Aside From The Muppets and Quantico, ABC's New Fall Shows Could Struggle

We’ve reached the midpoint of Adweek’s week-long look at each broadcast network’s new fall shows. Today, the spotlight is on ABC, which last season came in third among adults ages 18 to 49, but in recent years has made substantial progress in building formidable programming blocks on multiple nights.

Because of that, ABC’s fall schedule leaves four nights untouched from last season: Mondays (Dancing with the Stars and Castle), Wednesdays (comedies The Middle, The Goldbergs, Modern Family and Black-ish, followed by Nashville), Thursdays (Shonda Rhimes' TGIT trio of Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How to Get Away with Murder) and Saturdays (college football).

As a result, the network has fewer holes to fill with new programming than usual—which is a good thing given that ABC has produced the most underwhelming freshman fall class of any broadcast network. That’s a big comedown from last fall, which featured two impressive debuts in How to Get Away with Murder and Black-ish.

As we've been saying all week, while a pilot isn’t always the best way to judge a show’s potential, it’s often the only episode that audiences watch before making a decision about whether to stick around or cut bait, especially with all the other new and returning shows fighting for attention. With that in mind, here are ABC’s fall shows from least promising to most promising.