Masked Scheduler's Ratings Smackdown

Any network that starts off the night with the Holiday classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and ends the night with "The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show" is aces in my book. Talk about flow.

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The Masked Mailbox is filling up so let’s answer a few. BS wonders:

"Did 'Kevin (Probably) Saves the World' (likely) end up on the wrong network? I think it would have done a lot better in the same slot on NBC. 'The Mayor' was a lousy lead-in to stick it with, and 'Kevin' is more compatible with 'This is Us' than 'L&O True Crime' was."

Shows wind up on the network they wind up on for a variety of reasons. Assuming flow still exists, it's hard to say that "K(P)STW" would not benefit from a "TIU" lead-in -- but then, most shows would. As much as you may try to schedule for needs, you often wind up with a set of pilots that don't necessarily fit together, so you do the best you can.

I don't think I was ever in a scheduling room where all the pieces made perfect sense together.

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BO has probably lost countless hours of sleep wondering about this:

"I am curious about your thoughts on the strange history of 'Til Death' on FOX. It kept getting renewed season after season, yet half the episodes were ultimately burned off in the fourth season. They were burned off in no particular order, which became obvious through format changes and a daughter that was recast several times."

I remember reading the "Til Death" pilot script and thinking it was pretty funny, and the notion of a long-married dude imparting his wisdom to a recently married guy would offer lots of comedic situations. Brad Garrett was cast after we picked up the pilot. I don't think the execution was all that good (remember the Second Commandment of Television: A CONCEPT IS ONLY AS GOOD AS ITS EXECUTION), and the series quickly deviated from the premise.

If I remember correctly, we brought it back for a second season to pair up with a Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton comedy, "Back to You" (talk about a show on the wrong network), created by Steve Levitan. That was the year of the WGA strike. I believe it was sometime that year when Sony approached us with a deal for two more seasons of the comedy at a ridiculously low license fee. They were trying to get to enough episodes for syndication. We took the deal because we needed some filler programming to get us to "American Idol."

The ratings were so bad that eventually we just burned the episodes off wherever we needed to fill a hole. So, to answer your question, "Til Death" remained on the air because of a deal and not because of any love for the show.

I did get to know Brad Garrett. I ran into him once at Mulberry Pizza on Ventura Blvd. and he treated the Masked Wife and me to a pie, so there is that.

Any more burning questions? Send them to masked.scheduler@gmail.com, and you can follow me on Twitter @maskedscheduler and inquire there as well.