While it’s yet to live up to the legacy of Bloodbath Day 2018—which saw ABC kill off nine series in the span of a single sanguinary afternoon—today’s butcher bill is already starting to pick up steam, as both ABC and Fox appear to have chosen Friday, May 10 as the final gravestone date for a whole bunch of shrug-worthy series. For one thing, the Kids are definitively not alright; both ABC’s The Kids Are Alright and Fox’s “wacky old folks” comedy The Cool Kids have been wiped out after a single season, signalling the supremacy of non-Kids programming over the airwaves yet again. Take that, children.
Also faring poorly: Any show with a definitive article in the title. In addition to The Cool Kids, Fox’s The Passage and ABC’s The Fix are both dead after a single year, joining Fox’s earlier discarded X-Men spin-off The Gifted. (We here at An A.V. Club would like to express our condolences to all the shows’ casts and crews.)
Not even certified TV royalty is safe; Jenna Fischer’s ABC show, Splitting Up Together, is also gone after two seasons, doomed by a world that simply couldn’t accept Fischer married (and then un-married, and then etc.) to any floppy-haired weirdo who wasn’t her beloved John Krasinski. All told, it was a pretty messy day for ABC, which—what with Modern Family on life-support right now—really needs one of these new shows to stick for more than a handful of seasons if it’s going to keep its comedy empire afloat.
