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MediaBuyerPlanner: Commander in Chief, the most-watched new show of the season when it launched seven months ago, has been axed by ABC, Media Life writes. The show peaked with nearly 17 million viewers in its second week, but the network soon canned creator Rod Lurie in October and took over the show itself, reportedly because the show-runner’s scripts were coming in late and costing the network in delayed production.
Also in October, as ratings drooped a bit, a “conspiracy theory” began circulating that the show was really a ploy to help pave the way to the White House for Hillary Clinton.
ABC replaced Lurie with Steven Bochco of NYPD Blue fame. That, according to Media Life, was the wrong choice, as Bochco changed the focus from the personal to the political and caused the show to wither both creatively and in the ratings. By Jan. 24, the last show from Bochco, the audience had shrunk to 10.4 million.
The show was given a three-month hiatus for revamping, this time under writer Dee Johnson, part of Lurie’s original team. Commander in Chief was then changed to Thursdays at 10 p.m., against NBC’s ER and CBS’s Without a Trace – a timeslot in which ABC has not had a hit in more than a decade. The show averaged 7.5 million total viewers in its three Thursdays, barely half the 13.8 million it was averaging before its hiatus.
ABC has pulled the final three episodes of the show from the season’s schedule, with PrimeTime returning to the 10 p.m. timeslot starting Thursday, reports ComingSoon.net. The remaining Commander episodes will likely air sometime in June.