Posted in: CW, TV | Tagged: black lightning, crazy ex-girlfriend, cw, entertainment, HRL, izombie, television

Black Lightning Repeat Beats New Episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

At the end of last month I did a deep dive into the CW's ratings for the new season and concluded that the network needed to accept that their audience watches superheroes. When it was announced that DC's Legends of Tomorrow would be taking Supergirl's Monday night time slot for nine weeks, one of the reasons given by the networks president Mark Pedowitz was a fear of over saturation. They didn't want to run Arrow, Flash, Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow and Black Lightning all at the same time.

I can understand the thought there — they don't want to alienate their other viewers. But, other than Supernatural, their comic related adaptations are what do best for them. Throw in Riverdale and iZombie and it's pretty obvious that the CW's audience likes genre television. Frequency, No Tomorrow, Valor, Dynasty, Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend just don't do the numbers that the other shows do.

If the fall numbers weren't enough to convince them, maybe they should take a look at last night compared to last week. On January 12th, the CW aired a new episode of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and got 660,000 viewers and a rating of 0.2 in the 18-49 demo. Last night the network played a repeat of the Black Lightning season premiere — or, as they call it, an encore presentation — and got 1.05 million viewers and a 0.3 in the demo. This also being the fifth hour of superhero shows aired for the week. The encore did better than the averages of Valor, Dynasty, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Jane the Virgin.

I'm not saying that the CW should do 10 hours of Arrowverse every week, but the audience at the moment seems to want more genre series.

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