How Current Events Affect TV Shows

It isn’t often that a show will be changed at the last minute for one reason or another. But it can, in fact, happen. Sometimes, current events will affect shows. And I mean beyond shows like talk shows or those that thrive off of current events. There might be changes, disclaimers, moving episodes, or anything that might not have happened were it not for these events.

First, let’s get one of the most obvious examples out of the way. 9/11 affected a lot of TV. From that Tuesday in 2001 when most of the networks stopped airing their usual programming to air coverage of the attacks and it was a while before they moved back to their regular schedule. This affected a lot of the shows that year.

One of the reality shows that focused on people finding their way back home was cancelled because of this. Survivor had to change where a season was going to be filmed since they could no longer go to the Middle East. An episode of The Simpsons that featured the twin towers was pulled from syndication for a while and returned with edits. That’s just a handful of what happened then. There’s a whole article on Wikipedia about what happened with shows after 9/11.

There have been other changes besides that. For one, after the Paris attacks in 2015, Supergirl was going to air an episode that featured bombing as a plot and then suddenly switched it out with the next one in line. I even remember it being confusing seeing the same promo air again after the new one aired and then I learned later about the switch. The same thing actually happened with NCIS: Los Angeles.

Other changes can affect things in other ways. Law and Order: SVU was going to air an episode that was inspired by Trump. The episode was pushed back after the infamous Access Hollywood tape aired. After Trump was elected, the episode was shelved and it might not ever air.

This type of thing, where shows are changed in some way due to current events, is not common at all and doesn’t really happen that much. It makes sense that not much would be changed as not much would ever need to be.

Current events can retroactively change certain things that were already established before. The Cosby Show is gone from reruns and doesn’t have much good to its name after we know now what we know about the star of the show. As for Arthur, it no longer airs episodes that had Lance Armstrong in them due to his doping scandal being made public.

I think that’s about it for this post. I don’t know what else to say outside of this closing. In case you were wondering why I updated the blog on Friday, it was simply because there weren’t enough read posts in one of the blog posts when I did the next one. That’s also why I might want to discontinue posts in this and other blogs. We’ll see if I do anything like that in the end or not.