Allen Gregory: Has FOX Cancelled the Animated Series?

FOX has released their new schedule for mid-season and Allen Gregory wasn’t on it. What does this mean? Has the animated series been cancelled?

Allen Gregory revolves around an arrogant and delusional seven-year-old, Allen Gregory De Longpre (Jonah Hill), who’s being raised by his persnickety father, Richard (French Stewart), and his father’s hunky life partner, Jeremy (Nat Faxon). Neither Allen Gregory nor his father are fond of adopted Cambodian daughter Julie (Joy Osmanski). Because of the recession, Allen Gregory is forced to start attending a public elementary school. He meets his best friend/personal servant Patrick (Christina Puccelli), his idol Joel (Jake Johnson), and his crush, the school’s senior citizen principal (Renée Taylor)

Following a slew of negative reviews, the series debuted on October 30th. It attracted a 2.4 in the 18-49 demographic with 4.77 million total viewers putting it in last place for its timeslot. The series tied with The Cleveland Show as FOX’s lowest-rated show of the night and was even out-performed by a repeat of The Simpsons. This certainly wasn’t an auspicious beginning. A year earlier in the same timeslot, an episode of The Cleveland Show performed 30% better.

Allen Gregory fell by nearly 13% in week two and still hasn’t stopped falling. This week’s installment fell an amazing 21% in the demo, hitting a new series low of a 1.5 in the demo and 3.18 million viewers. It currently ranks 12th out of 13 scripted shows on the network, beating only Fringe which airs on Friday nights. It has “D+” demo grade on the network report card and, the way things are going, it won’t take long for that grade to drop even lower.

FOX ordered just seven installments of Allen Gregory and, the way things have gone, they’re very likely glad they didn’t ask for any more. There are two episodes left to air and they’ll be finished airing by December 11th. The network could run repeats after that but may decide to run something else. New episodes of Allen Gregory have done so poorly that its hard to imagine that reruns wouldn’t do even worse.

FOX hasn’t officially cancelled Allen Gregory and has no reason to announce it if they did, at least until the show’s off the schedule. If they did, the ratings would only go down.

They’ve made no mention of putting new episodes into production — even though they ordered additional scripts way back in July. Animated shows need a longer lead time for production so FOX has often handed out very early renewals. Not so in this case.

In the end, it makes no sense for FOX to renew the Allen Gregory show for a second season. It’s performed very poorly and the network has plenty of better-performing animated fare.

But, what do you think? Do you like the series? Do you think it should it be cancelled or renewed for a second season?

Image courtesy FOX.

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