As Erik Adams mentioned in his post announcing Fox’s schedule for next fall, the network has rolled out an idea for year-round TV that has all of the rapid-fire patter of a carnival barker. What? You don’t want to watch a bunch of regular schmoes create the perfect society? Well, that’s just fine, because Fox has a guy jumping Snake Canyon! And if that’s not to your liking, what about Batman? (This show will not feature Batman.) There’s good reason for all of this wild shifting around of assets and misguided enthusiasm: Fox is absolutely in the tank this spring. There are some networks—ABC—that would just blithely pretend everything is terrific, but that’s not really Fox president Kevin Reilly’s style. He will gladly acknowledge how much everything sucks, before immediately segueing into a song and dance number to distract you.
The fall actually showed some glimmers of hope for the network, with Sleepy Hollow a massive hit and a sense that the Tuesday comedy bloc had stabilized, even if it was never going to be the huge ratings hit Fox had hoped for when it created it back in the spring of 2012. Yes, The X Factor was a disaster, Glee was struggling, and Animation Domination seemed a bit shakier than it had in recent years, but all was more or less well. The network even got a surprising amount of mileage out of MasterChef Junior, and a World Series featuring the Red Sox and Cardinals (two of baseball’s most popular teams) did fairly well, too. It wasn’t the network’s best year ever, but it thought it had a chance to use the Super Bowl and perennial American Idol to vault itself into second place.
Instead, even with the Super Bowl, the spring turned into a disaster area. The Super Bowl was the Super Bowl, but giving New Girl and Brooklyn Nine-Nine the timeslot after the game didn’t result in appreciable ratings increases for either. (Indeed, Nine-Nine actually slumped, though that accompanied a timeslot move to the theoretically more protected 9:30 p.m. slot.) Glee moved back to Tuesdays and promptly started posting the sorts of numbers that got other shows canceled, but Fox was already stuck with a sixth season it would have to air at some point in the 2014-15 season. Almost Human performed pretty well, but it was no Sleepy Hollow, while The Following plummeted from the highs it had reached in season one. Reilly blames a lot of this on counting on second year “bounces” that just don’t come anymore, but that won’t account for Idol, which deteriorated dramatically this year, as audiences finally seemed to just get tired of it. The network will reduce the show’s order next year, turning it into a once-a-week, two-hour show, instead of having it take up three hours every week. It’s part of its bid to manage the show into a format in which it can run for many more years, like CBS’ Survivor, but it also seems like it should have been done a few seasons ago to have that effect.
So clearly, Fox needs some major help. Here’s what the network is planning. It involves a lot of betting on Europe, which you don’t hear often these days.
Mondays
8 p.m.: GOTHAM
9 p.m.: Sleepy Hollow
Here’s Fox pressing the advantage it has on the one night of the week where it possesses an advantage. Assuming the network properly promotes the return of Sleepy Hollow (and you just know it will), then pairing it with the DC Comics-inspired Gotham seems like pretty masterful scheduling. It’s easy to imagine geeking out over this night for most of the fall. Both shows will have higher orders than “just” 13 episodes, too, with Gotham looking like it will run 16 episodes and Sleepy Hollow expanding to 18. Whether the latter can make its patented “crazypants banana sauce” storytelling work over that number of episodes remains to be seen, but this is the one night where Fox can probably breathe easily. The only challenge is promotion, and this night seems easily promotable.
Tuesdays
8 p.m.: UTOPIA
9 p.m.: New Girl
9:30 p.m.: The Mindy Project
Here’s where Fox starts betting big on its friends across the Atlantic. Basically, if Utopia doesn’t work, then Fox may as well wave goodbye to its entire season. The show is based on a popular Dutch format, where strangers are isolated from the world and invited to built the “perfect society,” hopefully with lots of sexy shenanigans along the way. (This is not really that strange. Most of our major reality hits are based on European formats. The ones we come up with ourselves tend to be of the “reality soap” variety.) One of the ideas behind the show is that it could, theoretically, run forever, if the contestants are enjoying themselves and they’re constantly working toward said perfect society. If they ever actually achieve it, though, we guess the show ends? And everybody in the world starts redrafting their constitutions? Anyway, we don’t know, because we’re not Dutch. (Confidential memo to any Dutch people: Did you guys accidentally build the perfect society on reality television earlier? Inquiring minds want to know.) Fox is aware that if Utopia doesn’t work, it’s in serious trouble. As such, it’s beginning the series six weeks before the TV season begins. It’s the kind of gambit the Fox of old was known for, and the vast majority of big reality hits have started out in the summer. But the last breakout reality sensation was The Voice a few seasons back. Betting big on reality may not seem like such a good move come the fall. Then again, when have the Dutch ever let us down?
All of this leads into New Girl and The Mindy Project. The former was substantially hurt when it lost its Glee lead-in way back in the halcyon days of 2012. Fox is hoping it can regain just a smidgin of its former live viewership by having a stronger lead-in, to which we can only say: Good luck. Mindy Project will only run 15 episodes next season and seems like it’s reached the stage of its life where it keeps getting renewed because its studio cuts increasingly lucrative deals to get it to syndication. Which is one way to keep Adam Pally employed, we guess.