It’s December, and most of your favorite shows won’t return until January . Let’s talk about them behind their backs! Time for the winners, losers, and weird facts of the season.
Mindy Kaling of The Mindy Project. Courtesy of Fox.
Because American Idol was a monster that came to eat Earth, Fox has been the No. 1 network among 18- to 49-year-olds, the demographic advertisers care most about, since the 2004–5 season. We don’t yet know how Idol will perform when it returns in January with crazy lady judges Nicki Minaj and Mariah Carey, but it will need to be huge to help Fox out of the crater that has suddenly opened beneath it. It is in fourth place for the season, down 26% in both 18- to 49-year-olds and total viewers.
Here’s the problem. Without Idol, none of Fox’s current shows are unqualified hits. It has one show in the top 15 in 18 to 49, and that is the Wednesday edition of X Factor. But the Thursday results episodes lag — and surely these middling ratings are not what anyone wanted when Simon Cowell left Idol to create X. Yes, The Simpsons andFamily Guy still perform well on Sunday nights, and Family Guy is the No. 4 scripted TV show among 18- to 34-year-olds. From there, though, things get worse: Fox’s ambitious Tuesday comedy lineup inspired by last season’s success with New Girl is, to the naked eye, pretty much a catastrophe. While New Girl is doing OK — though it’s down — it has proven to have almost no halo effect: Critically hyped The Mindy Project, which follows it, is not a hit, and the (delightful) Ben & Kate, which precedes it, is a flat-out bomb. What Fox would likely say to this analysis is that the network is trying to build a comedy block from scratch, and that is a difficult thing, especially with baseball preemptions, competition from presidential debates, and Hurricane Sandy. Fox would also point out, I imagine, that the audiences these shows are drawing are young and affluent women. And therefore, both Ben & Kate and Mindy have been picked up for full seasons. We will know soon enough whether these pickups indicate patience and true belief or, as Variety’s Brian Lowry wrote recently about how few cancellations there have been this season, especially considering some astoundingly low ratings, it's a case of "postponing the inevitable, not preventing it."
Zooey Deschanel of New Girl, which, so far, has not helped create other comedy hits for Fox. Courtesy of Fox.
Looking across the rest of the lineup, Glee is doing fine, but, again, it’s down from last season, and way down from its Season 1 and 2 heights. Bones is down, but solid relatively. The unintentional comedy Mob Doctor is a flop. And that’s pretty much, like, it. So as far as the future goes, there’s the scary, scary, SCARY Kevin Bacon–starring, Kevin Williamson≠created serial killer-thriller, The Following, coming in midseason; when I watched the pilot, I actually threw my remote across the room at one point because I got so jolted. And let’s see what happens when Mariah and Nicki scream at each other on American Idol — god knows, I will watch, at least at first.
The network has been in this woeful place before, as midseason approaches. But right now, things are not good at Fox.
