Cancellation Watch: The Fall Season Blues Continue as Once Upon A Time and The Last Man on Earth Have Mediocre Debuts

Unless otherwise noted, the ratings results below are based on the preliminaries and could get adjusted when the finals are released.

The first week of the Fall season wrapped up last night, but failed to bring much good news for genre shows.  ABC’s Once Upon A Time could muster only a 1.8 rating based on the overnights for the 18-49 demographic with 5.9 million total viewers for its Season 5 debut (according to the Preliminaries).  That’s down by 51% from its Season 4 debut and it is even with its finale numbers from last year.  Considering the typical downward trend that follows a show’s debut, those numbers have this one off to a moderate start at best.  And you can’t blame Sunday Night Football because it had to contend with that last year as well and yet still debuted at two year highs.  So apparently last Spring’s slump still hasn’t let up.  I wouldn’t say it is in trouble just yet, though, because I am waiting to see how the dust settles with all the Fall debuts and how much the continued ratings slump can still be blamed.

And FOX’s The Last Man on Earth didn’t receive any better news from the Nielsen Company as it pulled only a 1.4 rating based on the overnights with 3.1 million total viewers for its second season debut.  That is down by 42% from its Season 1 bow and even with its finale last spring.  I considered this show to be on notice going into the season because of the ratings drops it experienced last Spring, but it is too early to make a call at this point.  The fact is that The Last Man on Earth was off by only a 0.1 rating from its Family Guy lead-in, so it can’t be counted as under performing by itself.  It is more wait and see for both these shows as we need to get a couple of weeks worth of numbers to better assess where all of the sci fi entries currently stand.

And it’s still early in the season and there are more debuts coming (you can see the full Fall 2015 schedule at this link), so keep an eye on the Cancelled Sci Fi Twitter Site for the latest numbers and on Cancellation Watch posts on this site for my analyses.