Fox’s The Exorcist has some of the best acting of the fall TV season and genuine thrills. So why aren’t audiences watching?

The Exorcist‘s biggest problem isn’t the Devil — it’s television ratings.

Over its first three episodes, the Fox series has pulled in an average of 2.33 million live viewers. It’s getting soundly beaten by CBS‘s Hawaii Five-0, ABC‘s Shark Tank and even the first hour of NBC‘s Dateline NBC, which brought in some two million eyeballs more last week.

That doesn’t make any sense considering the quality of The Exorcist. As we sat down to create our Top 3 TV Performers of the Week, one of the show’s stars was going to be on the short list for the third straight week — and that would’ve been the third different actor. The series’ entire main cast has been outstanding, getting better as the stakes rise and they have even more mayhem to play with.

Ben Daniels is a force of nature as Father Marcus Keane, the man whose entire life has been battling demons at the cost of his own happiness (and perhaps sanity). His intense energy is balanced out by the quiet earnestness of Alfonso Herrera’s Father Tomas Ortega, who just wants to help everyone but is slowly watching his optimism fade.

And as the series has fleshed out the Rance family, they’ve become much more than the demon’s innocent victims. Geena Davis is both strong and vulnerable as mother Angela, trying to save her daughters — well played by Brianne Howey and Hannah Kasulka — from evils both supernatural and domestic. The Exorcist has also thankfully begun giving more to Alan Ruck, who’s undervalued as Henry, the father who’s finally getting clued into the fact that his family is not normal.

What really sets The Exorcist apart is that it’s not satisfied being solely a horror series. Yes, there are plenty of startling, creepy, downright cringe-worthy moments, but the show aims to be more than that.

Its characters are well-written, with something new revealed every week as it becomes clear that they’re not all just players in this demonic game; there’s at least one thing that’s brought them all to this battleground. It quickly introduced a wider plot that takes the story beyond simply fighting one demon, presumably setting the show up for additional seasons.

But first it has to get there. So why can’t this excellent series get the ratings it deserves?

Here are a couple of reasons why The Exorcist may not have landed on your radar, and what we think can be done to clear them up:

1) It’s a horror show

The horror genre has plenty of fans; just look at how many new horror movies come out each year, or the success of American Horror Story on Fox’s sister network FX. But there are also people who aren’t interested in horror for a variety of reasons: They don’t like to be scared, presume that the show will have a lot of blood and gore, or it just isn’t their cup of tea.

Horror isn’t as easy to sell to a mainstream TV audience. It’s not like a procedural where the viewer knows generally that they’re getting a cop show or a lawyer show.

The Exorcist is a lot more than just a horror program; it’s actually a very well-rounded series that happens to be in the horror space. But that’s very hard to communicate to viewers unless you can get them interested in the first place. If Fox can find a way to show that the series has more to offer than scary demons and creepy music, maybe more viewers will take a chance on it.

2) It airs on Friday nights

Fridays are one of the hardest nights to launch a TV show. The “Friday night death slot” is one hundred percent a real thing, because on Friday evenings many people don’t want to stay home and watch TV. They’ve just finished with work for the week, have gotten paid and want to go out with their friends or loved ones.

It’s very telling that this time last year, Fox was using the Friday 9 p.m. time slot to air reruns of their other shows. They weren’t even trying to put original programming in there. The Exorcist is way up over those reruns of Rosewood, but it’s still in a far less than ideal position, and it’s going to take a bit for audiences to realize that they can tune into something new there.

On that note, this really should be a 10 p.m. show, but it’s stuck because Fox has to allow for the 10 p.m. local news. That doesn’t help either.

3) It has a terrible lead-in

Hell’s Kitchen is not a proper lead-in for The Exorcist. It seems like someone looked at the schedule, saw that the Gordon Ramsay cooking competition has “Hell” in the title and thought it’d be entertaining if they paired that show with the one about demon hunting.

There would seem to be virtually no crossover between the people watching competitive cooking and the people who would want to watch The Exorcist. And at 8 p.m., some of those people may still be having a late dinner. Do you want to go from seeing people make food and/or eating food to watching a multiple murder or a man on fire? Eh, no.

In its 16th season, Hell’s Kitchen is flagging. It only brought in 3.1 million viewers last week. That’s not a large lead-in audience to even consider sticking around for The Exorcist. Scheduling can be a huge part of a show’s success or failure, and this situation just is not working.

4) It’s all about the name

The Exorcist is one of the best, if not the best, horror films of all time. It was the first film in the genre to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, among ten nominations it earned, winning two Oscars. It’s been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress and was one of the highest-grossing films of 1973.

But that was 1973 — more than 40 years ago. And while there are many people since who do know what The Exorcist is, there are whole generations of TV viewers who haven’t seen it and don’t care. For some people, their horror knowledge is American Horror Story and/or the modern horror film franchises. The name carries no weight with them, and Fox can’t rely just on the people who know it if they want to create a hit.

They have to find a way to make The Exorcist accessible to a mainstream audience; not just the people who know the original film, and not just the people who like horror. The pieces are all there within the series itself, as it’s transcended its genre to be a phenomenal new show.

But Fox needs to communicate what it really has to offer to the public — whether it’s moving it to a new time slot, finding a different way to advertise it, or putting another series in front of it — or low ratings might finish it off before the demon does.

The Exorcist airs Fridays at 9/8c on Fox.