Are you one of those people who just can’t get enough of Fox’s reality series Utopia? I’m sorry to break it to you – one of roughly 2 million people – that Fox is pulling half of the plug on the fledgling experiment, taking it off of Tuesday nights completely. So that gives you at least one more hour to watch the live streams, I suppose.
Utopia started off strongly enough, despite some problems, bringing in over 4.6 million viewers for its premiere last month. But then the ratings nosedived, and its second episode’s total of 2.4 million viewers still stands as its second most-watched installment. This past Friday’s episode brought in 1.9 million pairs of eyes. It turns out more people are watching the Friday night episodes anyway, so Fox thought it best to cut the lower-rated night. Perhaps things will pick up once more than one “pioneer” has been banished from the show.
For those unaware, Utopia is a year-long experiment in which a group of men and women are living in total isolation from the rest of the world, and they’re made to figure out a way to survive and create mini-societies, with everything streaming online 24/7. It seems like a voyeur’s wet dream (and probably is for some people), but the lack of constant drama and challenges was too much for people to accept twice in one week, I suppose. Who’d have thought that people have a basic cable “blurred out nudity” threshold?
So what will Fox being doing with that time slot instead? They’re taking the second season of Gordon Ramsay’s Masterchef Junior, which was supposed to debut on Friday, November 7, and they’re moving it up to Tuesday, November 4. I’m not sure what it says about our culture that we’d rather watch children getting judged by one of the culinary world’s most volatile personalities, but then I left my sociology degree in my other pants. Watch children AND adults laughing at falling whipped cream in the Season 1 clip below.
Fox will re-air the Family Guy/Simpsons crossover next week, with the week after getting reruns of the Simpsons and Bob’s Burgers season premieres. And then, of course, the end of October has the World Series, which usually throws regular programming into disarray anyway.
No matter what night Fox’s reality series plays on, I’m only interested in one series named Utopia, and it's coming to HBO with David Fincher. No blurring with that nudity.
