Cancellation Watch: The 100 is Getting Close to the Brink, Agents of SHIELD Continues to Waver

Unless otherwise noted, the ratings numbers below are based on the final overnights and may vary slightly from the preliminaries reported on the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site.

Ratings Results for the Tuesday through Thursday sci fi / fantasy shows:

On the Hot Seat: Only two genre shows had new episodes over the last three days and both of those have been facing some struggles. The CW’s The 100 slipped again, this time to a 0.5 rating in the 18-49 demographic with 1.7 million total viewers. That has the show at a level that would suggest cancellation, but I’ll give it a mulligan for the week because the network ran mostly repeats including an also-ran of Arrow as a lead-in for The 100. And at least give the network credit for trying to give the show some exposure as it ran an encore episode on Tuesday in place of a Supernatural rerun. Didn’t seem to help much, but it indicates they have not given up on the show yet.  Still, this one needs to turn its numbers around now if it wants to continue past the current season.

Over on ABC, Agents of SHIELD slipped to a 1.9 rating with 5.4 million total viewers. I keep wanting to move this show back out of bubble status and I’m still leaning toward it getting renewed. But it keeps producing tepid ratings numbers and this latest episode had a tie-in with Box Office hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier which should have boosted its numbers. SHIELD is barely hanging in there at this point, but at least it will get an uninterrupted run of new episodes to finish out the season. Maybe that will help it build some momentum, maybe not.

Cancellation Watch Enhancement: For the season to date tracking of all the current genre shows (see grid below), I have added a column which shows a ratings target. This is the level that I believe each series needs to attain to get renewed and it takes into account various factors such as the network it airs on, its night/timeslot, its production costs, etc. Note that this is a subjective number, but consider it an educated guess based on data collected from previous shows that aired on the same networks, timeslots, etc. If a show is performing at or above the target I have shown, that does not necessarily mean it will get renewed, but it does indicate that it is more likely than not to get renewed. The same applies if it is performing below the target. I have added this new metric to allow you to more easily gauge the ratings health of your favorite shows because the numbers that a series needs to achieve to get renewed varies widely across the networks and the nights it is aired. As a rule, the broadcast networks will typically have higher target numbers, but the score will go down if it airs on a low viewership night like Friday. The cable networks will typically have lower targets and the night of the week that a show airs does not impact those channels as much as the broadcast nets.  This will hopefully alleviate some of the confusion over why some shows get renewed and others don’t, though don’t expect it to give too much insight into the murky thinking of network executives.

The Originals, Person of Interest, Arrow, and Vampire Diaries were in repeats this week and Supernatural was preempted. All of those return with new episodes next week.  There are plenty of genre shows on the verge of a date with the network executioner as well, and Fridays are typically when those announcements are made.  Keep an eye on this site and the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site for any breaking news.  And you can see the current status for all this season’s genre shows at this link,  and for more information on the ratings numbers and how I determine the Cancellation Alert status of a show, see the Cancelled Sci Fi FAQ.

Here are the season to date (StD) numbers and standings through April 10th for all the shows that have bowed so far (sorted by most likely to get cancelled):

Ratings Source: TV by the Numbers and The Futon Critic

Nielsen TV Ratings: ©2014 The Nielsen Company. All Rights Reserved.