Plus Power Rankings Tweaks

Thanks to omabin for the reminder about the "emergency fix" needed for some of the projected averages on the Plus Power Rankings. With only a few weeks left, most of these are not as impactful as they would've been a month ago, but they should still be an improvement on what was there before.

As I said in the original intro, there were a few particularly weird returning show projections due to a major inflation or deflation in one part of the season. For these projections, I've simply switched them to the same model used with new shows; it assumes every remaining episode in the order will get the same rating as the most recent episode. This may be more visually friendly next season, but to try to illustrate which projection is used at least a little better, I've put all completed seasons in bold and all new show-esque projections in italics. So the shows in italics should be all newbies plus the following seven odd returnee situations. Please let me know if there are others I should add!

Once Upon a Time: Projection changed from 2.28 -> 2.17. Last season had a low-rated fall average and then did the same or better in the spring, so the old projection expected a similarly excellent hold this spring. But since the early ratings were so Frozen-inflated, that is not happening.

Agents of SHIELD: 1.55 -> 1.62. Last season was heavily inflated by enormous early episodes, causing the old projection to expect a similar average crash this spring.

The Amazing Race Spring: 1.23 -> 1.18. The first couple episodes last spring were severely deflated by competition from the Olympics and the Oscars, then the average went up from there. So the old projection expected this average to keep rising.

Undateable: 1.23 -> 1.53. Due to a longer episode order and extremely difficult situations late in season one (NBA Finals, then 4th of July weekend), the old projection expected the average to absolutely crash in a way that is not going to happen. However, 1.53 is probably too generous after last night's drop to 1.3, so stay tuned next week.

The Blacklist: 2.18 -> 2.10. The midseason move to Thursday 9/8c has made the show perform year-to-year at much worse than its average for the full season.

The Following: 1.00 -> 1.14. This one is largely thrown off by the post-NFC Championship preview last season, which makes the full season year-to-year trend much worse than it is on a weekly basis.

American Idol Thu: 2.10 -> 2.28. Because of a major change in scheduling (airing on only one night for the last couple months), there's not really a simple way of making these Idol nightly averages apples-to-apples with the days when it aired a full season on both nights. Since I've always counted the season finale as part of the second night, I simply took the current Thursday average and assumed one more episode. In the future, we may combine all Idol airings under one average.