The world has been spared once more from the heat-ray-based wrath of ABC Entertainment Group President/James Bond villain Paul Lee: Because enough puny humans watched the first three episodes of How To Get Away With Murder and Black-ish, ABC has issued full-season orders for both series. By traditional TV metrics like Nielsen ratings (and less-traditional metrics, like the “Number of days since a henchman was capriciously shoved into the shark tank (not that Shark Tank)” chart at ABC HQ), it’s been a very good fall for ABC: HTGAWM and Black-ish are the two highest-rated new series of the season. The premiere episode of the former set new records for DVR viewership, and it’s been helping ABC’s so-called Shondaland Initiative (codename: #TGIT) fight back against Thursday-night telecasts from the NFL, the only organization that could feasibly challenge Lee for world domination.
How To Get Away With Murder’s 15-episode order confirms statements Lee previously made to his sworn nemesis, the Television Critics Association, about the show’s “limited series” status (and the limited time Viola Davis can take off from making movies). Black-ish’s 22-episode order, meanwhile, necessitates a transition of showrunners, and Deadline reports that former Happy Endings executive producer Jonathan Groff (not that Jonathan Groff) will join the show when Larry Wilmore departs for Comedy Central’s The Minority Report. Reports of Paul Lee’s own spin on Minority Report—in which programming and scheduling decisions are handled by a team of precognitive mutants—could not be confirmed at this time.