ABC's Thursday night swept the television screen last September 25 on the new series, How to Get Away With Murder. The pilot episode of Murder, opened the season with 14 million viewers in its 10:00 pm timeslot.
ABC takes this as a tremendous success after executive producer Shonda Rhimes' success in Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away With Murder gave the network its highest-rated Thursday evening in the span of five years.
If ratings hold according to Nielsen, How to Get Away With Murder might become the most watched television show on prime time television and can even possibly top over CBS' highly rated Thursday Night Football.
Created by Peter Nowalk, this legal thriller focuses on the story of a criminal law professor Annalise Keating (played by Viola Davis) who teaches at Middleton University. The pilot begins with four of Keating's students, Wes, Laurel, Connor, and Michaela, arguing with each other in the middle of the woods about how to dispose of a body. With their promising futures in the legal world on the brink, they decided to flip a coin to tell the fate of the body. After that, the scene flashes back to three months before when it was the students' first day for Keating's class.
The pilot also showed a lot of sex scenes between Keating and a detective. In another scene, Keating's student, Connor, used his sexual prowess in a bar to sleep with a tech man to uncover something for a case.
Viola Davis, 49, had discusses her new role on the series and revealed what made her want to be part of that series. At the 2014 Television Critics Associations last July, Davis told US Weekly that "I dove at [this role]. I love the fact that she's messy and mysterious. She's not necessarily nurturing and 'Come sit on my lap so I can talk to you, baby." She also said that "She's a woman. She's sexual. She's vulnerable. I wanted a character that took me out of my comfort zone."
