• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 10, 2025

It seems so quaint, staging a fall Premiere Week as in days of old -- so retro, so 20th century, so linear.

CBS is staging one next week, the only one of the four broadcast networks to set up the beginning of their fall season in this old-school way -- four new shows and 11 returning shows in an eight-day period, Sunday to Sunday.

It’s like the 75-year-old ice cream parlor on Main Street, USA that draws crowds after the movie ends in the vintage theater next door. 

Through some combination of miraculous events, it’s still there, handing out ice cream cones and banana splits in the same way it always has.

TV shows premiering and returning at a scheduled time in the same week? That system goes back so long that a generation or two of younger people have likely never even heard of it.

Nevertheless, the strategy of mounting a promotion push for linear TV still makes sense as long as audiences are still “tuning in” (how quaint!) in numbers sufficient to draw A-list commercials, which appears to be the case.

Aspects of the old system still work, or at least they are supposed to. One of them is hyping the new and returning shows during Sunday football games.

This Sunday night (October 12), both “Matlock” and “Elsbeth” return for new seasons following NFL football, where they will no doubt be promoted incessantly. The same goes for all of the CBS shows scheduled for next week.

By keeping CBS prime time very much alive, Paramount benefits two ways. CBS prime time still provides a revenue stream for the company, but it also represents a powerful promotion platform on which to introduce new shows and sustain old ones.

The day after they air, fresh off their runs on CBS, all of them migrate to Paramount+, where even more money is made from them.

Perhaps the only difference between this particular Premiere Week and previous ones is that this one is in October, a few weeks later than premiere weeks of old.

This year’s CBS Premiere Week consists of new and returning series on five nights. On Monday, it’s “The Neighborhood,” then the new comedy “DMV,” followed by the returns of “FBI” and “Watson.”

Tuesday features the return of the current “NCIS” universe -- “NCIS” at 8 Eastern, “NCIS: Origins” at 9, and “NCIS: Sydney” at 10.

On Thursday, it’s the return of “George & Mandy’s First Marriage” and “Ghosts,” followed by “Matlock” and “Elsbeth” in their regular time periods (the Sunday shows are a promotion stunt).

Friday’s lineup consists of two new dramas -- “Sheriff Country” at 9 (starring Morena Baccarin, above photo) and the “Blue Bloods” spinoff “Boston Blue” at 10. The evening begins with the return of “Fire Country” at 8.

With “Matlock” and “Elsbeth” moving to Thursday nights, the following Sunday (October 19) will have the return of “Tracker” at 8 followed by the new music-competition show “The Road,” starring Keith Urban, whose pending divorce from Nicole Kidman might boost sampling for this new show.