First Two Weeks, By Network

If you've been reading my First Two Weeks posts, you know that I am stupidly attempting to come up with an objective way of prognosticating the fate of new shows based on just the ratings from their first two episodes. If this is the first one you're reading, you can click the "new shows" label to see the other posts, along with that silly graphic and lists that I keep posting. Since there won't be another update to the list for awhile (till week 2 of V almost a month from now), and I have a slow Thursday afternoon, I decided to look at how the networks are faring individually. Let's start with the rundown of shows:

EXCELLENT (6 points) - NCIS: Los Angeles, Flashforward
GOOD ENOUGH (5 points) - Modern Family, The Vampire Diaries, Cougar Town, Accidentally on Purpose, Glee, The Cleveland Show, The Good Wife
BORDERLINE (4 points) - Mercy, The Middle
IN TROUBLE (2-3 points) - Community, Melrose Place, TBL:TBL, Eastwick, Three Rivers (3 points), The Forgotten, Brothers, Trauma, Hank (2 points)

The biggest problem with this method, as I've mentioned before, is that despite the Big 4 all being relatively scrunched together ratings-wise, they have very different standards for scripted TV. (Because a net like NBC is a mess in the scripted department but is really kept in the game by the huge numbers of Sunday Night Football.) So I'm going to just break these up by network.

ABC
EXCELLENT (6 points) - Flashforward
GOOD ENOUGH (5 points) - Modern Family, Cougar Town
BORDERLINE (4 points) - The Middle
IN TROUBLE (2-3 points) - Eastwick (3 points), The Forgotten, Hank (2 points)

Everything Borderline and above has gotten a back 9, and there's a good chance that those will be the only ones to do so. Right now, I think the top 3, FF, MF, and CT, will all make it into a season 2, and The Middle is the definition of "borderline" (has a back 9, but may not see s2). The Forgotten surprisingly stopped dropping after week 2 and may actually be a bit of a sleeper; we'll see. Eastwick and Hank look decidedly finished, just as the scale would indicate. This net definitely has some variety on the scale, and you can almost use it as is.

CBS
EXCELLENT (6 points) - NCIS: Los Angeles
GOOD ENOUGH (5 points) - Accidentally on Purpose, The Good Wife
IN TROUBLE (2-3 points) - Three Rivers (3 points)

As we'll see on some other nets, 3 points is not always a certain death. But in the case of Three Rivers, 3 points looks terrible, because the rest of its network newbies are a 6-5-5. Those high standards may well also plague AOP and The Good Wife, both of which are second-season-bound compared to new shows on other nets but within the CBS context are only average newbie efforts, if that. On CBS, 5 is the new 4. I consider both borderline (AOP perhaps even worse due to its timeslot situation).

FOX
GOOD ENOUGH (5 points) - Glee, The Cleveland Show
IN TROUBLE (2-3 points) - Brothers (2 points)

Nothing borderline here. The prognosis is pretty much correct on all 3. Glee/Cleveland are here to stay. Brothers isn't.

NBC
BORDERLINE (4 points) - Mercy
IN TROUBLE (2-3 points) - Community (3 points), Trauma (2 points)

And then there's NBC, the anti-CBS where almost everything has to be graded upward. Does Mercy get some kind of extension for managing to hang in the 2.0 arena, which has been something of a challenge for a lot of NBC scripted shows lately? Could be. Community premiered well but dropped huge in week 2 and then dropped huge again when it moved to 8:00, but it's still probably a borderline show at worst unless NBC wants to just get rid of comedy in the Thursday 8:00 hour.

CW
GOOD ENOUGH (5 points) - The Vampire Diaries
IN TROUBLE (2-3 points) - Melrose Place, The Beautiful Life:TBL (3 points)

Vampire Diaries is going to be around for awhile, it looks like. TBL:TBL left after two episodes, and its situation was very Three Riversian; it was DOA and then did a serviceable job of holding the DOA audience, which made it look "better" on this scale than it should have. Melrose probably deserves more points than TBL:TBL and if the scale were more precise, it'd have more. That's the CW's borderline show right now.