‘NCIS: Los Angeles’ season 8, ‘Madam Secretary’ season 3 delayed by NFL; see start times

It’s a familiar practice these days for those who watch Sunday-night television on CBS to be pushed back slightly by NFL coverage, and the best you can hope for sometimes is that they start even remotely close to on time.

The first thing that we should note is that this week is one of those in which the start times for “NCIS: Los Angeles,” “Madam Secretary,” and “Elementary” were already delayed because of later NFL game thirty minutes. CBS had that on the schedule, but even with that in mind, the games still ran long and “60 Minutes” did not begin until around 7:50 p.m. on the East Coast. Therefore, don’t anticipate “NCIS: LA” until 8:50, “Madam Secretary” until 9:50, or “Elementary” until almost entirely out of primetime. We’ve seen this happen before, and sometimes with the 10:00 p.m. show we end up seeing an outright preemption as a result of it. However, we haven’t seen any indication as of yet this is happening here.

Is there a way for this to change? Unfortunately, no. This is just the way that things have been for the network for a rather-long period of time now, and with NFL ratings being exponentially greater than anything in primetime, the incentive for CBS to change things just isn’t there.

If you really hate the way that things are scheduled at present, unfortunately the only thing that we can say as a result of that is to start looking to either record the programs with a bit of extra time added just in case, or watch them online the following day. Of course, we recommend somewhere like on CBS’ official site or All Access (if you subscribe there), since that will get some more ad revenue to the shows.

One final note: This doesn’t impact anything on the West Coast. We’ll have reviews for “NCIS: Los Angeles” and “Madam Secretary” up later in the night. (Photo: CBS.)