‘The Conners’ Is the Biggest New Comedy of the Fall–For Now

TV ratings are important. They’ve always been important, but now big ratings will get you a phone call form the president (just insert the longest possible groan/sigh here). It feels like ratings matter more than they have in previous TV seasons, and because everything has been made into a political firestorm in 2018, there are even a whole lotta political implications to how well certain TV comedies do in the ratings. Seriously. We’re all so frazzled and confused by the world around us that we’re trying to discern clues about the state of the union from how many people watch multi-cam sitcoms. Are people watching the new Murphy Brown? Are all the conservatives that wanted Last Man Standing back actually tuning in? Will Murphy Brown and Last Man Standing viewers ever get along again? Etc.

Sitting on a beat up old couch with a cold one in one hand and a remote in the other at the intersection of ratings and politics is The Conners. As good as The Conners is, it’s impossible to talk about the new show without also talking about politics and ratings. Roseanne came back for a revival season earlier this year, a move ABC made in direct response to Trump’s election. Then the show came back to truly mind-boggling numbers, which made the entire internet freak out. And then after the season finale, Roseanne Barr tweeted out some racist nonsense and was speedily fired, her show canceled. But with all those people out of a job and so many A-list actors under contract, ABC and the cast and crew found a way to carry on. That’s where The Conners comes in.

Since its debut last month, The Conners has been at the center of a lot of talk, all centered around ratings and politics. Would conservatives tune in to a show without Barr? Would The Conners win over liberals that loved the show’s original, more progressive run? Would the show tank in the ratings, or could ABC salvage some success out of the biggest PR fiasco in recent memory? So many questions, and all the answers you find online seem to be heated by hot takes. Either The Conners‘ debut was a failure because it wasn’t as big as Roseanne’s, or it was just fine because it was on track with where Roseanne left off in the spring. But which is true and which is fake news?

I wanted to cut through all the noise and get answers backed up by the actual ratings themselves. And forget just comparing The Conners to Roseanne; I wanted to compare it to every single comedy on every major network. Go big or go home, right? To do that, I looked at the final ratings for every night of the fall TV season and I. MADE. CHARTS. I mean business!

First up, here’s a look at the entire slate of fall 2018 network comedies.

No surprise, The Big Bang Theory is still on top with an average of 12.61M viewers for the 8 episodes it’s aired so far. Right below it is Young Sheldon, with an average of 10.84M viewers, and right below it… is The Conners! Now, The Conners (and all of ABC’s Tuesday night lineup) have only aired a handful of episodes so far as they didn’t premiere until mid-October. Still, it’s averaging 8.32M viewers, which gives it a slight lead over the #4 show, Mom (8.01M–also, why do I never hear anyone talking about Mom?).

Next, let’s take a closer look at specifically ABC’s comedy lineup.

The Conners is by far the most-watched comedy on ABC. It’s also the most-watched show on ABC, period–including dramas, comedies, reality shows, whatever (although The Good Doctor isn’t too far behind). The big surprise here has to be that freshman sitcom The Kids Are Alright is the #2 comedy on ABC with 5.42M viewers. It’s lead-in? The Conners. With an average of 5.23M viewers, Modern Family is far from its ratings heyday; it’s audience was more than twice that between 2010 and 2014. The takeaway here is that Roseanne ended as ABC’s #1 show, and The Conners began as ABC’s #1 show.

Zoom out just a little bit and you’ll see that The Conners is also the biggest new comedy of the season.

Revivals aside (I’m getting to them in a second), CBS has scored a hit with The Neighborhood (6.45M) and Fox’s The Cool Kids (5M) is doing just fine on Fridays, which is usually a dead night.

So about those revivals…

The Conners is the king of revived network shows, although it’s not that big of an empire. Each network has a revival to call its own, and The Conners is the only smash hit. Fox’s gamble on Last Man Standing has paid off okay. The show debuted with a solid 8.13M and has settled into an average of 6.55M, which is around where it was when ABC canceled it in 2017. On the other end of the political spectrum is CBS’ Murphy Brown, which is practically tied with Last Man Standing at an average of 6.54M viewers. No doubt CBS hoped the Murphy Brown reboot would get them Roseanne revival numbers, but that’s not happened.

Speaking of the Roseanne revival, lets talk about its ratings. Headlines were made when it debuted to 18.44M viewers in March, but everyone quickly forgot that the season wrapped in May with 10.58 viewers. Roseanne lost an average of 1.12 million viewers a week (it aired 9 episodes across 8 weeks). So, what does that look like when compared to where The Conners is now?

The Conners debuted just 20K lower than the Roseanne finale, and has more or less kept the same viewership decline Roseanne saw over it’s 9-episode season. But even though The Conners is big right now, it can’t afford to keep shedding viewers at Roseanne’s rate–or, more specifically, The Conners rate. Whereas Roseanne lost an average of 1.12M viewers every episode, The Conners is losing an average of 1.22M. If the show doesn’t level out soon, if it keeps dropping at those rates, it’ll fall into Last Man Standing/Murphy Brown/The Neighborhood territory.

The overall story of this season (so far) seems to be that there’s no real ratings juggernaut when it comes to comedies. The Conners is doing okay, for now. CBS’ crowd-pleasers are still on top, NBC’s critical darlings are hovering at the bottom (please watch The Good Place!), and the rest is jumbled together in the middle. Murphy Brown’s probably not as big as CBS hoped it would be and Last Man Standing is probably about as big as Fox hoped.

The main takeaway, IMO, is that network comedies are in a rough spot ratings-wise. The quality is there, especially if you’re as big a fan of multi-cam shows as I am. But week after week, the top-rated shows are procedurals, family dramas, and competition shows. The only comedies that are consistent ratings winners are the ones that star a Sheldon. Revivals aren’t a sure thing anymore; Will & Grace is NBC’s highest-rated comedy, but it can’t break 4M viewers. Critics love The Good Place and Fresh Off the Boat, but they’re both hitting consistent series lows. Low ratings isn’t just a Conners problem, it’s a TV problem.

Stream The Conners on Hulu