Is ‘Criminal Minds’ season 12, episode 5 new tonight? Evaluating the delay, the future

It is somewhat crazy to think that today is November 2, and there are only four episodes of “Criminal Minds” so far that have come on the air. This season is clearly moving along at a fairly glacial pace, and it’s mostly due to a wide array of different scheduling snafus. First, the show started late as usual because of the “Big Brother” finale. Then, the show was preempted one week due to a Presidential Debate.

Now, it’s happening again, and this time around it’s due to the World Series. There is a Game 7 happening between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians, and given that nobody wants to stay on the air against that, CBS made the decision to not put a new episode of the series on the air. We certainly do get that, if for no other reason than that you don’t want to see ratings plummet when they wouldn’t otherwise.

Now that we say that, we will go ahead and throw this one asterisk out there: We do really wish that CBS never decided to schedule an episode tonight in the first place. If there was no baseball, you’d still be less than a week away from the election, and that in itself makes airing the show tonight rather risky. Sometimes, it’s better to not run the ratings risk and confuse fans. Up until today, “Criminal Minds” still had a promo and sneak peek for an episode tonight on the air; that generates confusion, though we’re not sure how much the network cares about that proportionally to viewers.

For those wondering, it does appear as though the rest of CBS is still going forward as planned, and that includes both “Survivor” (which rarely takes weeks off during the season) and also “Code Black,” which probably needs to air out its run to make way for other stuff come midseason. For “Criminal Minds,” there isn’t as much of a hurry.