Abandon Ship! CSI Cyber Is About To Crash!
It’t not often that I get the perfect time, but my article about the Slow and Painful Death of CSI Cyber seems to have been more prophetic than normal. Without a couple of days the show lost it’s time slot, and now new that Ted Danson has flown the coop.
Stories have popped up (like this one from EW) that has Danson leaving the CSI universe that he join in 2002, and moving to NBC for a new sitcom with Kristen Bell called Good Place. While Bell is apparently not giving up her other work, it seems than Danson, who was reportedly on a single year extension of his contract with CSI, has put DB Russell into a body bag and called it a day.
CSI Cyber itself has one foot on the grave and the other on a really bad run of ratings. Down 20-25% from season 1, CSI Cyber has not been clicking in on Sunday nights, especially while running against Sunday Night Football, which typically soaks up a lot of their target demographic. You have to remember when season 1 of CSI Cyber came out, it was post football, and had a great lead on from the original CSI franchise in the same time slot. It should also be noted that Sunday is NOT exactly the best time slot around, the original CSI franchise lost about 20% of it’s viewers when it got shipped off to this outpost.
CSI Cyber will get a couple of Wednesday night runs, perhaps to see if the time slot is the problem rather than they show, and perhaps to get some fresh eyeballs on the product. The producers of the show have indicated that CBS contracted them for a full season (22 episodes) and that they will respect the contract. That suggests that maybe Cyber might re-appear in the future, perhaps has a summer replacement series or perhaps as another test to see if they can generate good enough ratings to keep it in production for one more season. At this point, it looks pretty doubtful, Cyber is not clicking with it’s true target demo (which should be 18-35 males) or a wider demo (18 to 49), making it pretty unlikely that much more will happen.
An interesting side note is that CBS has sent The Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu series Elementary to the Sunday slot. This is another series I really enjoy, but one that has been shedding viewers since the start. It has 12 million plus viewers at the start of season 1, and now in season 4 is poking along with about half that many. Sunday night may be it’s death warrant as well, it’s border line to get a 5th season. Sunday is sort of programming purgatory, you could go either way from there.
