No Laughing Matter

NBC is throwing in the towel.  Sort of.

After NBC's disastrous attempt at rebuilding its hallowed Thursday night sitcom lineup in the 2013-14 season, the Peacock Network modestly tried to keep something resembling a sitcom schedule on Thursdays in the 2014-15 season.  But after the failures of Cristin Milioti's "A to Z," referred to earlier on this blog, and Kate Walsh's "Bad Judge" (about a judge with an impeccable professional life and a sordid personal life) in the Nielsens - and after NBC's since-scrapped high-profile deal with the no-longer-respected Bill Cosby to develop a new comedy around him in the wake of Michael J. Fox's Comeback That Never Was -  NBC is getting serious.  Literally.  

After the Super Bowl at the beginning of February, NBC's Thursday night schedule will be all dramas for the first time in thirty-five years.  On February 5, "The Slap," a dark, new, limited-run family drama comprised of eight episodes, debuts at 8 PM Eastern, followed by the popular "The Blacklist" and the Hope Davis espionage thriller "Allegiance."  NBC is clearly issuing a direct challenge to the Shonda Rhimes-produced dramas airing on ABC that same night (including the new, huge hit "How To Get Away With Murder"), and the very idea of such a challenge has generated more laughs among TV critics than any of the sitcoms NBC has tried in the past year.

Anyway, these dramas promise to be more hard-hitting than the affable "Parenthood," which bids farewell on January 29 - the series being a victim of NBC's failure to produce enough Thursday night hits to lead into it.  NBC hasn't shown much of an ability to boost Thursday ratings in the interim, either. Its second live broadcast of a musical production - "Peter Pan," starring Allison Williams in the  title role and Christopher Walken as Captain Hook - failed to garner the same number of viewers as the 2013 production of "The Sound Of Music" with Carrie Underwood.  Like the earlier live show, "Peter Pan" was broadcast on the first Thursday of December.  NBC bosses say that they didn't expect their production of "Peter Pan" to be as successful as 2013's "The Sound Of Music" anyway, but it's clear that the Peacock Network's attempt to start a holiday television tradition of live musicals every first Thursday of December is off to an uneven start at best.

(Pointless aside I can't resist:  NBC is said to have been the network originally slated to air the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film on American TV before the negative reaction to the British airing put the kibosh on it being broadcast in the States for the 1967 holiday season.  At least then, NBC still had Bob Hope specials to fall back on.)  

Despite all that, though, NBC has had some general success in turning things around - it's actually leading in the 18-49 age demographic this season so far, with CBS leading among all viewers - so maybe Thursdays won't have a detrimental effect on NBC's numbers.  As for "Rhimesday," the idea of NBC or CBS trying to overcome ABC's Thursday night lineup -"Grey's Anatomy," "Scandal," and "How To Get Away With Murder," in that order - in the ratings as plausible as Allison Williams being able to fly without special effects.