Fox bosses talk ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ cancellation, reviving ‘Last Man Standing’

After a week of generating headlines and Twitter chatter for dumping a group of shows—most notably “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”—and officially announcing its revival of ABC’s “Last Man Standing,” Fox executives broke their silence on the motives behind their decision-making.

Fox Television co-chairs Dana Walden and Gary Newman took part in a conference call with reporters Monday morning to discuss the network’s schedule for the 2018-19 season. On the decision to eliminate “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” from the network’s schedule, Walden said a variety of factors came into play—including a push to boost the profile of Emmy-winning “Bob’s Burgers” and limited programming hours due to the addition of “Thursday Night Football” in the fall.

“We loved the show,” she said. “We ordered it throughout five seasons, which is a great length of time for a single-camera comedy. Ultimately we felt like we didn’t have the exact right place to schedule it this year. We’re really happy, though, that it’s found a new home.”

That new home is with NBC, which announced Friday that it was rescuing the Dan Goor-Mike Schur comedy for a sixth season. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” is produced by Universal Television, the studio sibling of NBC—keeping the show vertically aligned within the company.

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The move to resuscitate “Last Man Standing” also illustrates the increasingly important push by broadcast networks to stock their shelves with programming they own. Licensing deals with streaming services and international outlets are increasingly becoming a crucial source of profit at a time when declining viewership is affecting advertising sales.

In the case of “Last Man Standing,” which originally ran on ABC from 2011 to 2017, Fox bosses said they had been looking to add the show, which is produced by its studio counterpart 20th Century Fox Television, to its lineup ever since ABC canned the series. But not having the right show to pair it with last season delayed the idea. And while all this pre-dates the success of the “Roseanne” revival, seeing the ratings response to the revamped classic sitcom didn’t hurt in their push to find a way to make room for the Tim Allen-led comedy.

The revived “Last Man Standing” will air Fridays, in the same time slot it occupied when it aired on ABC, alongside fellow mutli-camera newcomer “The Cool Kids.”

“I think everyone took a good hard look at the performance of ‘Roseanne,” Walden said. “It did so well and it certainly did remind us that we have a huge iconic comedy star in our Fox family in Tim Allen. “We always felt like for whatever reason, ABC didn’t really prioritize ‘Last Man Standing.’ We always wondered how it would do if it was given a better opportunity and prioritized more, in terms of a network’s marketing agenda. So yeah, we were emboldened, I would say, by the performance of ‘Roseanne.’”

Fox will parade its new schedule later on Monday at its presentation to advertisers in New York.

READ MORE: The details on Fox’s fall schedule »

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