Rico knows what he's watching on Thursday nights

Brian Stelter has an article in The New York Times about Thursdays:

“Welcome to 8”, read the Twitter message from Dan Harmon, an executive producer of Community, to Bill Prady, his counterpart on The Big Bang Theory. It was May 19th, and CBS had just made the biggest television scheduling move of the season, shifting the hugely popular sitcom Big Bang to Thursday nights at 8, a particularly lucrative time slot for the networks. Mr. Harmon was being neighborly, like a homeowner welcoming a newcomer with a fruit basket, while fretting about his sure-to-be-falling property values. It felt as if a Terminator were being sent to destroy his year-old, critically acclaimed NBC sitcom, Mr. Harmon jokingly added.
An hour later Mr. Harmon electronically greeted an executive producer of the new series My Generation on ABC, Noah Hawley, to the same time slot, and by the end of the day the two men were talking about meeting for drinks.
So began an unusually candid conversation, largely in public view, among the producers of all five shows on Thursday nights at 8 on the major broadcast networks. They avidly talk to their fans on Twitter, and from time to time they also talk to one another. In a brutal and often opaque business, their messages convey just how personal television can be for its creators.
“There’s so much at stake; there’s so much competition, but none of it is our fault,” Mr. Harmon said in an interview this week, after noting that “none of us ask for our time slots”. He added: “It’s a beautiful thing that probably only Twitter can provide in this day and age, a reminder that there’s absolutely no reason for the creatives to have any animosity toward each other.”
Of course, since they are creatives, they enjoy poking fun at one another. Last Thursday the producer of Bones, on Fox, Hart Hanson, wrote to his counterparts: “I forgot to wish you good luck tonight! Or did I? I forget.”
Thursdays are exceptionally competitive for the networks. It is the second-costliest night of the week for advertisers, behind Sundays, according to Advertising Age, largely because movie studios, retailers, automotive dealers, and others want to capture viewers’ attentions heading into the weekend. There have been legendary matchups on Thursdays, like when Fox placed The Simpsons against NBC’s reigning champ, The Cosby Show, in 1990. A few years later NBC coined the phrase Must See TV for its Thursday sitcoms like Cheers and Friends.
A little more than two weeks into this season, Community and The Big Bang Theory are co-existing relatively peacefully. Big Bang has averaged 13.5 million viewers, a gain of 3 percent from last season, when it on Monday nights at 9:30; CBS said the show had exceeded its expectations. Community draws a much smaller audience: 4.8 million viewers so far this season. But NBC said it was satisfied with the ratings for the moment, and pointed to its particular strength among 18- to 34-year-olds, a particularly enticing demographic for movie advertisers.
Also at 8 p.m. Bones is up six percent, and The Vampire Diaries, on the CW, is down eight percent over last season’s averages. Mr. Hawley’s My Generation was the loser in the closely watched competition, having been canceled by ABC on Friday after just two low-rated episodes.
The next day Mr. Hanson expressed his condolences to Mr. Hawley on Twitter. On the web there is an obvious strain of sympathy among producers, something that Mr. Harmon learned after Community started in September of 2009. At first, he recalled, he playfully disparaged Bones on Twitter, but Mr. Hanson “only ever responded with smilies and electronic hugs.” “He Buddha-ed me,” Mr. Harmon said.
The two men haven’t met in person, but Mr. Harmon’s mother is a big fan of Bones, so Mr. Hanson recently mailed her a box of DVDs and t-shirts.
Mr. Prady has largely remained above the fray of the producer chatter. He didn’t respond to Mr. Harmon’s welcome message in May, and in an interview he said he decided back then “not to have a conversation about the other shows that are on at 8. I see no point in turning Twitter into professional wrestling prematch boasting,” he said, opting to use it to talk to fans instead.
But last week, when Big Bang fans asked Mr. Prady what he thought of Mr. Harmon and Community, he answered on Twitter, “Seems like a nice and funny guy.”
Mr. Harmon shared that remark with his followers, along with a joke: “See? Assassins can have class.”
Kind words and commiseration about network television life are one thing. Outright promotion of the competition is another. When Mr. Hanson of Bones wanted to tell Mr. Harmon how much he enjoyed Community last season, he did so through Twitter’s private messaging function, rather than sending it to him publicly. “In a way Twitter is a direct injection into your fans, and I don’t want to confuse them,” Mr. Hanson said. “I don’t want them watching Dan’s show. I want them to watch my show.” After reflecting for a moment, he added: “I don’t mind them recording Dan’s show.”

Turns out, to Rico's surprise, that the move to Thursdays was actually a promotion, as shows on Thursdays cost advertisers more (since it's getting toward the weekend) than other nights... (But doesn't the Great and Powerful Woz, in the video below, bear a terrible similarity to Jabba the Hutt?)