Castle's chances at renewal, which improved significantly after its outing on Monday, just got a lot better with the news that ABC is removing Surviving Suburbia from the lineup and putting Castle right after Dancing with the Stars. On the other hand, the survival chances of Suburbia just took a hit. Maybe not a fatal one, but it's certainly not good news.
ABC has pulled the Monday night sitcom "Surviving Suburbia" off the air for the remainder of the season. Show had been sandwiched between "Dancing with the Stars" and "Castle" on Monday nights; but with "Suburbia" preempted this week, "Stars" helped give a nice ratings boost to "Castle."
As a result, "Dancing" will once again air as a two-hour on Monday; the following week, as had already been scheduled, "Dancing" will air for an hour into the two-hour premiere of "The Bachelorette."
"Suburbia," which stars Bob Saget as a cranky family man living in the 'burbs, will complete its run sometime during the summer.
via Variety.
Good…what a terrible show it was. I have enjoyed Castle but Bob Saget is just not funny and the show does not work.
Key name here is Bob Saget, how did this guy even get a meeting with execs, he is like some bad joke that just won’t die. This is promising news for Castle but I still feel it belongs on CBS or even NBC not ABC they will screw it up and/or ignore it into obscurity. And don’t flame me please but what ever happened to Eleventh Hour on CBS, did it end or get pulled or what, it wasn’t great but it also wasn’t bad. Just curious…
Mike, no news on Eleventh Hour, and none likely before the CBS upfront. No more episodes, its season is over.
Bill, thank you for saying ‘its SEASON is over’. You are one of my hopes for its renewal.
i am on the edge of the my seat to see what is coming back and not
Castle has been getting better with every episode so good for them.
Thanks Bill I see they only picked it up for 18 eps, shame really since they replaced it with that groaner Harper’s Island, see now if I was boss man CBS someones head would have rolled for that debacle, furthering my belief that TV execs don’t really watch TV cause even the commercials for HI sucked hard. Oh well CBS could put castle after CSI and dominate thursday even killing Leno, but if ABc keeps it alive I guess they own it and will destroy it in time, the little 3 way they brought in this week helped.
AWESOME!! ABC must really want to keep Castle! Such great news. Hope this goes well!!
Thanks for the update!
how is this possble when Surviving suburbia ratings were well over 10 million every week, this doesnt make sence? castle has bad ratings from day one, abc is screwed.
Ryan, total viewers don’t matter, the demo does. Surviving Suburbia has had a very similar rating pattern to what Castle looked like when it was airing out of DWTS. Only now it appears Castle is actually a better fit since it saw this resurgence.
so does this mean Surviving is forsure done? i actually liked that show, it was actually funny….
and what is happening with the ratings, a few years back shows like friends were all doing 20 mil, now all shows viewerships is so low…
ryan, I don’t think it necessarily means that Suburbia is done for, but it’s definitely in danger now.
ryan, I doubt anything is decided about Surviving, but this move does nto bode well for it.
As for lowering ratings, the vast majority of that is cable. There are more and more channels to watch and every one takes a little more away from the broadcast nets.
This is not a good sign for Surviving, but it’s not a cancellation. We’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks at the upfronts.
Ratings have been dropping since the 80s with the surge of cable. The number of choices for viewers has grown exponentially in recent years, which means less people are watching the broadcast nets.
Edit: Both Holly and Bill beat me. All because I was discussing American Idol for a minute with my niece. This is why American Idol is so evil.
Julia American Idol is evil period. Family distractions not withstanding. I think I’m one of five people in the States who have never watched that show. I mean never, not for even 5 minutes.
Do networks usually make a fast move like this? It seems like ABC saw the bump without Surviving Suburbia and decided that the sitcom was killing Castle’s chances. I wonder if they moved so fast because networks are desperate for new hits. I saw an article awhile ago (forget where but I’ll do a search if necessary) explaining the programming philosophy of each network and their track record over the past 3 years. Something like 15% or less of new shows have remained on air. That’s pretty poor. I wonder what the normal rate is?
The_GodfatherSJP, TheFutonCritic did some analysis on that at the beginning of the season and I believe it was around 33% of new shows survive.
I wonder if this had anything to do with all the promotion they’ve given Castle this week. They had both Nathan and Stana watching DWTS and doing the talk show thing this week. It seems like they were really trying to see what it would do.
I don’t know why ABC doesn’t give up on 30 min Comedies. They can’t seem to wrap their heads around the idea of a night with 4 Comedies and let it grow. Even NBC knows how to do Comedy better then ABC. CBS (BBT, HIMYM, 2&1/2MEN, RoE) NBC (MNIE,P&R,Office, 30Rock) and even FOX (Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, and American Dad) know that a 4 hour block works….am I the only one that thinks ABC is foolish for the way they treat comedies?
They moved so fast because it’s already Thursday. They need to give the affiliates time to up the ad rates for 9:30 on Monday.
Quite frankly Castle is turning out to be better then even ABC thought it would and given the buzz about it they realized Hey we may actually scored one here, given the complete banality of all their other shows. I have said it since the nineties and its even more relevant today, we don’t need a 500-1000 channel universe, there is only one channel and that’s TCP/IP, if you don’t know what that is, I feel sorry for you, its the protocol that makes the internet possible.