Renewology Week 4: Evil Rising and Nervous Nancy

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

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Name	R%	True	Proj	Target	Aired	Skew	Male
CBS Newbies
Evil	76%	0.65	0.62	0.55	4	20%	40%
Bob Hearts Abishola	61%	0.61	0.58	0.55	4	18%	41%
Carol's Second Act	52%	0.58	0.56	0.55	4	17%	37%
The Unicorn	41%	0.55	0.53	0.55	4	17%	41%
All Rise	39%	0.54	0.52	0.55	4	15%	41%

Week four is the time when Renewology starts counting multiple episodes in the rolling average, so the week-to-week changes get a lot less jumpy. So if you make a big move in week four and beyond, it's actually a really big move, and that's what Evil did by managing a rise to 0.7 in its fourth episode. It's always healthy to exercise some skepticism, but it had already shown a little positive momentum in week three by taking a small drop on a bad night for its lead-in comedies. If it could somehow sustain a 0.7, there's pretty much no way it's getting cancelled, but low 0.6's like it had the week before are more murky. That's a good (if somewhat oversimplified) way to look at the 76% it has right now: it's basically an average of one bubble point (50%ish) and one lock point (100%ish). Could still go either way, but with this newbie class, that's what counts as promising.

The other CBS drama newbie All Rise has stabilized enough that it at least deserves a mention in the conversation now. On a Live+SD basis, its 0.6ish ratings appear to be competitive with some other CBS dramas at the moment, especially the SEAL Team/S.W.A.T. duo on Wednesday. I would probably take the under on its current R%, though, because the Wednesday dramas pull way, way ahead when looking at delayed ratings. (My guess is they have a lot of audience that watches the Chicago shows live.)

On the comedy front, the three newbies were pulled back together this week as Bob Hearts Abishola dropped while Carol's Second Act and The Unicorn had small rallies. Bob still has an edge in R% mostly because its week three was a lot better, but you could make the argument these three shows were pretty indistinguishable in week four.

Name	R%	True	Proj	Target	Aired	Skew	Male
Nancy Drew	61%	0.20	0.16	0.15	2	28%	33%

Just want to quickly point out a mistake in the week one number for Nancy Drew; it was not properly identified as a CBS Studios show, so it was given a higher target. I'm not changing the number I put out for week one (71%), but it should have been more like 80% if it were using the CBS target...

...which would've made Nancy's drop in week two even more stark. I think you can make the case that Nancy's drop was largely due to the collapse of its lead-in Riverdale, maybe to even more of an extent than the True formula can account. But if we're near the doorstep of 0.1's in week two, we may be heading for a place where the CW could have some hesitance even with a CBS show. It'll be tough to ever count it out, though; after all, Dynasty had a bunch of low-0.2's in this slot two years ago after a bigger Riverdale and still got a back nine and renewal. I'm not sure how low Nancy would have to go before you could say it was weaker than that Dynasty performance. 0.11ish, maybe?