A Look Back at the 2020-2021 Fantasy Schedule

With the 2022-2023 TV season ongoing, you might be wondering why this post has taken so long. Well, I feel that this follow up was a long time coming and should have been done back when it would have made more sense. But I got only the title of this written for quite some time. Now, I’m finally doing this look back of the currently most recent fantasy schedule that I have done. I could have done more or better if only it wasn’t so confusing due to the pandemic. And since I’m not doing look backs on my cancellation predictions again (I found them too bad in a way), then I might as well cover this from time to time in the event that I actually do it. Anyways, let’s get to this post.

 

ABC: What I got right- I was right thinking that America’s Funniest Home Videos, The Rookie, Dancing with the Stars, The Goldbergs, For Life, all of TGIT, Shark Tank, and 20/20 would all air at the times that they did, even if some didn’t start until November with other stuff filling in until it was ready. I was right thinking that some of the summer shows would be Don’t, United We Fall, and Primetime: What Would You Do? I was also right thinking that Don’t and United We Fall wouldn’t last. I was right thinking that The Bachelorette would air at the fall. I was right thinking that Emergence, Kids Say the Darnest Things, The Bachelor Presents: Listen to Your Heart, and Stumptown would all get cancelled although it did seem like Stumptown was going to come back at one point before it didn’t.

 

ABC: What I got wrong- I was wrong thinking that The Bachelor Summer Games, Videos after Dark, and Generation Gap would even air that season. Only one of those ever aired in the future. I got a lot of timeslots wrong, especially with the comedy shows. I thought a lot of what did return would return much sooner than it ultimately did. I was wrong thinking that The Baker and the Beauty, Schooled, Single Parents, or The Great American Baking Show would return as all of them were cancelled. I was wrong predicting the cancellation of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

 

CBS: What I got right- I got maybe about half of the timeslots right, not factoring in the delay in the fall season. I got a lot of the obvious renewals right. I was right thinking that midseason would have a new comedy and two new dramas.

 

CBS: What I got wrong- I got a lot of the renewal predictions wrong as the shows of God Friended Me, Broke, Carol’s Second Act, Man with a Plan, and Tommy were all shows that I thought would stay around and be part of this season while none of them were. I was wrong to think that Survivor would be at midseason or that a new should would take its place in the fall. I don’t know what I was thinking by putting Bull as cancelled.

 

CW: What I got right- I was right to think that Hypnotize Me would be cancelled, although I’m certain that they have yet to make that official. If I knew when shows would start by thinking that it wouldn’t be until later in the season, then I would have gotten a lot of the timeslots right. I was right in thinking that Supernatural would air its final season and episodes during the fall. I was also right to think that Walker would be delayed until midseason. I got my prediction of the upcoming season of Supergirl being the last one correct.

 

CW: What I got wrong- I had no idea that most of the regular shows wouldn’t air until the fall. I also did not know a lot of the timeslots right even if you did factor in the long delay of when a lot of those shows were actually starting and scheduled in the end.

 

FOX: What I got right- I got the entire prediction of Sundays correct. I thought that I Can See Your Voice would be on at the fall and was right about that. I was right thinking that Call me Kat, 9-1-1: Lone Star, and Last Man Standing would all be at midseason.

 

FOX: What I got wrong- I was wrong predicting the renewal of   Gordon Ramsey’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back. I was wrong thinking that he would have a new show this season. I was wrong thinking that The Great North would be cancelled. I also thought a lot of the new fall should would instead air earlier during the summer.

 

NBC: What I got right- I was right thinking that the Monday slot after The Voice would bring doom to what aired there as Debris was cancelled and even Small Fortune didn’t last despite it not even being on after The Voice, just in that same timeslot. I was right thinking that Kenan, Young Rock, Law and Order: Organized Crime, and Manifest would all air at midseason. I got a good chunk of the cancellation predictions correct with me not knowing what all would be known.

 

NBC: What I got wrong- I was wrong thinking that whatever aired after The Voice on Mondays would be cancelled as it was brought back. I was wrong thinking that Jeffries would ever air. I got the name of Law and Order: Organized Crime wrong. I got some of the returning shows wrong as they were cancelled instead of being brought back.

 

And that’s pretty much all of this post. I can’t think of too much else to say outside of doing the usual milking as much random things that I can think of saying the ensure that the closing of this blog, as in the last paragraph of it, has at least three lines in it. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along. Move along.

