THE SKED: FOX Tries To Rescue Tuesday

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When we last left baseball’s beleageured network partner, FOX was trying to recover from a particularly knotty night of rain delays.  The result was that what was supposed to be Wednesday’s episode of THE X FACTOR, cut off before its ending across most of the country, had to be rescheduled to Tuesday Oct 23.  This, however, was going to hurt the network’s sitcom line-up, which would be off the air for a solid month due to a combination of Presidential debate, baseball, and election coverage.  It would also put X Factor in direct competition with The Voice, not a face-off that’s gone well for FOX thus far.

In attempt to solve these problems, FOX has announced a modified version of its Tuesday schedule.  From 8-9:30PM, the network’s usual sitcoms will air, with RAISING HOPE, BEN AND KATE and NEW GIRL in their regular timeslots.  At 9:30PM, however, a reedited 1-hour version of X Factor will take over, pushing the end of primetime to an unusually late 10:30PM.  This keeps most of the network’s sitcoms alive in the minds of viewers, and moves X Factor out of The Voice‘s clutches.

The only loser now is THE MINDY PROJECT, which has been struggling already and will indeed have been off the air for a month when it returns on November 13.  The rationalization is presumably that the show already has its back-order, and will have plenty of time to recover from the blow over the rest of the season… but preemptions when a show is trying to form viewer loyalty and build momentum are always dangerous.