CBS consolidates crazy nonsense, moves Extant to post-Big Brother timeslot

By William Hughes | July 17, 2015 | 12:18am

Aux Features TV

Perhaps responding to the fact that the Halle Berry-lead show posted record low ratings this week, CBS has announced that it’s moving sci-fi ridiculousness pageant Extant up an hour on Wednesday nights, to 9 p.m. Eastern. The move will nestle the second-season show— which stars Berry as a female astronaut forced to juggle the demands of alien space-baby pregnancy and raising her robot son—up against long-running ratings success Big Brother, which at least manages to confine its insanity to screaming matches and the occasional burst of well-considered homophobia.

Of course, it’s possible that CBS is just trying to trick its audience into thinking they’ve tuned into a particularly weird episode of Criminal Minds, with a colony of extraterrestrial spores or a self-driving car as the unsub of the week. This is the second time the network has flip-flopped the two shows’ timeslots, moving the Thomas Gibson-starring crime drama up and down the Wednesday night schedule, shaking the programming block harder and harder in an effort to make some better ratings fall out.