Fox Is Putting The Mindy Project And Dads On Hiatus
After weak starts, Deadline reports that half of Fox's Tuesday night comedy block have been put on hiatus. Due to low ratings, The Mindy Project and Dads will be bumped to make room for steady performer Glee. Tuesday night's will now be Glee in the first hour, followed by New Girl and freshman comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Mindy had been on a three-week ratings decline, bottoming out at a season low rating of 1.2 in the 18-49 demographic (meaning that the show only captured 1.2% of viewers aged 18-49 that were watching television at that specific time). Despite being in its second season, the show never managed to break into the twos; which ratings-wise, is still rather low. The comedy premiered at a 1.9, and decreased steadily since. Due to its many big name recurring and guest stars, as well as the addition of series regular Adam Pally, sources tell me production costs were especially high, and the return on investment was low. It may have been all the guest stars that did them in—the clever show has been largely inconsistent this season, with no real character development for its regular cast, with the exception of Mindy Kaling's character Mindy Lahiri, and Chris Messina's Danny Castellano. Everyone else seems to swing through zany antics, provided as a sideshow to the revolving door of men Lahiri is dating. The show will return in April, after Brooklyn Nine-Nine wraps up its freshman season.
Dads, despite its controversial start due to allegations of racism amidst truly terrible jokes, managed to pick up a full season order from Fox. The network is now backtracking on that by putting the show on hiatus with no set date of return, or even plans to at least keep working on the show. The Seth Macfarlane-produced comedy has struggled to find its footing throughout its freshman season; once it bounced back from the uproar over its Asian jokes in the series premiere, it fell flat on its face from lazy writing and stale punchlines. Despite having Giovanni Ribisi as a lead, who is arguably great in multi-cams (his recurring role on Friends as Frank Buffay Jr. was truly exccellent), both Ribisi and co-star Seth Green were given no real material to work with, and instead reduced themselves to tropes of slacker and type-A best friend.
The Mindy Project will air its last episode before its break on January 28th. Dads last episode will air February 11th.