NCIS, Lethal Weapon, NCIS: New Orleans face possible State of the Union delay

Well, it seems as though Presidential politics may be throwing yet another wrench into major network TV schedules.

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Today, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi formally invited President Trump to deliver the annual State of the Union Address on Tuesday, February 5 — one week later than originally planned. This move is due to the government shutdown of the past several weeks; while the government may be reopened (at least for now), this move allows Congress time to properly prepare for the event.

For television networks, it may throw their programming into chaos. February 5 marks the first Tuesday of the key sweeps period, a time in which shows tend to deliver their biggest storylines in hopes of generating great ratings to show off to advertisers. Typically, CBS, ABC, Fox, and NBC avoid scheduling new programming on the same night as the State of the Union Address, given how all of them typically opt to cover the Address and Democratic Response instead. We imagine that this is going to be the case once more here unless someone decides to do something out of the ordinary.

So our suggestion is to watch your television schedules closely since there is a good chance that a show like an NCIS or an NCIS: New Orleans is going to be pushed back for a week and that schedules will be moved around down the road. The shows that are going to have the most trouble are the ones at Fox in Lethal Weapon and The Gifted, where the schedule was set up specifically so that the shows would be over at a very specific period of time. We imagine that they could try to air new episodes of these shows tomorrow, but doing so without any prior sort of promotion would give off the impression that the network is not altogether confident in their ability to generate good ratings down the road. (Both of these shows are firmly on the bubble.)

For the other networks we’ve specified here, there will likely be fewer issues just because of the fact that NCIS is the sort of show that is scheduled to air from September until May, and CBS can just air a new episode on an upcoming week that was previously specified to be a repeat. It’s mostly just frustrating for viewers who like to have a specified time in which shows are back, especially since the Tuesday schedule has endured a little bit of chaos already thanks to a Presidential Address from earlier this year in the first place.

Of course, check back to CarterMatt soon, as we’re going to have some additional discussion on this subject.