‘Designated Survivor,’ ‘Us’ get best new-season buzz
Remakes of MacGyver, Lethal
Weapon and The Exorcist rebounded last week as the new fall TV crop’s most conversationsparking shows. But two original series — ABC’s Designated Survi
vor and NBC’s This Is Us — drew the most favorable comments, followed by NBC comedy The
Good Place, a distant third. Those are the latest findings in an ongoing study by Engagement Labs’ Keller Fay Group shared exclusively with USA TODAY. The New Jersey researcher is polling viewers about which shows they’re talking about offline, and scraping data from social-media networks to gauge online chatter, with decidedly different results.
Online, This Is Us regained the top spot last week, swapping places with NBC’s Timeless. New at No. 4: ABC’s American House
wife, which premiered last week, though viewers spoke less positively about it than most other new shows. (It entered the offline chart at No. 9.)
ABC’s Conviction and CBS’ Kevin Can Wait were among the shows generating less talk com- pared with the previous week. CBS shows, which skew to an older audience, accounted for three of the most talked-about new shows offline, but none of them ranked among the top 10 in terms of online chatter.
Four weeks into the season, “we’re starting to see the shows level off a bit” as viewing habits gel, says Keller Fay research manager George Noble III. And while
Lethal has “stayed pretty consistent” in positive feedback, Mac
Gyver and The Exorcist have found less praise as weeks go by, a finding also reflected in their ratings. The least positive chatter has centered on Housewife and
Timeless, which dropped from their premiere week, suggesting “advance buzz was positive, but when people actually got a chance to watch they weren’t that impressed,” Noble says.
The survey says about half of Americans talked about one or more new shows last week, almost evenly split between men and women. The offline survey is based on a statistically representative sample of 700 Americans ages 13 to 69. The online data is derived from social-media networks, blogs and forums. In all, 17 of fall’s 20 new shows had premiered as of last week.