New Girl and The Mindy Project have been struggling mightily in the 9 p.m. hour so far this year on Fox, consistently landing the second and third worst ratings on the entire Tuesday night Big Four network schedule. Part of that reason is the terrible, terrible lead-in. That will soon change.
Fox has finally cried uncle and pulled Utopia from its schedule on Tuesday nights. It hasn’t been officially cancelled (yet), but just a month into the reality-show experiment, it’s been dealt a huge blow. The show — a kind of combination of Survivor, Lord of the Flies and Big Brother — was supposed to air for an entire year. In fact, Fox had such high hopes for Utopia — which the network spent $50 million to develop — that they envisioned the ability to plug in other holes in their schedule with extra nights of Utopia.
Turns out, nobody gave a damn about the show, which dropped to a 0.8 in the demo and less than 2 million overall viewers in its most recent airing on Tuesday. To put that into perspective, two years ago, a show called Do No Harm had the lowest ratings ever for a premiere on the big Four with 3.12 million viewers. NBC pulled it from the schedule after two weeks, and burned off the episodes nearly a year later over the summer. Those episodes were seen by around 1.8 million viewers. Utopia was seen by 1.99 million viewers.
Remember Surviving Jack, that awesome Christopher Meloni series that aired midseason last year on Fox, which the network pulled despite decent ratings? It had around double the ratings of Utopia, and you know what? It would’ve been a great lead-in to New Girl and The Mindy Project along with, say, Enlisted or another season of Raising Hope and Fox probably could’ve ordered both series for less than what they paid for Utopia.
Do’h.
Masterchef Junior, originally scheduled for Friday nights, will air in the Tuesday slot starting on November 4th.
Source: TVBytheNumbers and EW
