In a very unusual move, NBC has already made major changes in the fall schedule that it announced just 2 weeks ago. In fact, it’s changed the centerpiece of that schedule, reversing the move of its breakout hit This Is Us to Thursdays, and leaving it instead on Tuesday.
As the chart indicates, This Is Us is now taking the new Law & Order: True Crime anthology series with it as its 10PM partner. The network is completely reshuffling its Thursday, now with a quartet of sitcoms followed by Chicago Fire, which is relocating from Tuesday. As part of the change, the Will & Grace/Great News hour is shifting to 9PM, and Superstore/The Good Place are returning to the 8PM hour they occupied last fall.
To state the obvious, the change is bad for the competition on Tuesdays (especially family comedies The Mick, Black-ish and the new The Mayor), and good news for the exiting Scandal–and technically for FOX’s new The Orville, although that one seems already beyond saving.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that NBC decided, upon further review, that throwing its biggest new hit directly against the final season of Scandal, not to mention 6 weeks of Thursday Night Football to start the season, wasn’t such a great idea after all, made even more problematic by the fact that This Is Us itself would have been sidelined in late fall when Thursday Night Football moves to NBC. Considering that the network is widely considered to have wrecked The Blacklist with an abrupt move to Thursdays, it’s not an illogical decision (and 20th Century Fox Television, which produces This Is Us, was also reportedly none too happy about the Thursday move). But all of this was known before the Upfronts, so the unanswered question is why NBC thought the move made sense in the first place.
About the Author
