Cancellation Watch: Is NBC About to Yank Powerless from the Schedule?

 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.

Scheduling Move: This past Thursday, the schedule showed that a new episode of Powerless was set to air as normal.  But instead, NBC elected to run a repeat of their new comedy Trial & Error.  I checked the schedule Friday morning to see if I made an error (the TV Guide online schedule shows the prior day), but it still indicated that Powerless was supposed to have had a new episode.  But that’s not what happened as it was bumped for a repeat at the last minute, and that show has now been preempted three out of the last four weeks.  Its numbers have been low during its freshman run (season to date average of a 0.8 rating in the demo), but not disastrous.  I figured that NBC would let it air out its first season and then cancel it when May rolls around.  But right now it is looking like it might get yanked and cast off to Fridays or Saturdays or possibly a Summer burn-off run.  Currently, a new episode is scheduled for this coming Thursday (March 30th), so we will see if that holds.  If it gets bumped again, then consider this show set for a burn-off run.  This is currently a Call to Action show and if it has any fan following of note out there, they need to get active RIGHT NOW showing their support.

Ratings Results of Interest: On Wednesday, Syfy’s The Expanse slipped to a 0.11 rating based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic with 470K total viewers. That has the show at all-time lows and even though it was just renewed for a third season, these numbers have to be concerning. This is a Call to Action show and fans need to continue to spread the word about this show, otherwise its third season could be its last.

On Thursday, USA’s Colony held steady at a 0.24 rating with 800K total viewers and I still believe it has a decent chance of surviving to a third season (though fans are being proactive and campaigning hard for the renewal). On Tuesday The CW’s The Flash had its musical cross-over episode with Supergirl but didn’t see much of boost as it only managed a 1.0 rating (up just 0.1 from the prior week) with 2.7 million total viewers. Don’t expect that to dissuade the network from cross-over’s, though, as those have typically drawn good ratings to its superhero shows. (You can read my suggestions on how The CW can revitalize its Arrow-verse shows here.)

Charts: The charts below have the catch-up from the prior week when Nielsen got behind due to an outage.  Nothing much is too surprising from both weeks.  Vampire Diaries made it into the  Nielsen Social Network Top 10 for its series finale.  Into the Badlands made it into the Cable Top 25 for its second season debut and I expect it to stay there for the next two weeks while it has The Walking Dead as its lead-in.  Nielsen did not update their Social Network chart this past week, so there were no numbers to report there.

Chart Activity for the Week of March 6th:

Chart Activity for the Week of March 13th: