The term possibly began as a reflection of certain programs' dominance of Friday night in the 1980s and 1990s, which resulted in decreased ratings for those scheduled at the same time.
[1][2][3] By the 2000s, it was used in reference to the belief that young, single Americans rarely watch television on Friday or Saturday nights, thereby removing from the household what is considered the most lucrative demographic for advertisers.
One of the earliest and most famous examples of the "Friday Night Death Slot" phenomenon was the original Star Trek on NBC.
The poor ratings in the time slot affected the show after it, Jerry Van Dyke's sitcom Accidental Family, leading to its failure after less than a season[7] and angering Van Dyke, who was desperate for a hit and openly (but unsuccessfully) campaigned for NBC to give the show a better time slot.
[8] After Star Trek fans deluged NBC with a mail-in protest, producer Gene Roddenberry stated that he was promised the same 8:30–9:30 time slot for Season 3, but airing on Monday instead of Friday.
[9] Star Trek instead remained on Fridays, moving to the even less desirable 10:00 p.m. timeslot (one that had been used mainly for filler and throwaway documentaries the previous season).
In an effort to revive Friday night television in the 1990s, and to compete with ABC's successful TGIF block of family comedies airing opposite it, CBS first attempted to compete with ABC launching a comedy night in the fall of 1992 with The Golden Palace (a spin-off/continuation of NBC's The Golden Girls), Major Dad and Designing Women, along with a new sitcom from Bob Newhart, Bob.
In general, however, CBS has found ways, particularly in the years following the cancellation of the Block Party, to be at least somewhat more successful in the Friday night time slots than its broadcast competitors.
The following are examples of ABC network shows that started on Friday nights and lasted a few episodes, or were moved to Friday nights, lost the battle for television ratings, and were eventually canceled: In September 2018, ABC cleared the 9:00 p.m. Eastern time slot on Friday nights to make room for the expansion of 20/20 to two hours as a result of ABC News changing the program's format to include true crime stories in an attempt to address the program's declining viewership.
Upon its move to the "death slot," UPN/The CW Friday nights saw a substantial increase in ratings over UPN's movies and most of The WB's sitcoms.
In the spring of 2015, The CW's Cedric's Barber Battle fell victim to the Friday night death slot, only airing 8 episodes out of the 10 produced before being pulled off the schedule completely.
[citation needed] In the 1990s, two shows that found a lot of success on Friday nights were Fox's The X-Files and NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street.
The former show did so well on Fridays that it became an attractive option for the network to try and move past an all-comedy Sunday night lineup when it made the move to 9 p.m. EST in 1996 (and did well for several years afterwards), while the latter was mainly placed on Friday nights because NBC's dominant 1990s lineup simply had no place for the show on any other prime one-hour spot (it was considered for the Thursday 10 p.m. EST spot heading into the 1994–95 season, but the network decided to go with ER there instead).
TGIF series have included Perfect Strangers, Full House, Family Matters, Boy Meets World and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
During the early 1970s, ABC had a successful Friday-night comedy lineup with The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, Room 222, Love, American Style and The Odd Couple.
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit developed a large and loyal audience on NBC on Friday nights when it was moved there from Mondays in the middle of the first season in January 2000.
Following SVU on NBC, another wildly successful show, The Blacklist, took up the death slot for nearly 8 full seasons before being moved to a Wednesday 10/9c schedule in the middle of 2021.
For a majority of the show's run, the program was scheduled on Thursdays, Mondays being the only weekday it was not aired on, and it has maintained its audience in all time slots.
Disney Channel did not begin airing original programming on Friday evenings until 2001; premieres of its made-for-cable films moved to that night from Saturdays that year.