Friday night death slot
television term
The Friday night death slot (also Friday evening death slot) is a perceived graveyard slot in American television. It implies that a television program in the United States scheduled on Friday nights (typically, between 8:00 and 11:00 p.m. ET) is likely to be canceled.
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. However, this narrative can be contradicted with examples of shows that had consistent audiences on Friday nights over consecutive years despite competition, such as Miami Vice from 1984 to 1989. By the 2000s, the term 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. With the collapse of the traditional network viewing model where viewers had to be in front of the TV to watch shows (and then the evolution from VCR or DVR capabilities to almost all shows being viewed increasingly through on-demand streaming media), the stigma of Friday night scheduling is much less evident or considered today than in the past.
Affected series by network
NBC
One of the earliest and most famous examples of the graveyard slot was Star Trek: The Original Series.
The second season of Star Trek aired on Fridays from 8:30–9:30 p.m. (Eastern Time).
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5503551. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984 and 1989.
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This entry incorporates text from “Friday night death slot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.