ABC to Air 'Happy Endings' on Both Sundays and Tuesdays in January (This Does Not Bode Well for the Show's Future)

There's two quick ways for a network to announce to the world that they'd like to kill off a show without actually killing it off. The first move is to stick a show on Friday, when no one will be around to watch it live. The network can then cite low ratings as an issue and cancel the show. This is what NBC originally planned on doing with Community. In classic NBC fashion, though, the network managed to screw that plan up and will now air Community on Thursdays (but not until February).

The second move is to start erratically changing the day of the week a show airs on in the middle of the season. This is what happened to Scrubs constantly (but Scrubs somehow survived that). It looks like ABC is going to see how well Happy Endings can hold up to this move now. According to a Hollywood Reporter report, the network will air additional original episodes on Sunday Jan. 13 and Jan. 20, while still airing the show in its regular Tuesday slot. This is after ABC already moved Happy Endings from Wednesdays. It gets worse. "Both [Happy Endings and The B---- in Apartment 23 are slated to go off the ABC schedule in March," says The Hollywood Reporter, "and any leftover episodes would likely air in the summer."

Sadly, we shouldn't be surprised that Happy Endings is in trouble. When it used to air on Wednesdays, ABC paired it with Modern Family, giving the fledgling comedy a great lead-in. Now Happy Endings is stuck with Dancing with the Stars as its lead-in, which isn't the greatest in terms of matching audiences. Ratings for Tuesday comedies are down across the board, with Fox's New Girl and The Mindy Project having issues of their own. Everyone knew it was a bad idea when Fox and ABC decided to go head-to-head on Tuesday, and now these sitcoms are suffering for it.