Matt, I am so upset. When I ...
Jeffery Dean Morgan and Katherine Heigl, Grey's Anatomy
Question: Matt, I am so upset. When I found out that
Grey's Anatomy was moving from Sundays to Thursdays I almost cried. I understand every network wants to win the ratings on Thursday. But can
Grey's Anatomy overtake
CSI? I don't think it will; I think it can compete and hold its own.
Grey's Anatomy is my favorite show on TV and I would rather it be safe on Sundays after the horrible
Desperate Housewives than go up against
CSI. Let's say that the ratings aren't good enough on Thursdays. Do you think ABC will move it back to Sundays, or even put it on Mondays? Or do you think they will stick out the season on Thursdays? I know you can never tell what the networks are going to do, and it's early yet (this season just ended), but I just don't want anything to happen to this show. Oh, and how awesome is it that
Kate Walsh and
Eric Dane signed on for all of Season 3? Addison is my favorite character, and with Eric Dane back, there should be some good stuff coming our way. And thank God
Veronica Mars got renewed.
Answer: The issue here isn't about beating
CSI, it's about seriously competing on Thursdays, a night much coveted by advertisers. I've
said before that I'm selfishly unhappy to have the
Housewives/
Anatomy block broken up, but then, we tend to criticize the networks for not using their hits to launch new hits and strengthen other nights, so this is the way the scheduling game is meant to work. Unless, of course, it backfires, which I doubt. There's room for two hits in the same time period, but I suppose if
Anatomy takes too steep a nosedive in the fight against
CSI, ABC could blink and move it to a less treacherous time period. (Most of us were expecting
Anatomy to move to Monday, where ABC is starting from scratch, and not very impressively given the lineup of reality shows and
What About Brian.) The biggest problem for
Anatomy is that the shows on either side of it appear problematic: In the first hour, two single-camera comedies about wedding and childbirth, and following
Anatomy, the enigmatic
Six Degrees (which I haven't seen yet, but was left mystified by the clips from upfront week).
Lots of mail on this topic. Here's another angle, from Liz: "ABC has already announced the cancellation of Invasion (I'm fuming from it 'cause they left us with a major cliff-hanger) and they moved Grey's Anatomy to Thursdays, but wouldn't it make better sense to put Grey's before or after Lost? (Two great shows back-to-back seems good to me.) Or are they trying to see if Grey's can carry a night by itself.? I just answered my own question, didn't I?"
Yes. It may not seem all that logical, but the idea here is to scatter ABC's hits throughout the schedule in hopes of gaining traction on yet another night and also with the goal to create new hits after the old one (easier said than done).
