Fall TV, We Hardly Knew Ye
“It’s not going to be a fall that looks like any in the past,” says CBS Entertainment President Kelly Kahl of what should be the strangest — or, at least, skimpiest — fall TV season of our lifetimes. The surplus of programming the business had going into the Covid-19 shutdown has mostly run out. Cable and the streamers will have interesting shows here and there — like HBO’s Nicole Kidman-Hugh Grant thriller The Undoing and Showtime’s satirical miniseries The Good Lord Bird — but their
torrent of new series has slowed to a trickle. The outlets hardest hit are the ones that used to dominate in September and October: CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox, and the CW, all of which operate on filming schedules that have left the fall cupboards bare.
Every network is piling on contingency plans. At this writing, new quarantined seasons of The Bachelorette and Big Brother are slated, but what if contestants get sick? Most of the upcoming scripted programming hearkens back to NBC’s old slogan “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!” Fox is scheduling repeats of the Bad Boys spinoff L.A.’s Finest, previously only available to Spectrum subscribers. And the CW is dusting off old episodes of canceled shows Swamp
Thing and Tell Me a Story from corporate siblings DC Universe and CBS All Access. Some execs hope to need imports and repeats only until November, while others don’t expect new scripted originals before 2021. Until then, some strange shows may wind up on your TV. Why? Simply because they’re available. A.S.