Which of These New Fall TV Shows Will Fail First?
We're going to go out on a limb and predict that not every new television series this season will be a success. While recent years have brought new ratings hits in the form of This Is Us, The Good Doctor, and Young Sheldon, there have also been plenty of failures. At some point in the coming months, one show will be the first to go.
Which newcomer will be the first cancellation victim of the 2018-19 season? In the gallery above, we discuss the outlook for each of the 18 first-year shows headed to the five broadcast networks this fall. Note that this year (unlike in past years) we don't have quotes from critics' first impressions of the new fall pilots, since several networks have issued new guidelines to reviewers prohibiting such early reviews over the summer. (But over the past week several reviewers have started posting their evaluations of all the new fall shows, so we have summarized those where applicable.)
Debuts September 26 on ABC.
The Cast: Ron Livingston, Romany Malco, Grace Park, James Roday, Stephanie Szostak, David Giuntoli, Allison Miller, Christina Ochoa, Christina Moses
The Premise: A group of eight friends in Boston receive a wake-up call when a member of their group unexpectedly takes his own life.
The Outlook: It's This Is Us meets The Big Chill. (And we guarantee that some variation of that sentence will be in every review you read.) If the former's success is merely the start of a trend toward TV audiences embracing sentimental, emotion-filled ensemble dramas filled with flashbacks, then ABC could have a potential hit here, especially with that above-average cast. But if This Is Us is a one-off hit, Things may not be the right kind of soapy for ABC audiences.
At this point, it's hard to predict what the critical consensus will be. A few reviewers have suggested that they love the pilot, while several others clearly didn't. But with ABC's Wednesday comedies as a lead-in, Things finds itself in a decent timeslot where it can offer viewers a true alternative to its competition, the relatively stale crime procedurals Criminal Minds and Chicago PD.
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