| Canceled | Certatin to be Canceled | Likely to be Canceled | Watching | Likely to be Renewed | Certain to be Renewed | Renewed |
| Minority Report | Sleepy Hollow | The Grinder | Cooper Barrett’s Guide to Surviving Life | Bordertown | Empire | The Simpsons |
| Grandfathered | Scream Queens | The Last Man On Earth | Family Guy | Bob’s Burgers | ||
| Bones | New Girl | Gotham | ||||
| Brooklyn 9-9 | ||||||
| Rosewood |
The Simpsons and Bob's Burgers have both been renewed. Empire, Family Guy, Gotham, Brooklyn 9-9, and Rosewood are also all getting renewed, no questions asked. That's 7 shows that FOX either has or definitely will renew by May, and possibly some at Friday's upcoming TCA. In addition, The Last Man On Earth's decent ratings compared to the rest of the comedies prompted me to move it up to a likely renewal. I've also moved Bordertown from a likely cancellation to a likely renewal after this week's 1.5 A18-49 rating, which was a promising 83% retention out of Family Guy.
 |
| FOX |
All four shows could easily be cancelled looking at these live ratings alone. However, if all four are cancelled and the rest of my predictions indeed turn out to be correct, then FOX would have renewed 8 shows and cancelled 9. Can they really do that?
Nope. Not with American Idol leaving the schedule too. And with the fact that I also trust that FOX is starting to look more into the C7 ratings as well as the C3, FOX may be the toughest of the Big 4 networks to predict. However, I do have a hunch that FOX will begin to tout itself as the "young-skewing network".
Is FOX The Young-Skewing Network?
Compared to shows on other networks, most of FOX's shows have unbelievably good (often close to 1:1) ratios amongst the hard-to-reach-live M/W18-34 and A18-49 demographics. In the case of Empire, the W18-34 numbers have actually been higher than the A18-49 numbers, and such can be said for most airings of shows like Family Guy and Bob's Burgers. In fact, here are all the FOX shows that perform well in the M/W18-34 demographics relative to their A18-49 numbers:
M18-34
Bob's Burgers
The Simpsons
Family Guy
Cooper Barrett's Guide to Surviving Life
Bordertown
The Last Man On Earth
W18-34
Scream Queens
New Girl
Grandfathered
Rosewood
Empire
Now, that's a LOT of shows that do relatively well in the M/W18-34 demographics! All of the above shows either tie, beat, or fall just a tenth under their A18-49 ratings in their M18-34 or W18-34 ratings, depending on the show.
Unfortunately, very few of those shows do better than low 1s in the ratings. However, they are definitely hitting a demographic that other networks are having trouble doing, and I am beginning to think that if FOX had to choose between two shows with identical A18-49 ratings, they would renew the show that does better in M/W18-34. This is one of the reasons why a show like Bones may lose out to a show like Grandfathered, if you told me that one had to be renewed and the other canceled. However, seeing how Grandfathered is unable to grow more with its newly-obtained New Girl lead-in, combined with the fact that 20th Century Fox does not distribute the show, really diminishes its prospects as well.
Notably missing from the list are: Gotham, Brooklyn 9-9, The Grinder, Bones, and Sleepy Hollow. Brooklyn 9-9 is still a certain renewal for syndication purposes, and Gotham because despite not having as high a young-skewing ratio week-in and week-out, it is still one of FOX's highest-rated shows.
At this point, it is mostly a matter of which of the young-skewing shows perform best all-around. This includes, but is not limited to, C3 ratings, C7 ratings, streaming data, and VOD ratings.
What do you think of my predictions? Leave your thoughts and predictions in the comments below!