The Breakdown: CW Monday in 2018-19 (Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning)

It's time for a journey through the CW Monday schedule in 2018-19...


fall

Year	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	Avg
2017-18	Supergirl		Supergirl	Valor		Valor	35
	2017-18	50		50	20			20	35
2018-19	Arrow		Arrow	Legends of Tomorrow		Legends of Tomorrow	40 (+14%)
	2018-19	46 (-7%)		46.3455237757903	33 (+66%)			33 (+66%)	39.6099353581865
VsAvg	+3%		0.0254561696137823	-9%		-0.0885503699683525	-3%
Rank	9/18		9/18	11/18		11/18	9/18

For much of 2018-19, Monday was a rare year-to-year growth night on the CW, as Arrow made a reasonable transition to the night and Legends of Tomorrow (and later Black Lightning) got compared against the year-ago flop Valor.

winter

Year	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	Avg
2017-18	Legends of Tomorrow		Legends of Tomorrow	Valor		Valor	28
	2017-18	39		39	17			17	28
2018-19	Arrow		Arrow	Black Lightning		Black Lightning	32 (+15%)
	2018-19	35 (-10%)		35.1361020100947	29 (+74%)			29 (+74%)	32.1905605242185
VsAvg	-11%		-0.11315550067209	-7%		-0.0723758641125621	-10%
Rank	11/18		11/18	11/18		11/18	10/18

Arrow's winter average looks much worse than the fall one because fall includes a huge crossover episode, but the story on a year-to-year basis was about the same.

spring

Year	8:00	8:30	9:00	9:30	Avg
2017-18	Supergirl		Supergirl	iZombie		iZombie	31
	2017-18	41		41	22			22	31
2018-19	Legends of Tomorrow		Legends of Tomorrow	Arrow		Arrow	25 (-21%)
	2018-19	28 (-31%)		28.2706233950235	21 (-2%)			21 (-2%)	24.8654985389179
VsAvg	-24%		-0.24347802544997	-32%		-0.324434680481041	-28%
Rank	13/18		13/18	16/18		16/18	14/18

But the 8/7c comparison became a lot less flattering in the spring, as the network flipped Legends of Tomorrow to 8/7c and saw it go massively below last year's Supergirl. At 9/8c, Arrow suffered greatly, not even breaking even with the year-ago iZombie.

Rating the Ratings

Name	Lo	Avg	Hi	y2y	Plus	Label	Plusy2y	Results
Arrow*	0.2	0.34	0.8	-20%	36	solid(CW)	-8%	detail
Legends of Tomorrow	0.2	0.29	0.4	-40%	31	marginal(CW)	-31%	detail
Black Lightning	0.2	0.30	0.4	-46%	32	marginal(CW)	-38%	detail

Arrow: After a couple years of truly meteoric descent, Arrow slowed the bleeding to some extent in its penultimate season, but still fell to another new low in Plus. It was really close to even in Plus all year, and almost all the decline was due to the collapse after the spring move to 9/8c. I would argue the two timeslots combined were not much different difficulty-wise than Thursday at 9/8c last year. Grade: C+.

Legends of Tomorrow: On the other hand, Legends had a much tougher go of it this season, after airing alongside The Flash for much of last year. Not good, but not as bad as the raw numbers look. Grade: C-.

Black Lightning: It really is staggering to look at just how down Black Lightning was this season, as well as how incredibly down Roswell, New Mexico (a mediocre performer but not a flop) was in the Tuesday timeslot it left behind. It's all quite a testament to how much Black Lightning really moved the needle in season one. But it's still a major disappointment that there was essentially no sign of that show ever again, whether on Tuesday or Monday, and it just became yet another part of the 0.2-0.3 morass. Grade: D+.

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 CW Monday.