The Breakdown: Fox Friday in 2017-18 (Hell's Kitchen, MasterChef Junior, The Exorcist)

It's time for a journey through the Fox Friday schedule in 2017-18...


fall

Year	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	Avg
2016-17	Hell's Kitchen		Hell's Kitchen	The Exorcist		The Exorcist	70
	2016-17	85		85	55			55	70
2017-18	Hell's Kitchen		Hell's Kitchen	The Exorcist		The Exorcist	56 (-20%)
	2017-18	74 (-13%)		74.1122752823214	38 (-31%)			38 (-31%)	55.9877745986732
VsAvg	+44%		0.442308236269632	-9%		-0.0929936739226107	+20%
Rank	4/17		4/17	10/17		10/17	6/17

Gordon Ramsay split time between Friday and Thursday in 2016-17, but this year his shows were kept on Friday all season. Even in these fairly apples-to-apples comparisons, Hell's Kitchen looked a decent amount weaker than last year. But its declines didn't get a ton of attention because sophomore lead-out The Exorcist was bombing out even harder at 9/8c; it took a 31% year-to-year Plus decline in the same timeslot.

winter

Year	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	Avg
2016-17	Rosewood		Rosewood	Sleepy Hollow		Sleepy Hollow	46
	2016-17	51		51	42			42	46
2017-18	Hell's Kitchen		Hell's Kitchen	9-1-1 (R)		9-1-1 (R)	70 (+52%)
	2017-18	88 (+72%)		87.6817212741176	53 (+27%)			53 (+27%)	70.2040404871626
VsAvg	+58%		0.578082357844484	+4%		0.0446608808739922	+32%
Rank	1/17		1/17	9/17		9/17	1/17

Fox didn't even try to program the 9/8c hour after the new year (except for some spring MasterChef Junior episodes). When repeats of Wednesday hit 9-1-1 can do better raw numbers than year-ago Sleepy Hollow originals and fall Exorcist originals, why bother?

spring

Year	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	Avg
2016-17	Rosewood		Rosewood	Sleepy Hollow		Sleepy Hollow	40
	2016-17	42		42	38			38	40
2017-18	MasterChef Junior				MasterChef Junior	MasterChef Junior	MasterChef Junior	70 (+73%)
	2017-18	70 (+64%)		69.5059376107763	70 (+83%)		70 (+83%)		69.5630032409986
VsAvg	+54%		0.535546056507895	+56%		0.556019806572778	+55%
Rank	1/17		1/17	1/17		1/17	1/17

And the network had another period of massive Plus growth in the spring, with MasterChef Junior (even at somewhat blah levels) absolutely routing the year-ago flop dramas. Junior aired four two-hour episodes late in the season.

Rating the Ratings

Name	Lo	Avg	Hi	y2y	Plus	Label	Plusy2y	Results
Hell's Kitchen*	0.7	0.87	1.1	-21%	79	hit(Fri)	-11%	detail
MasterChef Junior*	0.7	0.79	0.9	-24%	72	solid(Fri)	-15%	detail
The Exorcist	0.3	0.41	0.5	-38%	38	flop	-31%	detail

Hell's Kitchen: Even considering they had Thursday airings last year, it was kind of a "meh" year for the Ramsay shows. But they get a little break relative to the trends above since they were kept on Friday all season. Grade: C+.

MasterChef Junior: Same story as Hell's Kitchen, except in this case MasterChef Junior actually aired the entire last season on Thursday, and much of this season very late in the spring. So it gets a bit more of a break than Kitchen and ends up with a Grade: B-.

The Exorcist: This was a low-end bubble show at best last year, and it dropped 31% in Plus from that level. And usually when a show drops this hard, it makes up some of the losses in delayed viewing; The Exorcist actually became a much smaller DVR gainer in season two. (It generally got 80%ish boosts in Live+7 ratings last year, and more like 50% this year.) It looked like a dubious renewal last year but it went even more disastrously than I would've imagined. Grade: F.

The names in this last table link to the shows' War of 18-49 pages. Links with an asterisk(*) have been updated with the new info. Updates to younger shows will come later in the summer.

Here's the now updated Schedules Plus for Fox Friday.