There Were a Lot of Duds in the 2021-2022 TV Season

More so than perhaps any other season before it that I knew about or kept track of in the detail that I do now of certain shows, I have to wonder if there has been an example of so many duds all airing in one single season of television. There sure have been a lot of them. I’m not even going to mention all of the shows that I think are bad. I’m just going to mention the exceptionally bad shows. Let’s start with the obvious: the new shows.

 

Examples: ABC- Queens (this show about the drama of an all girl singing group reuniting later with all of their secrets coming to light was just obvious and dumb with nothing exceptional about it), CW- Naomi (this superhero show lacked substance in a pilot that should have been a good origin story that the network has been good at, but instead seemed more like a fan film of a show were they weren’t even sure if Superman was even real), March (this show is so boring that it lacks a Wikipedia page as this documentary on high school marching bands brought little to nothing to it)

 

NBC- That’s My Jam (I just don’t understand how this one lasted when nothing about it seemed good and the fact that everyone gets the same amount of money regardless of who wins makes me wonder what the point of the whole “competition” even is), CBS- How We Roll (this sitcom based on a true story would have been boring, dull, and unfunny, certain to be cancelled, even without it starting so late in the season that it was doomed from the start)

 

FOX- The Big Leap (how does this have a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes when it was so terrible that it mocks the very idea of reality shows in a way that won’t get any of those viewers or any other ones in ways that simply wouldn’t happen on reality shows), Pivoting (she can’t fit into tiny pants and winds up in the hospital in a comedy where death is important in some way and, yes, it’s as terrible as that sounds), Domino Masters (this should have been much better than it was, but only seemed to milk the drama between contestants more than anything else)

 

Continued: Our Kind of People (you can tell that a show is bad if after having seen an episode, I can’t even tell you what this was even supposed to be about in the end), The Real Dirty Dancing (even if I had seen the movie that this is based off of then I wouldn’t be interested in this crapfest that seems very boring with no real point), Welcome to Flatch (Sony bribed its way into a second season since this so is so unfunny that it is more cringe worthy than anything else), Alter Ego (the voting mechanism made no sense in a wanna be Masked Singer with no famous people except judges)

 

And it’s not just new shows that were bad. Big Sky had one of the worst sophomore slumps that I have ever seen in a TV show as it went from being an interesting missing persons drama to a show about drug running that I have no interest in seeing ever again. Rivervale was just the arc that started out the new season of Riverdale that was beyond absurd. It was too late into the show for it to introduce any of the supernatural elements that could be in the show and it still work. It was as if they let people submit fan fiction and that become episodes of the show. While I don’t yet know when I’ll be covering the best and worst of the decades from the 2010s, I can tell you that Riverdale might almost be certain to win the jumped the shark award worst of the decade in the 2020s.

 

Then there are shows with bad endings. There are a lot of them. Most of them were cancellations that came as a surprise, especially regarding the CW shows, but it is still hard to like any of these shows now. Legends of Tomorrow had the heroes arrested by time cops with other aspects of it unresolved. Batwoman set up a new villain that won’t be resolved. 4400 seemed to undo some of its canon with its cliffhanger. B Positive left one of the main characters alone without resolving things with her planned love. Ordinary Joe had a cliffhanger for each of the three timelines. Mr. Mayor had a terrible ending in the middle of a debate with a bombshell revealed.

 

Monarch was supposed to be part of this season, but was delayed like a lot of the FOX shows were to the next season. The reason given was due to the pandemic. It was also a terrible show since we got basically all of what we had wrong with Filthy Rich only with the show focusing on country music stars instead of “religious” hypocrites. I’m only including this here since it could have been part of that season that just happened.

 

I will be doing posts of this blog on every Sunday now for the foreseeable future. I’m doing this since the day of the week was made available now and I made use of it right away. I can only hope that this does not mess up anything regarding my CSI: Vegas blog. Also stay tuned for different things relating to this blog on Fridays, potentially. Otherwise, things will be even weirder than they are now.

Why Networks Don’t Care about Friday Shows

Well, the name of this post is a bit misleading. It seems as if networks don’t care about shows that air on Fridays. Few networks try that hard and some don’t seem to try at all. Others try for a time and then give up. Others try some of the time, but not all of the time.

