Analyzing the 2016 Fall Schedule: FOX

THURSDAY

SHILO’S PREDICTIONS: 8:00 Bones; 9:00 Rosewood
CRAIG’S PREDICTIONS: 8:00 Bones; 9:00 Rosewood
ACTUAL SCHEDULE: 8:00 Rosewood; 9:00 Pitch

SHILO: Pitch being shoved into the fall after initially being left off the schedule gives me mixed feelings. On one hand, I think it’s smart to have this show on during the end of the baseball season and for the whole of the playoffs. Baseball only hits the sports zeitgeist around August/September, so Pitch will be airing right when people are paying attention and there are plenty of opportunities for the show to be showcased during the FOX playoff coverage. Plus, its trailer got great buzz out of upfronts and if it’s successful, it could make life for Scandal-less ABC that much more difficult. On the other, though, Pitch has a weak lead-in in Rosewood, isn’t airing at 8:00 for some reason, and landed on a night with sports programming, so its ceiling might be lower than it would’ve been otherwise.

If Pitch is a property that FOX wants to succeed, it’s been put in a pretty poor situation. One would think that a show where sports play a prominent role, even if the show is centered more around baseball than it is about baseball, wouldn’t be placed against Thursday Night Football, while Rosewood will be below a 1.0 in the demo pretty quickly and the 9:00 start time might lose some of the family audience that a show like this would’ve gained by being at 8:00. I’m also very curious what the gender breakdown for a sports drama with a female lead will look like, as we don’t know how Rosewood will skew away from Empire and the competition for Pitch will be primarily older female-skewing in nature (Notorious, Mom, Chicago Med); could Pitch garner enough male viewers to keep it competitive?

CRAIG: I really liked the idea of saving Pitch for the Spring when Major League Baseball is starting its new season, and I think it’d be better to have the about-to-expire Bones around to give Rosewood a boost on its Thursday night move. Now, FOX is doing neither, which could cause more harm than good to Pitch and to Rosewood. I guess I can see where they want the end of Bones to have a really big bang in the spring, but I still don’t like this schedule change.