'Superman & Lois' Final Season Flies To The CW’s Fall Schedule
Brad Schwartz may know what he’s doing after all, giving the surviving scripted shows their respect
Superman & Lois isn’t coming back to The CW this season after all. The Nexstar-owned network revealed more midseason premiere dates at their Television Critics Association winter press tour Executive Session on Thursday. This includes fellow survivors All American on Monday, April 1 for its sixth season, and Walker season 4 on Wednesday, April 3. Both All American: Homecoming and Superman & Lois were missing. It turns out, they’re not being neglected, they’re just a bit out of range.
For a regime that was prepared for with such violence of mass cancellations for two consecutive seasons leaving only those four (scripted) survivors, it seems The CW president genuinely wants to see them succeed. For example, he isn’t dumping Superman & Lois’s fourth and final season in the summer, arguing it to be “wasted” there. Instead, the series’s final run will be in the fall. Schwartz believes it will rival the competing networks’ fall broadcast slate with the proper regular season sendoff it deserves. “I watched the first episode last night,” Schwartz remarked. “It will make you cry.” While several pilots on other networks have also been pushed to the 2024-25 season, long-running CBS series Blue Bloods will also be finishing its run with the back 9 episodes of its 14th and final season in that fall timeframe as well, so it’s not alone in that regard. It’s a move that gives vague reminder of when Supergirl, the show Superman & Lois was originally spun off from, was able to premiere its final season somewhat sooner because of a hiatus by the latter back in its first season corresponding to a positive COVID case-caused production pause. It led to the second consecutive year where a CW series started its season in one traditional season and finished in the next. The first was Supernatural’s remaining 7 season 15 episodes running from October 8 to November 19, 2020, and then Supergirl’s back 13 episodes running from August 24 to November 9, 2021.
As for All American: Homecoming season 3, it is likely debuting in the summer, but not as a shunning from cold feet or a lack of confidence. It’s quite the opposite actually, as Schwartz said the show is “finally getting to a place where it can stand on its own” without lead-in from the series it spun off from, as it was positioned in its first two seasons. Practically a gesture of independence. Schwartz said that the plan is All American will seamlessly transition into Homecoming’s season, schedule-wise, not plot-wise.
While Superman & Lois is ending with its fourth season, its remaining three cheaper surviving brethren may very well still have a bright future ahead of them with the new ownership. “CBS and Warner Bros. have been so wonderful working with us on those shows and we’ve gotten both of those shows to an economic area where, as long as they keep rating, there’s no reason we can’t keep doing them,” Schwartz said.
Because the fall season is the fall season, a premiere date for Superman & Lois’s final season will likely come in May, during whatever fall schedule reveal event The CW will have, while Homecoming’s could happen closer to the end of April (on the April side than the May), the endpoint of their currently-known midseason schedule. Who knows if a full-strength Nexstar-owned CW will continue the traditional October start or if they’ll bump back a few weeks into the regular mid-late September start like the other networks. It’s going to be interesting. Watch this space for coverage of what shows the network has been picking up, because the breadth has only gotten wider.
