Coronavirus Changes: Version One

First, I did not watch an episode of Survivor today, but had to update this blog or I wouldn’t be able to update my Survivor blog for a while. Second, I don’t know if there will be a second version of this yet or not. I might do that in the future, but might not be able to or want to. I mean, I still haven’t done version two of the Weinstein affect and really should in the future, even if not much has changed since I did the last version of that. Now there have been a lot of changes on TV thus far due to covid19 and I thought that I would do a blog post on some of what has happened thus far.

I honestly don’t know as much as I could about this. I have no idea what all the different affects might be thus far. For one, I thought that all of the TV shows were allowed to finish filming whatever current episode they were on when the filming shutdowns started. But this does not appear to be the case for The Flash, which aired the episode before the current one they were filming as the last one of the whole season while keeping what was filmed of the next episode for the next season premiere.

I also know that Empire didn’t finish filming its second to last episode and might not have the series finale that they planned, even though they want to do it in the future. But I also am lead to believe that Prodigal Son did take this option of filming the rest of the current episode they were on and changing some of what they suddenly had to with other episodes. What I do know is that there have been some changes with the planned schedules that were going to happen at some point this season that won’t be here until the next season as a result. Let’s get to all of them that I can think of.

The ABC’s Bachelorette will now be on during the fall on Wednesday nights. Big Brother won’t be on this season on CBS. The $100,000 Pyramid won’t be on this season on ABC. The Amazing Race’s filmed season will be airing in the fall instead of the summer as originally planned for the future. Whether or not they will be able to do more of the season that they had started to film after all the shutdowns and travel restrictions are over is unknown. The future of that show could very well be in jeopardy.

The CW has delayed a lot of their summer programming from last year. Pandora, The Outpost, and Two Sentence Horror Stories will air during the fall, possibly having already filmed seasons before the shows had to stop filming or expected to have stuff done the rest of their shows do. The final season of Supernatural is set to return during the fall at some point, previously set to end this season. I do not understand the reason why they couldn’t go into post production of what was filmed as it seemed like most other shows were able to add special effects and whatnot like that from what I can tell.

A lot of shows had to abandon their seasons and could possibly see more of what was written or maybe even filmed in the future. Other shows ended up being cancelled entirely, not even filming what was to be the end of their seasons yet having a good ending (from what I’ve seen) regardless of this. There was at least one person who thought that existing shows would get renewed when they otherwise would not have been, only he wound up being wrong about this in the end. Most shows did not benefit and some had even worse outcomes than you would otherwise think. Only the animated shows on the FOX network got renewals that might not have otherwise happened if they were live action.

What is supposed to be CW’s normal schedule won’t be here until January. Also kind of missed is that The Masked Singer and MasterChef Junior will be the only regular FOX shows that aren’t animated that are planned to air when they normally would have or had at other times during the fall. They will be making use of otherwise new or previously aired elsewhere programs.

While shows being delayed until later isn’t actually that new of a thing, it has been happening a lot of times this season. Filthy Rich was at one point going to air back in January when Deputy wound up airing instead. It will finally air in September by the looks of things. It is probably already filmed. Big Sky on ABC was also like this at some point: set to premiere sooner or at least this season, but won’t air until it is later. This also creates something new that we haven’t seen as much before.

As one might expect, there are a lot less new shows than we typically have seen in the past. Both NBC and ABC are set to air only one new show each during the fall, possibly hoping that they can film some more new things in time for midseason. CBS will only air two new fall shows. FOX and the CW both seem to be unusual by airing a lot of new shows. Only one of FOX’s new shows already aired on National Geographic and a good chunk of CW’s new programming aired internationally or on some other network first before it is set to air here.

We still don’t know what the effects of this virus will be and it is unlikely that we will know for sure right away. They could get back to filming soon and all of the networks are banking on there being enough of their shows filmed in the future in order to do the schedule they have announced. If they can’t get to that in the future, you’ll be seeing lots of changes in the future. Survivor hasn’t started filming its next planned season yet, even though it is on the schedule for the future. At some point, they might not be able to do a fall season unless they can air some while they film it. This is what I know about thus far and feel like sharing right now. I might do more on this later.