I don’t think we need to rehash the undoing of NBC over the last few months, an undoing that hit humiliating new lows by falling behind Univision in the ratings, and having its once MUST SEE Thursday night lineup being replaced by a 20-year-old Matlock movie. Their dramas aren’t working, and even their sitcoms aren’t working anymore, so what to do? MORE REALITY TV, OF COURSE.
Ugh.
First of all, the biggest change is NBC’s decision to move their very expensive, heavily promoted failure, Smash, to Saturdays, where it can quietly die without anyone noticing, although the show will finish out all 17 episodes. That is a worse fate than the Friday night death slot, but on the bright side, instead of facing stiff Tuesday competition, it will go up against COPS. To replace Smash on Tuesday nights beginning in April, NBC is putting their dating show Ready for Love in their most coveted post-The Voice time slot. Perfect. WAY TO EXPLOIT YOUR ONE GOOD TIME SLOT, NBC! A new dating show! How original! I cannot wait to completely avoid that.
Ready for Love is hosted by Giuliana and Bill Rancic, the latter of whom gained his popularity as a contestant on Donald Trump’s The Apprentice, which has not had particularly good ratings (except in relation to the rest of NBC’s schedule). But, without Ready for Love in its once intended Sunday night schedule, NBC has decided instead to expand their awful Celebrity Apprentice to two hours, which means EVEN MORE FILLER. EVEN MORE DONALD TRUMP.
In the meantime, Go On — which had fairly decent ratings when it came on after The Voice but tumbled into near obscurity after The Voice went on hiatus, will move to Thursday nights after The Office for its final two episodes of the season in April. That’s probably a testing grounds; if it does OK, maybe it returns for a second season. If it continues to get lower ratings than Whitney, then it’ll probably be cancelled (better still, it does save us from 1600 Penn, at least for two weeks).
Meanwhile, with Whitney, Go On and The New Normal all airing finales in late March and early April and Smash being put to the Saturday pasture, NBC is left with some scheduling holes, so it has decided to bring back The Sing Off, yet another reality singing competition (HOORAY). To be fair, if I had to watch one singing competition, it would be The Sing Off, but only because Ben Folds is smarter than every other judge on every other reality singing competition on television. Also, a capella is kind of cool.
The take home: More reality tv! More singing competitions! More Donald Trump! More failure! Why don’t we start a Kickstarter campaign to buy NBC? What could it possibly cost? $10 and some belly button lint?
