‘Law & Order: SVU’ will not air ‘Unstoppable’ until 2017; ‘Chicago PD’ airing two-hour episode next week

Due to NBC preempting the Wednesday-night lineup last week due to the World Series, there are many schedule changes that needed to be made for shows like “Law & Order: SVU” and “Chicago PD” — and we’re starting to get clarification on many of them now.

Per a report from Deadline, tonight’s new episode of “SVU” (entitled “Broken Rhymes,” which was formerly titled “Bad Rap” — so many changes) will serve effectively as the last episode of 2016. The original plan was for there to be one last week and then potentially two more, but because of “Chicago PD” having some story that needs to be told regarding the Antonio Dawson character prior to the start of the “Chicago Justice” spin-off in the new year, it will be airing two episodes next week.

What this means in the bigger picture is that it is confirmed now that “Unstoppable,” the episode featuring Gary Cole as a Donald Trump-like political figure, will not air until January at the earliest — given his upcoming inauguration, it wouldn’t necessarily be a shock if NBC opted to push it further away from then. The delay until January for this episode was determined before the election on Tuesday, so there is no inherent connection between one event and the other — at least not yet.

We won’t get political in this article (we’re a TV site, after all), but even if the stories are serious on these shows, we still hope that viewers look at it still as an escape tonight and watch. The themes and the messages presented in these episodes are meant to be unifying, and a celebration in some way of heroism — not everyone may be perfect, but these are characters often doing their best to get things right. (Yea, Voight especially has some things to work on there from time to time, given what happened at the end of season 3.)

Photo: NBC