News Corp reported Thursday morning that Kevin Reilly, the chairman of Fox Entertainment, will be stepping down from his post at the end of June. Since Reilly has overseen the broadcast network for the past seven years, first as its entertainment president in July 2007 then as its chairman of entertainment starting August 2012, the announcement comes as a big surprise and leaves critics wondering what his departure might mean for Fox.

Over the past year, Fox has been struggling to keep up with its competition, due in large part to their once-popular shows like American Idol and Glee proving unable to keep their audiences. This past season, the wide variety of singing competition shows on other networks caused Idol to lose, on average, half of the 20 million viewers that used to regularly tune in. As a result, the network will be reducing the number of times per week it runs Idol. Glee was once considered a musical phenomenon, but now brings in a mere 3 million viewers per episode. Reilly’s comedic picks The Mindy Project and New Girl are well-received by critics and have definite fanbases, but not enough viewers tune in each week.

Fox ended the most recent TV season in fourth place in overall viewers with an average of 7.5 million viewers a night, largely aided by NFL football games and  Super Bowl viewers. Nielsen data by Horizon Media’s Brad Adgate reveals that the network drew an average of 4.8 million viewers per show (excluding sports) for this past season, which is a significant drop from 7 million per show in the 2011-2012 season.

Reilly made efforts to help the struggling network by controversially ending Fox’s pilot season. Pilot season is the process where a network pays for a number of shows to make a pilot and then chooses from those pilots which shows will go to series. It’s an expensive process that has become common in Hollywood, but Reilly believed that ending it would save the network money and allow them to compete with more flexible cable stations. In a recent Hollywood Reporter article, Reilly stated:

“The broadcast development system was built in different era and is highly inefficient. It is nothing short of a miracle that talent can still produce anything of quality in that environment. When they are competing, frankly, with a huge swath of cable that has a lot of flexibility and order pattern and flexibility in when the shows can go on, cable networks are able to course correct creatively and reshoot and recast.”

Fox has already started looking for Reilly’s successor. The network is expected to look at outside candidates as well as executives who currently work within the company. Industry insiders believe either John Landgraf, who runs FX networks, or Dana Walden, co-chairman of 20th Century Fox Television, might be in line to take over network programming.