The Catch Post #9

The day has come and gone but unfortunately The Catch did not do as well as a Shondaland original. When Grey’s Anatomy premiered in 2005, it rated 4.2 with 16.25 million viewers. When Scandal premiered in 2012, it rated 3.0 with 7.33 million viewers. When How to Get Away With Murder premiered in 2014, it rate 3.9 with 14.3 million viewers. When The Catch premiered, it rated 1.2 with 5.8 million viewers. It is now the lowest rating Shondaland show with the #TGIT brand. On March 24, the show had major competition with NBC’s Shades of Blue and cable network’s FX’s The Baskets season finale. But the largest competition was the NCAA Sweet 16 schedule. There were two major games playing that night. At 9:40 p.m. on CBS, No. 1 Kansas played No. 4 Maryland and ranked at 2.1 with 6.55 million viewers. There was another NCAA game on TBS that premiered at 9:55 p.m.

According to Forbes and TV By the Numbers, ABC has been declining in the 18-149 demographics from a 2.4 in 2014 to a 2.1 by the end of 2015. The network has been looking to Shonda Rhimes and her arsenal of hit shows to keep ABC afloat. With The Catch premiering with such low numbers, its concerning to ABC but also Shondaland since The Catch has not been scheduled for renewal for a new season.

The Odd Couple 2.0: A Look Back at its First Revival

As The Odd Couple continues its hiatus because of the NCAA Basketball tournament airing on CBS, I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a look back at the history of the show. Particularly, at the fact that this new version of The Odd Couple is not the show’s first TV revival. In anticipation of the series’ return back in February, USA Today ran a great article on the program’s history (http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2015/02/25/odd-couple-tv-film-broadway/23980183/). While the critics were not too enthusiastic about this new CBS version of the show, the ratings have not been dismal. However, turning the clock back to October 29, 1982, when the first revival of the show premiered on its original network, ABC, this new African-American version was panned by critics, even reused scripts from the original series and was canceled after a run of just eighteen episodes. What is more, the failures of The Odd Couple adaptations are not just limited to the small screen. According to IDBD.com, in 1985, Neil Simon (the creator of The Odd Couple) updated his original play, this time with an all-female cast, featuring popular television personalities Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers as Olive Madison and Florence Ungar. The show flopped and ran for only eight months, compared to the original 1965 production, which was huge hit and ran for nearly two and one-half years (http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=4375). Therefore, given the track record of The Odd Couple derivatives, it will be interesting to see whether or not the show finds its way onto the CBS Fall 2015 schedule.

Trending Now: The Odd Couple

Since The Odd Couple will be on hiatus for the next two weeks because of the NCAA Basketball Tournament airing on CBS, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the show’s social media presence. As now more than ever, social media presence is an integral part of a television show’s success, it appears that The Odd Couple is taking full advantage of all that twitter has to offer. For example, as a nice tie-in with CBS’s NCAA coverage, the stars of The Odd Couple have filled out NCAA brackets and the show’s twitter feed is encouraging viewers to see how their brackets measure up with those of the stars, Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon. Additionally, the stars have been live tweeting and the show has been posting photos of the different cast members tweeting for both the east and west coast feeds. They even suggested a drinking game, consisting of everyone taking a drink every time that Matthew Perry wears a blue shirt that matches his eyes! So far, they have 3,263 followers, which is a drop in the ocean, compared to ABC’s rival new spring 2015 sitcom, Fresh Off The Boat, which has 16,700 followers. Therefore, The Odd Couple has a way to go before being the number 1 new comedy on Twitter.