Schedule Five-Spot, February 2012 - House, Touch, Bent, Community, Archer

It's been three weeks since my last one of these, and since I don't particularly care about pilot casting, there's never really been a week with five good scheduling "spots" at once. So I'm just gonna recap some of the bigger scheduling news from the last three weeks.

House - The big scheduling tidbit of early February had to be Fox making official the end of House. This was one of the dominant TV ratings forces of the aughts, and looked pretty healthy as recently as two years ago. But the last couple years have brought huge and fairly consistent declines. As is usually the case with former ratings giants, the negative costs got driven up, making its still decent ratings much less acceptable than they'd normally be.

Touch - Last night, Fox did a nearly wholesale drama shuffle, as the final run of House will move up to 9/8c on Monday, Bones will join it on Monday (reprising their pairing on the night after the writer's strike in 2008) while Touch heads to Thursday 9/8c after American Idol. Always nice to give the new show the best lead-in. Despite Fox promising a return for The Finder, it feels like a de facto cancellation. (The term "spring finale" implies it'd return in summer if at all.)

Bent - NBC's using Wednesday to unload their midseason comedies Best Friends Forever and Bent along with long-unscheduled Betty White's Off Their Rockers. These moves feel pretty burn-offy, especially Bent's six 9/8c eps in three weeks. That may look like a two-hour "lineup," but the two blocks actually only air together once, on April 4. (Most of Bent is before that date, while the Off Their Rockers/BFFs lineup premieres that night.)

Community - You might have thought all those Wednesday burn-offs would mean relative stability on Thursday. Yeah, not so much. Community's back at 8/7c on March 15, with its ratings looking better each week it's off the air, while 30 Rock shifts to 8:30. Up All Night wraps its season early (usually not a good sign) and Parks and Recreation heads to 9:30 for its last few weeks. The good news for a nerd like me is that this will provide a lot of timeslot comparisons.

Archer - As always, there have been some miscellaneous cable goings-on. Lemme know if I missed any, but here's what I spotted: Archer will return for season four on FX; increasingly solid Being Human on Syfy got picked up for a third season; and TBS had a bit of a busy month, picking up Tyler Perry's For Better or Worse for 35 more episodes plus extending Conan through April 2014. And MTV axed Good Vibes, the animated lead-out of Beavis and Butt-head.

The Five-Spots are my recaps of what aired, what got renewed/cancelled and what rated well or poorly last week in TV. For more Five-Spots, see the Index.