Renewology Week 30: Bless This Mess Has A Pulse, and Life in Pieces Returns

Here's a look at the big Renewology developments in week 30.

Name	R%	True	Proj	Target	Aired	Skew	Male
Single Parents	73%	0.73	0.73	0.66	21	33%	39%
Bless This Mess	61%	0.95	0.71	0.66	1	25%	33%
Splitting Up Together	53%	0.67	0.67	0.66	18	31%	35%
The Kids Are Alright	52%	0.66	0.66	0.66	19	27%	39%

The already tangled ABC comedy bubble got an unexpected late-season shakeup as April newbie Bless This Mess showed some real life on its premiere night. These shows (especially the trio listed above) are probably the biggest discrepancy between Renewology and the "conventional wisdom" of anything on TV; a lot of people have considered these shows dead for months, but Renewology has been very consistent having Single Parents as a decent favorite and Splitting/Alright as true bubble shows.

So when I saw BTM's 0.9, which seemed like an outstanding result, I thought the model might be even more enthusiastic than 61% here. But new shows drop a lot post-premiere, and thus it expects BTM to settle as only a little stronger than the two bubblers, and there's always a good chance that it underachieves the initial projection. Settling at 0.7 feels like a good renewal bet (or at least it should be), while 0.5 seems like an easy enough cancel. The question is what happens if it joins that 0.6 fray...

Name	R%	True	Proj	Target	Aired	Skew
Life in Pieces	50%	0.79	0.78	0.78	2	20%

The veteran Life in Pieces did little to clear up the uncertainty surrounding previous timeslot occupant Fam, as it came back with a very Fam-esque performance both at 8:30 (1.0 after a 1.9 The Big Bang Theory) and at 9:30 (0.8 after a 1.0 Mom). Haven't seen any DVR numbers on LiP as of this writing, but based on its history my guess would be that it's gonna fare better in the delayed numbers than Fam. The latter part of Fam's run typically picked up only 30% or so in Live+7; last year Life in Pieces was usually in the vicinity of 50% gains.