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| NBC is making a big bet on James Spader's "The Blacklist" |
With NBC’s upfront presentation tomorrow morning, the
network released its fall schedule today. NBC will finish the season at the top of the
ratings standings thanks to Sunday Night
Football, The Voice, and the
Winter Olympics, but problems in other areas left them while quite a few holes
to fill. On the face, not much has
changed from this spring’s schedule, but they’ve made one big change that they
pretty clearly hope will bring the return of Must See TV, just not the Must See
TV we’re used to.
NBC’s 2014-15
Schedule (New shows in BOLD)
Monday –
7:00pm – The Voice
9:00pm – The Blacklist
– State
of Affairs (Beginning Nov. 17th)
In my upfront preview for NBC I asked whether the
network would let The Blacklist
anchor its own night and what they were going to do with Thursdays. The answer to the first question is,
apparently, both “yes” and “no,” while the answer to the second is “put The Blacklist there, eventually.” I speculated that NBC would hesitate to put
its number one scripted series up against the juggernaut that is the NFL and it
appears I was right there, as they will keep it behind The Voice for two months at the beginning of the season before
making way for the new Katherine Heigl drama, State of Affairs, which basically sounds like “Scandal with white people.”
It seems like the right play. Keep The
Voice stable in its traditional timeslot, keep The Blacklist from having to go up against football, and then give
your most promising new drama the cushy Voice
lead-in. I see only three potential
problems. First, ratings for The Voice are usually about 25% higher
at the beginning of the season than at the end, so State of Affairs won’t enjoy the huge premiere numbers that The Blacklist and Revolution received.
Secondly, premiering in mid-November means that the new series will air,
at most, five episodes before going on hiatus for at least three weeks over Christmas. Lastly, The
Voice will likely debut in mid-February at the earliest, so what does NBC
do with State of Affairs for the
first six weeks of 2015? They aired The Blacklist in January after
back-to-back episodes of Hollywood Game
Night, but those episodes lost almost a full ratings point from the post-Voice counterparts. NBC doesn’t have the Winter Olympics
sucking up two weeks’ worth of scheduling this year, either. But those are problems to worry about in
January, not in May. Today, this seems
like the best solution for NBC.
Tuesday –
7:00pm – The Voice
8:00pm – Marry Me/About a Boy
9:00pm – Chicago Fire
Chicago Fire and The Voice are doing great here, so there’s
no reason to fix what isn’t broken, but I’m a little surprised by the decision
to continue with comedies in the 8:00 slot.
About a Boy and Growing up Fisher have been good, but
not great, this spring and I saw no indication that their ratings would have
been much better than what Parks and
Recreation and Community were
drawing had they been airing on Thursday nights instead. The good news here is that the premium
timeslot is going to Marry Me, which
employs a lot of people I like including Happy
Endings creator David Caspe, Happy
Endings co-star Casey Wilson, and Party
Down co-star Ken Marino. I like when funny people get good breaks and
this is a bunch of funny people getting the second-best timeslot on NBC’s
schedule.
Wednesday –
7:00pm – The Mysteries of Laura
8:00pm – Law &
Order: SVU
9:00pm – Chicago PD
In another example of not fixing what isn’t broken, SVU and Chicago PD stay put for another year. Replacing the late Revolution is The Mysteries
of Laura, starring Debra Messing as “a brilliant NYPD
homicide detective who balances her ‘Columbo’ day job with a crazy family
life. Look, I’m extremely impressed and
pleased that NBC is launching four shows this fall that feature strong female
leads. But this sounds just dreadful. I don’t know why NBC felt the need to put “hot
mess” and “working mom” in scare quotes in their press release, but they did, so make of that what you will.
Thursday –
7:00pm – The Biggest
Loser
8:00pm – Bad Judge/A to Z – The Blacklist (Beginning Feb. 5th)
9:00pm – Parenthood
– Allegiance
(Beginning Feb. 5th)
Thursday was the biggest problem for NBC this past season
and it was most in need of retooling.
The network apparently hopes that they can revive the culture of Must
See TV with dramas, rather than comedies.
The Blacklist will get the
coveted post-Super Bowl timeslot on February 1st before moving to
Thursday later that week, leading into Allegiance,
which the AV Club’s Todd Vanderwerff derisively described as “what if The Americans, but present day.”
The fall schedule is a little more predictable with Parenthood returning for a shortened
sixth and final season and a pair of new comedies at 8:00 for the second
straight year. The big surprise here is
the moving of The Biggest Loser to
7:00, a timeslot in which NBC has been airing sitcoms since the year after I was born,
literally. The last time NBC regularly
aired something other than sitcoms at 7:00 on a Thursday was in the fall of
1982, when a television adaptation of Fame
led into Cheers and Taxi (and Hill Street Blues at 9:00).
It’s especially surprising to see the network abandon comedy at 7:00
when this seems to be the perfect time to capitalize, with The Big Bang Theory off the schedule until November thanks to Thursday Night Football.
Comedy isn’t off the schedule altogether, with the Kate
Walsh-helmed Bad Judge in the 8:00
hour leading into A to Z, starring
the eminently likeable Crristin Milioti.
And the network does still have four new comedies waiting for timeslots
along with the final season of Parks and
Recreation, so we might see more comedy in the spring, perhaps even on
Sunday nights, where there are currently zero hours of live-action comedy
scheduled on any of the four networks.
Friday –
7:00pm – Dateline NBC
8:00pm – Grimm
9:00pm – Constantine
It appears that NBC is still interested in creating a
supernatural night on Fridays with the stalwart Grimm leading into the new adaptation of the DC comic book Hellblazer. Constantine
is a traditional network production, as opposed to last year’s Dracula and Hannibal, which are both international co-productions (and thus
much less expensive), so NBC will be expecting better ratings from Constantine than its predecessors. This could lead either to a very successful
Friday night schedule or a quick cancelation.
Saturday –
7:00 – Repeats, all repeats
NBC doesn’t care about Saturday nights, so I don’t either.
Sunday –
7:00pm – Sunday Night
Football
Sunday Night Football
is Sunday Night Football. It’s going to be the highest-rated and
most-viewed primetime series on television next year. There’s nothing else really to say about
it. What there is something to talk
about is the announcement that Mark Burnett’s follow-up to The Bible, A.D., will be
debuting on Easter Sunday, April 5th. The
Bible drew massive numbers when it debuted two years ago, including more
than 13 million viewers for its premiere.
I mentioned in my upfront preview that
they needed some kind of event programming for Sundays in the spring and
I can’t think of much better. They’ll
still need to find something to air for the first few months of 2015 (and there
are still three “event series” on the shelf to be debuted somewhere), but airing
a dozen episodes of A.D. back-to-back
for six weeks in April and May is a good place to start.
That’s NBC’s schedule, one big move to try and revitalize Thursday
nights along with several attempts to keep stable what was working before. Not all of it will work (as is the case with
any television season) but NBC is still the favorite to win next season (thanks
in part to the Super Bowl) and they’ll need every show to count.
Tyler Williams is a
professional librarian and amateur television critic. You can reach him at tytalkstv AT gmail DOT
com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.
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