NBC Reworks Thursday Line-up, Moves ‘The Slap’, Cancels ‘Allegiance’
In an attempt to revive its Thursday night line-up, NBC has decided to give its Thursday night a serious facelift. According to TVLine, NBC decided to cancel spy-drama Allegiance just after five episodes. That said, those five episodes were extremely low in the ratings.
As for its other freshman series, The Slap, which is the network’s hot button show, it’s struggling in the ratings. To hopefully give the show a better time slot, NBC has decided to give it Allegiance’s 10 p.m. slot.
It seemed like NBC hoped that Allegiance would pull strong with comparisons to The Americans but in Variety’s review, Brian Lowry gave it to NBC straight.
“The new NBC drama Allegiance clearly suffers from cable envy. Like Homeland, this spy thriller was adapted from an Israeli series, and the basic Russian-moles-among-us plot sounds an awful lot like FX’s Cold War homage The Americans, merely relocated into a contemporary setting.”
In the end he said it was entertaining but had its fair share of “silly” moments.
As for The Slap, it received mixed reviews, but The Hollywood Reporter just found it downright annoying.
“It’s an agitating piece of work by design, hoping to prompt conversation and create first impressions that it might later be able to subvert, but the takeaway is that none of the characters are particularly likeable, a large portion of the audience will probably want to slap the kid in question before he actually gets slapped and the voiceover narration is so god-awful it seems like a prank.”
We have to tip our hats off to NBC for at least trying to go against ABC’s line-up. Since Shonda Rhimes owns Thursdays now, her three series, Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and the runaway hit How to Get Away With Murder have won Thursday night as a whole as far as the ratings go. On Thursday nights, everyone’s fingers are ready to tweet out the outrageous plot twists on her shows, and other networks except for NBC have basically threw their hands up as far as programming their big shows on the same night.
Now that How to Get Away With Murder aired its season finale, NBC might use this as an excuse to slip in there. That said, it’s still going to be hard to beat Thursday nights, even with one less Rhimes centered show. Last night ABC just debuted a new polarizing show called American Crime, which is in Murder’s slot for the remainder of the TV season.
According to Deadline, American Crime’s ratings are decent for a debut. They’re not as high as How to Get Away with Murder but they have a pretty great lead in with Scandal, so we can see it hanging on for a while and gaining traction as the series goes on.
What do you think of NBC’s new line-up?
[Image via NBC]
