This Tuesday, April 17th, the season finale of Black Lighting will premiere. As promised, this will be the show’s 13th episode, and it is titled “Shadow of Death: The Book of War”. With the closing of the season 1, the show has proven their spot on The CW. With a constant rating of .5 for audiences 18-49 and a share of 2, Black Lighting is the third most-watched show on The CW (only a .01 difference from Supernatural).

With the renewal of the second season, The CW has many options on how they choose to continue to promote and increase viewership of the series. As mentioned before, the cast and well-known writers of the show completed serval interviews months before the premiere. They however mainly focused on gaining audiences already interested in comic book characters and to the Black community. For the future of the show, there may have to be different areas/demographics that the network chooses to focus their marketing strategies.

This upcoming summer will be a critical time for the network, especially considering the close of season 1.

Sources:

CW 2017-18 Season Ratings (updated 4/17/18)

Now three weeks into Alex, Inc.’s run on ABC, the ratings for the premiere episode appear to be the show’s ceiling. On Wednesday, April 11^th, the show’s third episode aired to a 0.9 rating and 3.56 million viewers. Comparatively, the program received the same 0.9 in the previous week but had a slightly more impressive 3.83 million total viewers. The pilot episode, though, which premiered to a 1.1 rating and 4.6 million viewers, seems to be the mark to which ABC wishes to return to. As I noted in a previous blog post, the ratings Alex, Inc. received for its pilot episode were similar to those of ABC’s Speechless, which was renewed. However, the last two weeks illustrate that the show cannot maintain those ratings, at least not without an improvement in the program’s overall quality. As of now, there is no definitive news regarding the future of Alex, Inc. on ABC.

In its eleventh week on the air, I have begun to run out of things to discuss since NBC has yet to renew the show still. So this week I have decided to analyze the way the show is engaging with its viewers on social media, particularly twitter.

The show does not seem to have a very strong following on social media, (only ~7,000 followers) but it does do an excellent job of engaging with those followers that it does have. The show constantly will reply to tweets that viewers have tweeted at the show, usually replying with some snarky comment or other humor. Additionally the show did a live Q&A twitter thing with one of the shows leads last week to engage the viewers as well outside of just the show.

So while the show may be struggling to get more viewers, its engagement technique is likely to be effective in retaining the viewers that it does have by keeping them constantly engaged with the show. This could be a benefit for the show if it were to get renewed as it is working to keep the base it has and thus hopefully retain similar ratings were it to survive for a second season.

With three weeks of ratings for Splitting Up Together now, I figured it might be a good time to analyze the Halo effect the show had been receiving from Roseanne and see if that halo has dissipated, or if it still exists and has reduced for Splitting Up Together in a proportion similar to the way it has for Roseanne. So below is a table of the ratings for both shows in their first three weeks, and the percent change in viewership week to week for each show.

As you can see Splitting Up Together has had a slightly higher % loss of ratings compared to Roseanne but that does make sense considering that Roseanne airs at 8pm and Splitting up Together at 9:30pm. That halo will only extend so far and the shows at the edges of its reach are certainly the more likely ones to lose that halo effect the fastest. Overall though I would say the show is fairing well currently and a 1.2 rating for a half hour comedy is certainly nothing to be concerned about from my perspective.

Now that the show has aired I thought it would be a good time to see how the shows marketing has changed from pre-premiere promotions to post-premiere promotions. Essentially it seems like the show has maintained its same exact promotional style on its facebook and twitter pages. Of interest in this comparison I noticed that whereas one typically would expect a show’s twitter to be more engaging than their facebook page these days, that is not the case with this show. Instead it seems as though the show’s Facebook is more engaged than their twitter in so much that the Facebook page gets more likes, and comments on its content. This goes to support that the show is reaching out to that 30s-40s age group that may not be as engaged with twitter as the younger audience.

Anyway that note aside, the marketing strategy of the show is definitely still maintaining its promo strategy of using short little clips of the show captioned with some attention grabbing one liner to catch viewers eyes. Once in a while it also will throw in a fact such as when one of the leads appeared on Jimmy Kimmel, it posted that she was appearing but never posted a link to view her appearance.