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#62: The Legend Of Korra Moves To Friday Night For Season Two

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It's all Bolin's fault, he didn't want to get up that early on Saturdays.

The Legend Of Korra was the critically acclaimed successor series to Avatar: The Last Airbender, debuting in 2012. After a successful season one in which the show averaged right around four million viewers in its Saturday morning timeslot, the show would see a steep ratings decline for season two, followed by being removed from Nickelodeon's schedule entirely halfway into season three, with season four also relegated to online and the Nicktoons network. Fans will give you lots of different reasons why the show went into such a steep ratings decline, but here I'd like to posit a fairly simple solution: the move from Saturday mornings to Friday nights for the show's second season. Nick may have had many reasons for moving the show: its mature subject matter made it inappropriate for a morning audience, it may have noted the success of iCarly and Victorious in nighttime slots and wanted to repeat that success... but ultimately, when the show moved to Friday night, its ratings fell almost immediately, bleeding a million viewers from the season 1 finale to the season 2 premiere, and falling off sharply soon after that. Why was Korra such a success on Saturday mornings? Ultimately, Saturday mornings are were Nickelodeon traditionally aired its biggest cartoons. Yes, there actually was a crossover audience between Spongebob Squarepants and The Legend Of Korra: kids liked both shows, despite the vastly different subject matter, and the shows helped boost each other's ratings via cross promotion. When Korra was removed from its home on Saturday mornings to stand on its own, it had to rely on hardcore fans only, with few new people having the opportunity to discover the show. There are other factors at play, certainly, but the biggest one and the easiest one to control was the timeslot, and the fact of the matter is that Nickelodeon blew it by moving Korra. There's an old saying, "you dance with who brung you", and when Nick ditched its Saturday morning dance partner, it left Korra twisting in the wind. The move from Saturday morning to Friday night didn't kill Korra,, but it inflicted a slow and festering wound that would lead to the series being pulled from Nickelodeon entirely within just two years.