 

I’ll admit, I didn’t always use to care about shows on Fridays. I would normally eat pizza and watch a movie from a video rental store. I would not see what aired on TV. That started to change when the show Moonlight premiered and I could watch that. I have more or less watched Friday shows a lot ever since that time frame. I probably watch too much.

 

With many new movies being released when they are, Friday is when less people would watch shows. Others are out enjoying their weekend in some ways. It is hard to say much about why there isn’t as much things on. But that is the main set of reasons.

 

I need to work more on getting intense posts done that require a lot of time to get done. I’m at least glad that I’m able to get some posts done. I just need to get the right posts done and I’m not doing that. I don’t want to wind up like December of last year where I had a lot of large posts to get done all at once, but didn’t, and still haven’t, gotten one of them done. I am hoping that I can get stuff done soon and am already expecting shorter posts than I would like.

The Craziness of the CW’s Schedule has Actually Just Begun

Once the pandemic hit, the CW started acting strange with its schedule. It wasn’t that unexpected that there would be changes as a result. But this network was weirder than others. It didn’t cut a lot of the show’s episodes’ counts to a logical lower number the first time around. The next season after that, it cut back a lot of the episode count and now stood the chance of regaining normalcy. But then there was the fact that this network was for sale. And a whole lot of shows were cancelled that never would have been before. Which leads us to this season.

 

With the CW network under new ownership, the vast majority of its shows are still owned by either CBS or the WB. But they have just 12.5% of the network now each with Nexstar owning the other 75%. They can carry these shows longer than just this one season, but it is unknown how much they will or if they will do any at all. It is known that The Flash and Riverdale will be ending.

 

The shows that could have a better chance of survival are the third season shows of Superman and Lois, Kung Fu, Stargirl, and Walker. What I do not yet know is who owns what and how much Nexstar owns of anything. It seems that two of the notable new CW shows are spin-offs (Walker: Independence and The Winchesters). One is a foreign import (Family Law). And the only new fall show that isn’t either of those last two is Professionals.

 

While a lot can change at midseason, it seems weird that only one new show might be on at least at the fall that Nexstar owns. Plus, you do have to wonder if they would keep lower rated shows that they own over higher rated shows from the WB or CBS. What’s weird and this might just depend on the news sources that I keep track of is just how little press coverage this has gotten so far. The CW was for sale and I’ve never heard people talk about it outside of one source.

 

There is a thing that happens at times where some networks effectively do a throw the bums out thing. This has largely in my mind only happened with sitcoms and even then, only rarely outside of the one network that just kept doing it over and over again. But I can’t remember much about this thread. Will we have a phased out way of getting rid of all of the old shows on the network? There is no way that they would get rid of all of them at once and start with brand new shows next season outside of what they could take over from this season. Or, at least, that’s what I think.

 

So while the scheduling of the shows may be going back to normal or already back that way, we may never see shows last long that aren’t owned by Nexstar in the future until nothing from the WB or CBS is left on that network. And that is how the network’s craziness has just begun.

Wishlist for Final Season of The Flash

 As I get to this way late post of this blog, I might as well cover just the basic idea of what I might want done. I have no way of knowing if all of what I even want will be mentioned. But I figured that this is a good thing to put in this blog, even if the likelihood of them doing any of this is slim.

1- Revisit a lot of what has happened. I almost want them to do a season heavy on time travel, but that could just become too similar to what they did on the final season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Still, there could be other ways to take that general idea in their own, original direction.

2- Finally resolve the Eobard Thawne storylines. I know that I have already mentioned how Thawne is a continuity nightmare within the world of Arrowverse. But it wouldn't be that bad an idea to give him his own episode as the big bad of the series in order to explain once and for all how everything possibly makes sense in his timeline. Heck, they don't have to limit this to just one episode.

3- Have Iris West-Allen be pregnant. This would be the ultimate great act of fulfilling the show once and for all with this being a good closing arc to include. While I'm glad that they've never shown Barry and Iris in a sex scene, at least having them as expecting parents would be a nice touch since we all know that they become parents in the future.

4- Resolve Legends of Tomorrow. It makes the most sense for anything regarding the Legends and potentially Booster Gold to be done in this show instead of Superman and Lois. In fact, it might be better for this show to touch upon what happened towards the end of Batwoman as well, unless Gotham Knights winds up being part of Arrowverse.

5- Bring back as many of the former cast as possible. You should especially do this with Ralph Dibney, preferably played by Hartley Sawyer, but can be played by someone else. This would be a nice way to help resolve the show.