Cancellation Watch: Agents of SHIELD Still Hanging On, Revolution in Trouble, Beauty and the Beast Shifted to Summer

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: It’s looking like time to finally move ABC’s Agents of SHIELD out of bubble status and back to a Cancellation Alert of Low. That series improved to a 2.1 rating in the 18-49 demographic with 5.5 million total viewers for its latest episode and it seems likely to hold at about that level for the rest of the season. Now I’m sure those numbers are disappointing to ABC executives as they expected the show to be a breakout hit this season (so did I). But the fact is that this one is part of a major franchise, and since Disney owns both Marvel and ABC (and they will own you pretty soon, too), I’m guessing they give the network the nudge to keep the show going. It will likely be revamped to an extent for its second season, but I do expect it to return at this point short of a ratings collapse over the next few weeks.

Not so lucky is NBC’s Revolution which found itself yanked from the schedule in favor of Law & Order: SVU repeats for the month of April. Currently the next new episode is scheduled for April 30th, but that could move as they have been doing that to the show all month. This can’t be a good sign for the sophomore series and it’s time for the fans to start rallying for the show, though they would be best served to focus their efforts on convincing Netflix or Amazon to take a flyer on continuing the show, because I don’t see it returning to NBC next season.

The CW’s The 100 remained at a 0.5 rating with 1.8 million total viewers on Wednesday which was not good news for that show.  It started out with decent numbers in March, but slid quickly and is now at the same level as The Tomorrow People when that one was still on Wednesdays.  At this point it is looking like both of those shows will be disappearing from the schedule by the end of the season.

And don’t get confused by The CW’s announcement that Beauty and the Beast will be “returning” in the Summer, they are basically announcing its burn-off run. That low-rated show was supposed to air out its Season 2 episodes in May, but they have had a change of heart and bumped it up to June. Now since this is the fifth pace network, there is a slight chance that they plan on eyeing its numbers while considering the possibility that it could continue as a Summer entry. But I’m thinking that is a longshot. Still, this one never should have come back for a second season based on its first year numbers, so maybe one or more the network execs have a soft spot for it. But I’m pretty sure this is there way of burning off the show’s six remaining episodes before letting it lapse into cancellation.

Other Ratings News: The CW’s shows continue to suffer from that network’s late season rerun fever as all of its Tuesday and Wednesday entries apart from The 100 experienced drops in their numbers. The Originals matched its season low of a 0.7 rating in the 18-49 demo with 1.5 million total viewers and Supernatural came in at the same ratings mark with only slightly more total viewers at 1.6 million. On Wednesday, Arrow also pulled a 0.7 score, though it did better with total viewers 2.4 million. All of those shows have already been renewed, but the constant interspersing of reruns really stifles their momentum as the season comes to a close. Over on CBS, Person of Interest pulled a 1.8 rating with 10.7 million total viewers as that show continues to do better in the latter metric which counts more on CBS than the other broadcast nets.

I will get the numbers for last night’s Vampire Diaries out on the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter site later this morning.  And cancellation announcement could be coming at any time with Fridays being when the networks prefer to release that news.  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 17th 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.