Agents Of SHIELD Shoved To Fridays Next Fall
It’s been a bumpy few years, but as of Season 4, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD has finally become compelling, must-watch television. So naturally ABC picked this time to bury it on Friday evenings at 9 PM. We should be happy we get a Season 5 at all, but this makes us uneasy.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that it’s FOLLOWING Once Upon A Time at 8, which if you didn’t know, just had two-thirds of its main cast leave. There is barely any life left in it now, and the odds of this zombie show helping, rather than hindering, SHIELD’s chances of viewership are low.
ABC has ordered 22 episodes of SHIELD for the 2017.2018 season and eight episodes of The Inhumans, the other Marvel series we previously mentioned. The Inhumans will air its episodes first, in the same time slot, and then SHIELD will take it from there. It’s very strange that ABC would go to the expense of creating an IMAX release for the first two episodes of Inhumans when they’re going to be Death Slotting the thing.
This is not the only move the networks are making that endangers what few quality shows they have. ABC, NBC and Fox have all slotted their returning comedies against each other on Tuesday nights, and the last time this strategy was attempted, many of them got cancelled. I’m preparing my “Save The Good Place” petition already.