Is ‘Law & Order: SVU’ season 18, episode 6 new tonight? What’s on instead; making sense of scheduling madness

Tonight, NBC is making a decision when it comes to “Law & Order: SVU” that is somewhat frustrating — but it also makes a lot of sense. There is no new episode coming on the air, and that’s what you should be aware of first and foremost. The World Series went to Game 7, and given the monster ratings that are migrating over to Fox, there is zero reason for the network to try and compete with that. Do we think the World Series numbers will be that much higher than “Empire”? Probably not, but given that NBC is preempting their entire night, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to air one of their shows without all of the others.

Here’s what we can tell you instead about what NBC is putting on the air tonight: They will be airing both “Terrorized” and “Making a Rapist” back-to-back, meaning that you should be able to get a sense as to where we began this season; “Terrorized” in particular is a great episode, even if certain scenes are rather tough to watch.

We will give NBC the same critique here that we gave CBS for pulling their own programming, and that is why schedule it in the first place if you’re going to ultimately make this decision? Given that there would be election furor serving as competition in the first place, we would’ve opted to just sit this week out and chill until we get around to November 9. Then, hopefully everyone in the country (with an emphasis on “hopefully”) will be breathing a little easier and be down for watching some more TV.

The episode airing on the 9th is now “Bad Rap,” which features Wyclef Jean as a music producer who finds himself in a tricky position. There are two more episodes coming after that: The still-mysterious “Great Expectations” (love the name, as a Charles Dickens aficionado) and “Unstoppable” a.k.a. the Donald Trump inspired episode guest-starring Gary Cole, which NBC’s juggled around the schedule this fall like a hot potato already.

(Photo: NBC.)