Tyler Perry’s ‘The Oval’ Earns Season 3 Renewal

Tyler Perry’s The Oval has been renewed for a third season, due in large part to the success of the Season 2 premiere last week. According to a report by Deadline, the episode was an unexpected success for BET on Tuesday, Feb. 16, and it immediately followed Madea’s Farewell Play. It earned the show another order right then and there.

BET programmed The Oval Season 2 premiere right after Madea’s Farewell Play on Tuesday night, which has not been a particularly profitable block in its schedule recently. The movie reportedly got about 1.2 million total viewers — using the Live+3 metric to account for streaming views — while The Oval reached even higher with 1.5 million viewers. This includes both BET and BET Her, and is a huge success by today’s Nielsen standards.
That officially made The Oval the number one show for Black viewers in all of TV this week, including the key demographics of those ages 18-49 and 25-54 years old. The success carried on into delayed viewers, to the delight of the network and the creative team.

The Oval is considered a soap opera, telling the dramatic stories of a fictional White House from the staff all the way up to the first family. It stars Ed Quinn as President Hunter Franklin and Kron Moore as first lady Victoria Franklin, the first biracial couple to occupy the White House. The show premiered in October of 2019, and has received generally poor critical reviews.

Season 2 raised the stakes by making Hunter and Victoria Franklin even more maniacal than before and putting more of their plots in question. While Season 1 had 25 episodes, Season 2 will have just 22. Work on Season 3 will reportedly begin by the end of this year at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Georgia.

BET’s streaming service, BET+, is already airing a spin-off of The Oval as well, titled Ruthless. It stars Melissa L. Williams as Ruth Truesdale, and centers around a religious sex cult, according to a report by Variety. The show will now air on BET after The Oval, but it has not yet been officially renewed for a second season.

“I’m so grateful for the millions of fans who have been watching the new shows on BET. And this is only the beginning,” Perry said at the time. “I’m excited to bring these two new dynamic series to the BET Plus family and continue to tell stories of high-stakes drama with emerging talent.”

The Oval airs on Tuesday nights at 9 p.m. ET on BET. Disclosure: PopCulture is owned by CBS Interactive, a division of ViacomCBS.