Back in October, NBC announced that Law & Order: SVU would be doing a classic ripped-from-the-headlines story inspired by the many sexual assault allegations directed at Donald Trump. A few days later, NBC pushed the episode from October 26 to an unspecified date after the election, though the network refused to specifically say why it had made the change at the time. Now, Deadline is reporting that the episode—titled “Unstoppable”—has been bumped again, with NBC pushing it all the way into 2017.
The timing of this may seem rather unusual, given the thing that happened this week and NBC’s fairly close relationship with Donald Trump, but Deadline claims that the decision was actually made several days ago. Apparently, it was all because of a domino effect caused by the initial delay and the World Series going to game seven on Fox, which caused NBC to air repeats for all of its Wednesday shows last week instead of new episodes. That means last week’s episodes are airing this week and this week’s episodes are airing next week, but since a special two-hour Chicago P.D. was already on the schedule, it’s pre-empting “Unstoppable” on NBC’s schedule. Then, since NBC didn’t have any new SVU episodes scheduled until January, the “Unstoppable” episode will most likely be held back until 2017.
That’s assuming, of course, that it doesn’t get bumped by the inauguration, and then again by some other random thing, and then it just becomes easier for NBC to never air it.