Mid-season Comings and Goings
Because I get questions about it every single week, I figured I'd weigh in on the CW's announcement this week that the former WB Friday sitcom
Reba (once a bright spot on that dim night) is finally coming back on air. But very much on the margins. And there's a reason for that.
November is becoming an unexpectedly busy month for series and season premieres: ABC's
Day Break is filling in for
Lost, CBS'
3 LBS is replacing
Smith on Tuesdays, and ABC's wedding-day sitcom
Big Day and NBC's long-awaited return of
Scrubs (as part of a new Thursday two-hour comedy block) will both bow the week after Thanksgiving.
And now
Reba joins the party. But you'll have to make an effort to find her. The CW has scheduled the show for Sundays, in the unenviable slot of 7-8 pm/ET. On the first night back, Nov. 19, two new episodes will air back-to-back. After that, starting Nov. 26, an "encore"
Reba will air in front of a "fresh" episode (as they used to be called on the WB). If it looks like the CW is burning the show off in a bad time period (too early, no lead-in support), that's pretty close to the truth.
The CW never really wanted to inherit this show: It was imposed on them by a preexisting contract from the WB that would have made it more expensive to cancel the show than to keep it in production. It's an understatement to say
Reba doesn't exactly fit in with the rest of the CW's comedies (the African-American sitcom block, anchored by
Everybody Hates Chris and
Girlfriends, which now airs on Mondays). It wasn't the greatest fit on the young-skewing WB, either. I always thought that
Reba McEntire would have been a natural star on CBS, and her show would have meshed well on Mondays, when that lineup still included mainstream hits like
The King of Queens (still poised for a mid-season return) and the much-missed
Everybody Loves Raymond. Though
Reba was a success for the WB, it was lost there. Just like it's going to be lost on the CW now. Given the corporate synergy of CBS and the CW, I'm sorry CBS didn't try to pluck this one from obscurity for its final run.
But to accentuate the positive,
Reba at least is finally going to air, which I wasn't sure would even happen. This should satisfy, at least for now, the legions who've been writing me wondering why this show had vanished. Wouldn't it be a kick if the Sunday numbers for
Reba were actually good, and the CW would be forced to rethink its lack of enthusiasm for the show? I wouldn't hold my breath, but stranger things have happened this year.
On another front, I guess it was too good to be true to expect NBC to keep
Kidnapped on the air to the end of its shortened 13-episode run. It is being pulled immediately, and the remaining eight episodes will be shown on NBC.com. That's better than nothing, but it still baffles me that an hour on low-impact Saturday can't be turned over to letting a show like this play out its story. Yes, repeats of
Law & Order: Criminal Intent or whatever will do better. Duh. (Like we need another hour of that franchise on the schedule.) Another nail in the coffin for this year's riskiest trend of serialized mystery dramas.
