Friday Night Death Slot

Synonyms:	graveyard shift, the graveyard spot
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Definition

The Friday Night Death Slot is the perception that a network moving or scheduling a program on Friday nights is a sign that the show is likely to be cancelled. The last network to really have a successful run on Friday nights was ABC with their "TGIF" sitcom block in the 1990s.

In 1968, Star Trek: TOS fans were in the midst of intense Fan Campaigns. One of them was the attempt to influence the night the show was aired on:

Back to your battle stations, crew, the Enterprise is under attack again!... As you recall from our last thrilling episode, Star Trek was in danger of being cancelled because of low Nielsen ratings, brought on in part by the Friday night time spot in the network schedule. Many viewers just aren't home on Friday nights; they're attending school or college events, or dating, or involved in other social activities. So Star Trek fans wrote a million letters, and NBC decided to renew the show. They tentatively scheduled it for 7:30 Mondays, which seemed likely to improve its Nielsen position. But did it remain there? No. ST is now scheduled for 10 PM Fridays. Which could mean more low ratings, which could mean cancellation in January.

In one of the most severe cases, The Nashville Network stuck ECW on TNN on Fridays and only promoted the show while it was on the air. It flopped and accelerated the demise of the promotion. The whole storyline with ECW vs. "The Network" derived from the promotion's real-life problems with TNN.

Links

• "Wikipedia". Archived from the original on 2022-05-11.
• "TV Tropes". Archived from the original on 2022-06-16.