Neither Sheldon nor Sherlock will be sitting on the sidelines when
Thursday Night Football fills CBS’ dance card for eight weeks this fall.
During a conference call to discuss the company’s fourth quarter earnings, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said the network is “not going to wait until November” (as a few had speculated) to launch the eighth season of
The Big Bang Theory aka TV’s most watched, highest rated comedy. Nor will
Elementary, if picked up for third season, be made to ride the pine for much of the fall.
Instead, CBS’ strongest Thursday shows will launch their new runs “on some other night,” our sister site
Deadline quotes Moonves as saying, while
Thursday Night Football will be employed as a vehicle to heavily promote those and other fall premieres.
Once CBS’ eight-game
TNF schedule has wrapped,
Big Bang and
Elementary would return to their Thursday time slots.
The decision to get
Big Bang on the air sooner versus much later makes all the sense in the world, given not just its boffo ratings but also the fact that the cast will be entering Season 8 having negotiated
significant pay bumps. An extended summer vacation on top of that? Uh,
bazinga.