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 28 on Fox.
The Cast: David Alan Grier, Martin Mull, Vicki Lawrence, Leslie Jordan
The Premise: Four septuagenarians—three men and a rebellious female newcomer—navigate life in a retirement community that's filled with as many cliques as high school.
The Outlook: It's a bit like a (mostly) gender-reversed Golden Girls from the producers of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (and specifically Charlie Day, credited as co-creator of The Cool Kids), which doesn't necessarily sound like a bad thing. But will Fox viewers tune in to a series whose cast members are old enough to be CBS viewers? It's certainly a gamble to feature a core cast whose average age is 67, but, then again, it does make the show stand out against the competition—there's literally nothing else like it on television. And there's something to be said for comedy experience.
But several critics already hate the pilot. (A few others like that cast and find the opener somewhat fun but unmemorable.) Kids will also have the revived/relocated Tim Allen sitcom Last Man Standing as its lead-in, and we don't know whether that is an asset or a liability: Man is a proven Friday night hit, but it also has never aired an episode on Fox, and it is unclear if the two shows' comedic sensibilities will mesh, though both are stylistically similar as multi-camera sitcoms. But given that it's a low-stakes Friday show, and that the network has only one other newcomer this fall, we would expect Kids to at least make it to the end of the season.
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