9:00 Hell’s Kitchen
SHILO: 8:00 Hell’s Kitchen; 9:00 Gotham
CRAIG: Friday is the night where I think FOX should tell its audience to go to Hell. Sadly, an Exorcist won’t be around anymore to take care of things, but I think a hot night of Lucifer followed by Hell’s Kitchen would be exactly what the doctor ordered. WB will get their fourth season of Lucifer, so maybe they can cut a deal to keep this reliable performer on the air, and FOX can trust Gordon Ramsey to do his thing at 9.
SHILO: Although I kind of think FOX should boot its Gordon Ramsey hour to earlier in the week, I expect Hell’s Kitchen to be back at 8:00 for another season. 9:00 will be interesting because it’s almost for sure going to be another hour of scripted content, but they have a handful of choices that are feasible for Fridays. Would they move a comedy hour here if they’re determined to put The Orville on in the fall or keep the 3.5 hours of comedy they had this year? Which of their bubble dramas would get the call up for a tough slot? The best fit would probably be Lucifer, given the branding opportunities around a lineup of it and Hell’s Kitchen, how the shows skew similarly in terms of gender and age, and Lucifer‘s procedural bent, but it’s not been the easy renewal that I figured it would be. With its fate up in the air, likely dooming it to a midseason slot if renewed, I went with Gotham. When I was trying to put together my schedule, I kept shoving Gotham to midseason Thursdays with The Orville, but the Hollywood trades are confident in its safety for next year, it has a Netflix deal that WB will want to exploit, and FOX will do what it can to keep its relationship with DC.
1 Comment
“As far as midseason, I think they either put out a third season of music competition The Four, which moved to Thursday this summer following a successful midseason run on Wednesdays, or return to a two drama lineup.”
The Four run on Thursdays for its first season too. The X-Files and 9-1-1 were on Wednesdays this winter on FOX.