As the standard TV season heads into the home stretch, most broadcast shows know by now whether or not they’ll be coming back in the fall or beyond. That’s not the case yet with the Fox comedy Cooper Barrett’s Guide to Surviving Life, although the network just pulled a schedule switcheroo that doesn’t look like it will end well for the freshman series.
Cooper Barrett, which debuted earlier this year following a ribald ad campaign, already received a pretty gnarly hit from Fox a few weeks ago when it got pushed to the pre-primetime slot of 7:30 p.m. ET. But now even that looks like a good place to be, as the newly revised schedule for Sunday, April 17, doesn’t have Cooper Barrett on it at all anymore, according to Deadline. In its place will be a repeat of a Simpsons episode that leads into a new Simpsons, without a speck of shenanigans-causing twentysomethings to be seen. The last Sunday of Fox’s month is dedicated to airing the American Country Countdown Awards, so it’s unclear if this is the network’s way of pulling away from the comedy while the pulling away is good, or if there’s a different plan for it.
But let’s be real here. The show is far closer to cancellation than it is getting any other kind of future. The ratings weren’t reaching 2 million people for the live airings and the key 18-49 demo ratings were equally dismal. Not a lot of viewers have been tuning in to hear what Cooper’s survival advice has been, and the people who initially tuned in weren’t overwhelmingly satisfied by the way things were going then, either.
Now, Fox did take Brooklyn Nine-Nine from its Sunday Funday lineup and moved it to Tuesdays, where it nabbed a Season 4 order. So there is indeed the off-chance that, instead of putting it through an immediate cancellation, Fox will just run the remaining unaired Cooper Barrett's Guide to Surviving Life episodes during some other unenviable timeslot during the week, or perhaps a little marathon on a Friday night now that Sleepy Hollow Season 3 is complete. Or maybe the episodes will show up on Hulu in August when nobody really remembers what this show was in the first place. The schedules for Sundays in May won’t be finalized until tomorrow, so who knows what we’ll be seeing next month?
Whatever happens to it in the long run. I certainly hope this doesn’t hurt newcomer Jack Cutmore-Scott’s chances of finding more TV leads in the future, as he’s definitely got the charisma and talent to head up another show. Let us know how you guys feel about the flailing comedy’s latest setback.
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