How it works

A pilot has aired inside a series you already own, and next season's schedule has one hour in it with nothing booked. You are the person who decides. There is a slate to spend and six choices to make with it: how many episodes you order, how much on-air promotion you buy against them, how many weeks you leave the thing alone before you start reading its numbers, which hour of the week it goes into, whether you say any of it out loud before it is final, and — the choice the result actually turns on — the order in which you would give your reasons if somebody across the table asked you to justify the whole thing in one sentence.

Every number here is arithmetic done in front of you. The slate meter is the running sum of what you have committed. The reach meter is promotion multiplied by what the hour you picked actually delivers, so six weeks of promotion behind a dead slot is worth less than two weeks behind a live one. The posture you end up with is a lookup on three plain thresholds: whether the order is a season or a try-out, whether anybody was ever going to find it, and whether you left it alone long enough to become a programme rather than a verdict. Move one dial and the whole thing recomputes. Nothing is random and nothing is remembered — the address bar carries the entire slate, so the link you copy opens on your plan and not on a blank one.

The six dials, and what each of them really costs

The order. A short one is a hedge you can still walk away from in the autumn. A long one is a promise already made to a crew, a studio and an audience, and the promise is the expensive half.
The promotion. The only line on the page you can still change after the schedule has been printed, and the dearest thing here per unit — which is exactly why it is the line that gets cut.
The grace. The weeks you refuse to judge it. Nothing in this business is cheaper to buy and harder to keep hold of once the first set of figures is in the building.
The hour. The strongest hour you own hands the new show an audience already sitting there and costs you the one part of the schedule you were not worried about. The cheap hours cost little and deliver less. Off the schedule altogether costs you no hour at all and produces no number you can defend it with — or be beaten with.
The announcement. Saying it early buys goodwill on the day and spends the thing you will want in eight weeks: the ability to quietly change your mind.
The reasons. Five of them, ranked. The only dial that costs nothing, and the only one you are marked on.

Why your reasons are marked against your own spending

Anybody can say the demographic was what mattered. The question worth asking is whether the plan you have just built behaves as though it did — because a stated reason the budget contradicts is not a reason, it is a line for the press release. So each of the five is checked against your own arithmetic, in code, with no opinion anywhere in it. Lead on the audience being loud and then buy them one week of promotion and bury the hour, and the page will say so. Lead on keeping it cheap and then commit most of the slate, and it will say that too. Ranking the five honestly turns out to be harder than it looks, and having all five come back backed is not possible inside the slate you are given — which is not a flaw in the tool. That is the shape of the job.

What this page will not tell you

It does not tell you what any real network decided, what any executive said at any presentation, or how many names a campaign gathered. Those are checkable things and this page has not been able to check them against a source it could actually open, so it names each one and leaves it blank rather than printing a figure it picked up second-hand. Every result ends with that ledger: what the page is willing to state, what it is not, and what each unchecked line would need before it could be filled in. A page about how commissioning arguments get made is a poor place to be casual with a number, and there is no version of the word "roughly" that belongs next to a rating or a petition total.

This is fan-made, and unofficial

This is an unofficial fan tool about how a television network decides what to commission, made in tribute to a fandom that has argued about one such decision for years. It is a free, unofficial fan tool — an unofficial fan tribute, made for fun. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Warner Bros. Television, The CW, or any official rights holder of Supernatural.

Every word on this page was written for it. It reproduces no dialogue, no script text, no lyric and no image from any television series, and it makes no factual claim about any real programme, executive or decision — where a real figure would be needed, the page names the gap and leaves it empty. Iron Realms — the strategy game the rest of this site is about — is an original fantasy world with its own map, its own houses and its own art, and has no connection to the world of Supernatural. This corner is kept separate on purpose, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting otherwise.

Where the rest of them are

If you would rather be asked something about yourself than about a schedule, the crossroads quiz asks the hardest question in this wing. The Supernatural section lists every quiz and tool in this wing, and the fan tributes hub has the rest of the corner. If you would rather play something than fiddle with a tool, Iron Realms is free and runs in a browser tab.