It's no secret that NBC's Constantine hasn't been living up to its potential. The Friday night time slot at 10/9C seemed to be NBC setting the show up for failure. While fans clamor to social media using #SaveConstantine in hopes of getting more people on board, many see this show, which didn't even get the order for a full season, coming to an end very soon.
While the show did recently move to an 8/7C time slot on Friday nights, it yet again failed to live up to NBC's standards. In its new time slot, the show dipped down to 3.1 million viewers and a rating of 0.8 among 18-49 year olds. During a recent TCA press tour, Jennifer Salke and entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt discussed the show and whether or not it will get a second season:
"Still talking about [renewing the show],” Salke said. “We wish the show had done better live. It has a big viewership after [live airings] in all kinds of ways, and it has a younger audience. The live number is challenging. It hasn’t kind of come out of Grimm the way we wanted it to. We love the show. I think it’s fair to say we’re really still talking about it."
The question rises "what were the live numbers compared to the dvr or streaming numbers?" The way we watch television now compared to 10 years ago is vastly different. Not everyone watches television live because we live in this age of convenience where we can have what we want at our fingertips. Frankly, as a fan of Constantine, I'd love to see the difference in numbers.
While Salke has this mildly-optimistic tone within her comments, Robert Greenblatt seemed to be pleading almost immediate regret about doing the series.
We got on the bandwagon of these shows based on comic books, and maybe there are too many of them. It’s a popular series of comics, but it’s not The Flash. It’s not Batman, so maybe it suffers a little bit there. But as Jen said, it’s a show we really liked. We love Matt Ryan, who is the star of it. I think we did right by the fans who didn’t like the film that was made of it, and I think the future is still up in the air on that show.
He's right. John Constantine is not Batman or Flash. They took a chance on a character who isn't a super-hero or as widely popular and expected Batman or Flash results. The show truly does stand on its own merit and is a good but not great adaptation of the HELLBLAZER comic book series. But is the show really still up in the air? While there's this glimmer of hope in that quote, it feels like they're just saying so it doesn't cause an uproar with fans.
It all comes back to "why is this show not doing as well as fans think it should?" I've done my fair share of finger-pointing because I'm a fan, but maybe it just doesn't have the broad appeal we all think it does. Sure, when Constantine came back from its break, in its new time slot, it wasn't only towards the tail end of the season, with pre-established characters and world, but it was also the second part of a two-part story. However, that shouldn't matter. It still took a hit in the ratings.
We could sit here all day and talk about television like how Firefly wasn't picked up or give hope and say Arrested Development got three seasons on FOX without having a huge audience or even that the first season of Parks and Recreation is awful compared to the rest of the series. However, it's pointless and the future is in the hands of NBC and it doesn't look incredibly great. Sure, there's a glimmer of hope for Constantine, and frankly, I, along with a many other Constantine fans, would love to see a second season to this show. For right now, let's just keep our fingers crossed and pray to Mnemoth that we can get some more of this show.
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