Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: cbs, entertainment, fox, gotham, supergirl, television

Gotham V Supergirl And What It Might Mean For Television

For the first time since the onslaught of comic based television series started, we are going to have two from the same universe going head-to-head… Gotham vs. Supergirl.

Now we already have Marvel's Agents of SHIELD going up against iZombie on Tuesday nights, but they don't really go after the same audience and come from different publishers and where one is a show set in a superhero universe the other is a police procedural set in a zombie universe. So it's not quite the same. Plus a bad night on ABC would often still be a good night on the CW.

But here we have a Batman prequel featuring a lot of the villains and characters that DC fans love going up against a Superman offshoot featuring a lot of the villains and characters that DC fans love.

Gotham has really been picking up steam in their second season introducing a storyline that seem to be right out of the Court of Owls series. A lot of critics have turned around on this show and are really liking it now that it has the kinks worked out. Supergirl is from executive producers Greg Berlanti and Andrew Kreisberg who gave us Arrow and The Flash. It's more of a straight forward, lighter superhero show and gives us a lead that even caught the eye of Jeb Bush.

So what does this TV version of Batman V Superman mean? We won't really see the numbers until the second week as CBS is running a new episode of The Big Bang Theory at 8 pm then Supergirl at 8:30 with a ninety-minute Scorpion after. That should give the premiere the best lead in the network has to offer. The NCIS franchise may have more total viewers than BBT, but not in the demographic the network wants here. So it will be the following week when the two really go head-to-head.

The potential here is that it could change how networks look at ratings. They currently still cling to the overnights as the best gauge for a shows success even though viewers record and watch more shows now than ever. So if Supergirl flies in and trounces Gotham, then I'd expect Fox to adjust their schedule. They know what they have in the series so I'd expect a move if the numbers drop significantly. If Gotham is too entrenched and Supergirl can't really make any headway, then there is a chance the series gets axed because of the cost of making it.

But what if the numbers are pretty even? This is where things might change. If the shows are pulling in pretty similar ratings then I think both networks would start taking the +3 and +7 numbers into account along with streaming and webviewers. Why? Because both shows come from the same company, Warner Bros TV, and they will want to stress that both of their series are a hit even against each other… showing that number of viewers of a show when it airs may not be the best judge of how popular a show is. And getting networks to realize that could give shows more opportunities to survive regardless of how many people tune in on a specific night and time.

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