Elementary Fans Rejoice at Season 6 News
If you are a reader of this site, you know that I have been a pretty big fan of CBS’s show Elementary. A modern day retelling of Sherlock Holmes starring Johnny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu has been for me one of the few bright spots in US network programming that seems to have greatly suffered in the last decade or so. The ratings for the show have been reasonble but not off the hook, and CBS has shuffled it around it’s lineup a couple of times, finally putting into a truly horrible time slot on Sunday nights. That means that for much of season 5, Elementary was delayed by NFL football games and such. The ratings, not surprisingly, sort of suffered.
At the end of season 5, the bad news came: For Elementary season 6, CBS would only be ordering half a season, and the series wouldn’t start until some time around the end of the football season. For fans, this was a crushing blow that suggested that the series was on it’s way out, but that CBS was going to let it have a shorter run to close out story lines and end the series nicely.
CBS seemed to be sticking with that until very recently. The show that was brought in on Sunday nights to the slot Elementary is in has not done all that well. Wisdom of the Crowd starred Jeremy Pivens, but it has been cancelled after it’s initial 13 episode run. Apparently there are some issues of a brewing sexual assault scandal for the star, and the show’s ratings haven’t been all that stellar. It seems that NCIS: Los Angeles and Madame Secretary will move back to their original time slots, and Elementary will land at 10PM.
The better news is that, with the failure of Wisdom of the Crowd, CBS has decide to order more episodes to bring Elementary Season 6 up to 21 episodes (only slightly off a normal 24 show run). The last episode of WotC is sceheduled for January 7th, 2018 or perhaps January 14th, so Elementary should be back on the air no later than January 21st. With 21 episodes and without any interruptions in the schedule, that would mean Elementary Season 6 would run until the middle of June, 2018. As CBS doesn’t have the Superbowl or the winter olympics, it seems likely that they will run the shows pretty much one after another.
If season 6 had been written as a farewell, it will likely have to redone, or at least re-structured to make it to 21 episodes. With Sherlock’s mental health in play, this could be a very complex season that ends in any number of tragic ways.
