Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: ABC, agents of shield, entertainment, HRL, inhumans, jeph loeb, marvel, television

Will Friday Night Be The Death Of The Inhumans And Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.?

Friday night has never been a great ratings night for television. It's the network equivalent of Florida — the place where shows go to die. ABC is placing their new event series, Marvel's Inhumans and then the returning Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. into the Friday at 9 p.m. slot. Does that mean the network has no faith in the series? They're just airing them because Marvel and ABC are both part of Disney? Are the Inhumans and S.H.I.E.L.D. getting the television equivalent of going to live on a farm?

Not necessarily.

Just because Friday night is usually a bad ratings night, it doesn't have to be. The expectations are lower and some genre shows have actually done well. The X-Files found a home on Fridays in the '90s and NBC had six seasons of Grimm running on Friday nights. And for the first time since it's been on, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will have another genre related show leading into it with Once Upon A Time. Up until now, it either started the night or had comedies as a lead-in.

That's not to say that Friday is a great thing for the shows — a few cult favorites started and died there, like Firefly and Constantine. But it's not the automatic kiss of death that you might think.

Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel television, is looking at the move positively. He told Screen Rant:

"There are other shows that have debuted on a Friday night that have lived in the genre world. The other thing that excited us enormously was to have Once Upon a Time as our lead-in.

It was always a challenge when we were on Tuesday nights. We were either the one that started the night without anybody that could do that, or we had comedies that were in front of us. And so being able to have something that at least exists in our world, in a world that has genre elements, in a world that has special effects, and a world that has larger than life characters, all of those things lend themselves — you could more see, 'Okay, I just finished watching Once Upon a Time and when the guy says, 'Coming up next is Marvel's Inhumans or coming up next is Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.', it's a little different than, I'm watching Speechless and they're going 'And right after Speechless Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,' and we're sort of going 'Yeah, we're a little speechless too.'

We do know that people are going to watch the show on the next day, and what better day to watch it than on a Saturday or Sunday? A large part of our audience is a family. And that family — certainly in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s case — we've felt that once we moved to ten o'clock had no choice but to then watch the show on the next night. Certainly that's what happened in my house. And so, being on a Friday night at nine o'clock, we actually think that a large part of our audience can actually come to us because they're home. This is a good night to watch television. So, we're ready to take it on."

And that is the other factor to take into consideration. A lot of viewers watch TV after the initial broadcast on DVRs and On-Demand. You can no longer look at the overnight ratings and get a good feel for how a show did. S.H.I.E.L.D. has been a show that historically improves greatly as the +3 and +7 ratings come in. A good time slot can help a series, especially with a good lead-in, but a bad time slot is not the instant killer that it used to be. So, yes, Marvel's Inhumans and Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. are being sent off to the Friday night farm…but we can still visit them any time we want.

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