TUESDAY
SHILO: 8:00 Scream Queens; 9:00 Cooper Barrett’s Guide To Surviving Life; 9:30 New Girl
CRAIG: 8:00 The Grinder; 8:30 New Girl; 9:00 Scream Queens
SHILO: Comedic-horror drama Scream Queens might be loud enough to premiere on another night, but it feels like enough of a sure thing to use on the network’s Tuesday comedy night. The series will be funny enough to pair with comedies at 9:00, Ryan Murphy shows tend to start strongly in the ratings, and it’s different enough from its likely competition (NCIS, family comedies on ABC, The Flash) to where it can debut fairly unimpeded, which will be a good thing for whatever FOX chooses as its lead-out. Rather than using a potentially big lead-in on New Girl’s fifth season, I think they’ll try something new at 9:00 and push New Girl to 9:30, seeing as how they need to build their comedy slate up again. With FOX not really developing female-skewing comedies, they’ll go for Cooper Barrett’s Guide to Surviving Life; its 20-something ensemble will appeal to the (likely) young audience of Scream Queens, while the premise makes this the most compatible new comedy with New Girl.
CRAIG: I could be really, really wrong on this one, and again, this could work in any configuration. I wanted to have another comedy or two – Cooper Barrett and the John Stamos sitcom both sound like good choices – but as it stands, I ended up with this, starting with The Grinder, the Rob Lowe/Fred Savage comedy that has buzz but a really horrible title which will be the butt of jokes at the press tour if the show happens to get picked up. New Girl I’ve got at 8:30, and then Scream Queens at 9. So far, I’m not all that thrilled with Scream Queens from the on-air promotion, but maybe they’ll surprise us.
