How ‘This Is Us’ Final Season’s Olympics Break Actually ‘Helps’ NBC – and Fans

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterThe Pearson family will be hitting the bench for a few weeks as the final season of “This Is Us” is bumped from NBC’s primetime schedule — along with all of the network’s other regularly slated comedies and dramas —  to bring in the Beijing Winter Olympics.While many “This Is Us” fans may not want to part with new episodes of the show in favor of figure-skating, curling and bobsledding competitions from Feb.

2-20, those viewers should know they were going to lose the Pearsons for three weeks this season, with or without the 2022 Olympics.“We don’t love having it off for two weeks [during the Olympics], but those two weeks would have been repeats or preempts anyway, because there’s 18 episodes and 21 weeks,” Steve Kern, head of scheduling for NBC, told Variety. “And so it actually helps us.

We think for the last season it’s a much better viewing experience for the fans to know every week that the show is on, that it’s going to be an original episode.” “This Is Us” aired the fourth episode of its sixth and final season Tuesday, and it will skip its slot on Feb.

8 and Feb. 14 for the Olympics, returning with a new episode on Feb. 22. The show will then once again be pulled on March 1 for President Joe Biden’s televised “State of the Union” address.