UPDATED: ABC renews a bunch of stuff, (including The Neighbors), cancels Happy Endings, which is the only thing you cared about
ABC, which waited until the last possible moment to pick up or cancel any of its series, has been announcing its pickups all afternoon long, in irritating, haphazard fashion, via Twitter. Most of the shows picked up have been certainties, with some mild surprises, but what you most care about is that ABC has canceled Happy Endings, its winning comedy about a group of wacky friends. Studio Sony Pictures Television plans to shop the show around to cable networks and streaming sites. If we were betting, we’d expect it to end up somewhere else, but at the very least, Damon Wayans, Jr., will have a guest spot on New Girl, which should be interesting. ABC bet that Happy Endings would have an audience, based on it performing better than any other show has after Modern Family (despite still losing a large chunk of that show’s audience), then moved it into a Tuesday slot where it would have to compete against two comedies with similar audiences. Predictably enough, it flopped. The network briefly tried it on Sundays and Fridays, and though its numbers stayed relatively stable once DVR viewership was added in, nobody cares about DVR viewership. So it’s gone. For now.
ABC also canceled How To Live With Your Parents (For The Rest Of Your Life), Red Widow, Body Of Proof, and Malibu Country. The latter two were roughly coin flips, with Body Of Proof actually winning its Tuesday night timeslot some weeks, but not so substantially that it couldn’t be canceled. How To Live did quite well after Modern Family for a week or two, but it very quickly collapsed. Family Tools and Red Widow were goners from the word go.
But! ABC picked up a bunch of things, including the increasingly awesome political soap Scandal (for season three), the long-running Grey’s Anatomy (for season 10), the inevitable Modern Family (for season five), the quietly successful The Middle (for season five), the amazingly consistent (in ratings terms) Castle (for season six), the increasingly strange Last Man Standing (for season three), and Sunday night stalwarts Once Upon A Time and Revenge (both for their third seasons).