NBC, CBS to share Thursday Night Football; how ‘The Blacklist,’ ‘Big Bang Theory’ will be impacted

Some of the rumors are unfortunately true when it comes to the NFL’s latest attempt to get a ton of money at the expense of other programming: NBC and CBS are going to share “Thursday Night Football” duties on this coming fall.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the two networks are each paying a whopping $225 million to broadcasts five games during the fall. Yes, that is an absolutely crazy amount of money, but they know that it will get them big ad revenue. So long as the NFL continues to generate the sort of ratings that they are for their games, there’s no reason for them to change things up.

We could rant about the NFL all day long, but nothing would happen and we’d probably be preaching to the choir here. Let’s instead go through how this will impact some of your favorite shows.

CBS – The first five games will be broadcast on The Eye, which means that shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Mom” could see their premiere dates either delayed or on a different night like Mondays. The good news here is that CBS will be able to start airing a Thursday-night programming block a little earlier than they have the past couple of years. Granted, it will be forced to go against the NFL on NBC.

NBC – Meanwhile, NBC will air the second batch of five episodes, which could mean that shows like “The Blacklist” could have an early hiatus in November, and then stay off the air until January or February. The only real positive to take away from this is that you may get a straight run of new episodes from the show’s return in 2017 to the end of the season.

Photo: NBC