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ABC today became the latest broadcast network to make its full-season pickups, handing out back-nine orders to freshman comedy Better With You and drama No Ordinary Family. Additionally, the network has picked up 5 additional episodes from freshman cop drama Detroit 1-8-7 and 4 from veteran family drama Brothers & Sisters. Missing from the list is new legal drama The Whole Truth, which already has been on shaky ground and is preempted again next week. The series will stay on the air but the network doesn’t plan to order more episodes beyond the original 13. The episodic orders follow the pickup of 4 additional scripts each for No Ordinary Family and Brothers & Sisters 2 weeks ago. It brings the order for Brothers & Sisters to a full-season 22 episodes, up from the 18 ordered in May, meaning that ABC is probably considering a change in its launch plans for midseason drama Off the Map, which was to premiere in Brothers & Sisters Sunday 10 PM slot. (Off the Map also recently received an order for an additional script.)
Overall, comedies have fared better than dramas among freshmen this fall. Besides Fox’s Running Wilde, whose chances are not very good, all other new half-hour series have already received full-season orders: ABC’s Better with You, Fox’s Raising Hope, CBS’ Mike & Molly and $#*! My Dad Says and NBC’s Outsourced. For comparison, 3 new dramas have already been yanked: ABC’s My Generation, Fox’s Lone Star and NBC’s Outlaw, and ABC’s The Whole Truth is not looking rosy either. Better with You, from Shana Goldberg-Meehan and Warner Bros. TV, has been the lowest-rated comedy in ABC’s Wednesday comedy block but has showed solid lead-in retention. For the past couple of weeks, the family comedy has been averaging a 2.1 rating in adults 18-49, holding onto 80%+ of the The Middle demo lead-in. No Ordinary Family, co-created by Greg Berlanti and Jon Harmon Feldman, has been slipping since its premiere but still delivers respectable numbers in the highly competitive Tuesday 8 PM slot. Last week, it delivered a 2.2 demo rating. The Michael Imperioli starrer Detroit 1-8-7 most recently logged a 1.8 in the Tuesday 10 PM period. Detroit, No Ordinary Family and Bros & Sis are produced by ABC Studios.
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Good News for Better With You, I think it stands to only get Better With Time… It has quite a few laugh out loud moments and the writers and actors seem to be on the same page.
This along with the also entertaining Raising Hope, will hopefully find the audience they deserve. Network comedy lives !!!
Better With You is the best new comedy of the fall (beating Raising Hope by a nose). They deserved their back nine for sure. Kudos to all the writers and the talented cast.
Detroit 187 gets better each week. Kudos to ABC for giving it a chance to find it’s legs.
ABC must have zero in the hopper.
Better With You is unwatchable.
Good move on picking up “Better with You.” The show is genuinely funny, and the cast has great chemistry and is likeable. It seems like it would work better if it had another multi-cam paired with it (nothing wrong with “The Middle,” but there’s something different about the rhythm of the pacing of a multi-cam vs. a single cam comedy)
I think they need to move Better To You to a different night and put one of the 2 or 3 comedies they have for mid-season in it’s slot.
Better For You is a pretty funny show but the problem is it doesn’t fit in with ABC’s Wednesday comedy lineup. By slotting in another single camera comedy in that half hour, they will only strengthen the lineup. Not to mention given how people still love multicamera comedies as shown by the success of CBS’s comedies, I think they should move Better To You to a different night. It would only increase it’s audience imo because in it’s current slot, the people who tune in for The Middle look for a laugh track free sitcom to follow it.
No Ordinary Family is one of the most boring shows on t.v right now…Like Heroes, it completely throws away the great premise they have. They just don’t know how to work with people with superpowers. The show sucks.
I am a comics fan with over 9,000 titles in my collection. I mostly stay away from all TV shows starring superheroes however, because the budget needed to bring these sorts of things to life is never there and the show winds up being dull as dishwater.
Running Wilde is a very clever, well written comedy in the vein of “Arrested Development”. FOX would raise the intelligence quotient of TV viewers by picking it up for a back nine order.
Pick up Detroit 187 and cut back V to 10 eps. What is wrong with them?
What about “The Whole Truth?” It is such a great show and ABC has hardly given it a chance. First it was up against a 2 hour SVU and the Defenders. Then it was up against the premiere of LOLA and then it was pre-empted for the Chilean miners special. They need to move it to another night and give it a chance! There hasn’t been a show like it and Maura Tierney and Rob Morrow play off of each other so well. People! Watch it!
Detroit 1-8-7 is terrific broadcast network drama. Michael Imperioli, Natalie Martinez stand out. Glad ABC is giving it a chance.
I fear that “Detroit” will end up being the new “Homicide”
What are you afraid of? “Homicide: Life on the Street” is one of the greatest TV series ever.
Better With You is unwatchable, and I think a large portion of its success is its sndwiched timeslot between The Middle and Modern Family. If they move it from that location, I doubt too many people would follow it. Their inability to find a suitable fourh piece of the comedy block just demonstrates how rediclous it was for them to cut off Samanha Who? a couple seasons ago, which had trouble maintaining an audience when it was bounced around the schedule but did very well when it was stable behind Dancing with the Stars and would have made an exellent building block for their Wednesday lineup surrounded by the aforementioned hit shows.
Have watched Brothers and Sisters from the beginning. Really glad it will be around for awhile. Love it!!
Wow, they’re getting rid of THE WHOLE TRUTH, and nothing but the TRUTH, so help me God.
Detroit 187 is great and I’m glad it’s being given a chance.
But I agree with Turbogal – The Whole Truth is one of the best new shows of the fall and it hasn’t been given a fighting chance. It’s one of the shows I most look forward to every week.
I know I am supposed to hate Brothers & Sisters but seriously – put Sally Field in (almost) any scene and she’s fantastic. I know it’s not Nurse-Jackie cool but I wish the Academy would look closely at her for next year. Also dare I say Lowe had some moments on that series and Dave Annable’s reps really should be making a strong push for Academy to take a second look, because his acting chops (thanks to Field and good directors) have gone sky high. Alas, I know the overall show and writing isn’t that great. But what a great cast top to bottom. Do I cringe through the stories? Yes. But I love the characters and actors so much.
Maura Tierney is great but The Whole Truth deserves to go. Other than the episode with Judd Hirsch, it is very poorly written. Running Wilde is okay but I’m not going to miss it. No Ordinary Family is a bore. Plenty of good veteran shows around but there is not one solid newcomer this season.
It’s interesting that the new comedies are doing better than the new dramas, since none of the new comedies are actually really any good. In a stronger, more creative, year all of the new comedies and dramas would probably have been canceled — with the possible exception of Hawaii 5-O.
It’s been a terrible year for new shows. Judging by the pick-ups, the mid-season looks to be worse. The networks have got to cure their creative anemia.
Detroit 1-8-7 and No Ordinary Family are not good shows, but I guess they are good enough to hold on to for a season.
Better With You is horrific. It seems impossible to understand that anyone in the 18-49 demo would like the show, it’s phoned-in, cliched multi-cam. It’s old-fashioned, and it’s not even remotely funny. Pairing it with Modern Family only makes that all the more glaringly obvious.
Running Wilde is AWFUL. I was a HUGE Arrested Development fan, and I had to stop watching this half way through. ABSOLUTELY AWFUL.
What a shame about The Whole Truth. I loved this show. ABC killed it with the crappy day/timeslot. They didn’t even give it a fair chance.