Opinion: Why Supergirl’s Early 2018 Hiatus Is Not A Bad Thing

Opinion Supergirl 26 Craig Byrne December 18, 2017

Craig Byrne

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Earlier this month, The CW announced that after a four week run of new episodes that will begin on Monday, January 15, Supergirl will be replaced on the network’s schedule of Mondays at 8PM for two months to make way for the last nine episodes of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow Season 3. You can read the original press release about this change here.

Some fans are quite upset that we won’t have new Supergirl for two months; we’re actually not thinking this is a bad thing. Why? Read on for some reasons:

Supergirl Season 3 will now end on June 18. So, while all of our other DC TV favorites will be done with their respective seasons in mid-May, we will have one whole month of extra new material to make the summer hiatus more bearable. Even better, it means that Supergirl might have the undivided attention of the superhero TV watching audience, which is a good thing, because…

There’s just too much DC TV on right now. Look, I run fan-based news sites for each of the connected DC shows airing on The CW, and not even counting iZombie, there are currently five of them. If all five were running at the same time (Black Lightning joins up in January), that would mean half of The CW lineup of new originals would be comprised of DC TV. Already, it seems like four at a time is pushing it, and it becomes very easy for even the most dedicated fans to fall under the tide. Five would really be extreme.

Fewer reruns (hopefully). Prior to this century, repeats were an important part of a network’s strategy, as it would allow people to catch up on episodes they may have missed. In this day and age, you can catch up via the CW app, iTunes, or other platforms… making less and less of a need for reruns. How frustrating is it to tune in and see it’s an episode that you’ve already seen? Now, we won’t have to sit through that rerun mess, and we can have confidence that if it’s Monday night at 8, it’s either a new episode of Legends of Tomorrow or a new episode of Supergirl.

But doesn’t it suck that the premier female-fronted CW show is left on the sidelines while the others are kept on? Isn’t that sexist? No, it’s not, because that “fact” is untrue. Arguably, the lead of DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is Sara Lance, the White Canary. (You remember her. Alex certainly hasn’t forgotten.) Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (which admittedly will probably have wrapped by the time Supergirl flies off) and Jane the Virgin star females. The lead characters of iZombie and The 100 are female. Black Lightning’s daughters Anissa and Jennifer are integral parts of their respective shows, and The CW will be launching Life Sentence with its lead, Pretty Little Liars’ Lucy Hale, sooner rather than later. There’s still a lot of girl power on The CW in those intervening months — in fact, there may be more series with female leads vs. male leads at the end of the day.

It could be worse… Remember Season 1 when the season ended in April, we didn’t know for sure if the show was coming back, and we had only 20 episodes? That’s not the situation here at all. Who knows, maybe we’ll even see Kara, Alex, and their super-friends at one point elsewhere during the hiatus. We’ve weathered worse here at KryptonSite Central… beyond that, we remember when Lois & Clark took two months to finish the frog-clone-amnesia arc, and we also remember the super-long breaks created by the strike during Smallville Season 7. Nine weeks is nothing.

But do remember….! Supergirl still is returning January 15, and we’ll have four episodes in January and February. Then new episodes from April to June. All will be good in National City. And if you get really bored, you can fly over to our Supergirl forum to talk about why you love this show!

About the author

Craig Byrne

Craig Byrne has been writing about Superman TV since 1995, when the "Lois & Clark Krypton Club" launched. He founded KryptonSite.com in February 2001, becoming the first fan site for The WB/CW television series Smallville. He also wrote the Official Companion books for Smallville seasons 4-7 as well as the Smallville Visual Guide.