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 25 on CBS.
The Cast: Missy Peregrym, Zeeko Zaki, Sela Ward, Jeremy Sisto, Ebonée Noel
The Premise: FBI agents stationed in New York do their jobs. (Those jobs sometimes involve explosions.)
The Outlook: It appears to be an extremely generic procedural—though that's actually a strength of both CBS and F.B.I.'s producer, Dick Wolf—which won't try to complicate things (and alienate potential viewers) by getting political. The series was given a 13-episode order prior to shooting a pilot. The pilot was filmed anyway, and it didn't necessarily go well: original star Connie Nielsen exited the series (she was replaced by Ward, who will start in episode 2 in a different role), and Craig Turk was subsequently replaced as showrunner with Greg Plageman (Person of Interest).
Is it a bad sign that Wolf's usual home NBC didn't want to make room for the series? Perhaps, though NBC's parent Universal is still co-producing the series (with CBS). So far, critics find the pilot well-executed and fast-paced, if unremarkable.