‘Survivor’ & ‘The Floor’ Season Finales To Be Interrupted By Live Trump Address
President Trump may annoy reality and game show fans tomorrow night.
The former host of The Apprentice has set a live, primetime address to the nation for Wednesday night at 9pm ET. All four broadcast networks will carry the speech and will pre-empt their primetime schedules to air the address live. Trump only announced that he will give the address six hours ago, which will have caused the network schedulers a massive headache. White House officials have indicated that Trump will use the speech to outline his accomplishments this year.
The problem for reality fans is that this comes right in the middle of two major season finales – Survivor and The Floor.
CBS will interrupt the three-hour finale of Season 49 of Survivor in order to air the address. The network said that the finale, which starts at 8pm ET, will “resume where it left off immediately following the president’s address for Eastern and Central Time Zone viewers”.
Given that Trump has a history of long, meandering speeches, it’s unclear when fans will find out whether Sage Ahrens-Nichols, Sophi Balerdi, Savannah Louie, Kristina Mills or Rizo Velovic was crowned winner.
CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell will anchor and be joined by chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes, reporting from the White House, in between the Jeff Probst-hosted show.
Similarly, Fox has the season finale of The Floor. The fourth season of the Rob Lowe-hosted show begins at 8pm ET and was set to run through to 10pm as the final 16 players battle it out to win $250,000.
It’s not clear whether Fox will also pause the episode and resume once Trump is done talking.
ABC and NBC have got holiday specials in this slot; ABC is airing the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball, while NBC has Christmas in Nashville with Trisha Yearwood ringing in the holidays with music.
The iHeartRadio Jingle Ball was scheduled to begin at 8pm ET and run for two hours, while hour-long Christmas in Nashville was set to start at 9pm ET.
It’s not clear what the Disney and NBCUniversal-owned networks are planning to do with these specials. We’ve reached out for comment.
