CBS’s 2026 Replacement For Network TV’s Best Show Will Be An Uncomfortable Watch
Laura Hurley has been writing about the entertainment industry for more than twelve years, after a decade as a content producer and editor at CinemaBlend after writing for WhatCulture and Examiner. Attending events like SCAD TVfest and San Diego Comic-Con over the course of her career, she has been immersed in the world of network, streaming, and cable TV.
The fall TV season will soon bring some of CBS's biggest shows back to primetime, but the network made some big changes to its successful Thursday night lineup. Instead of delivering a new season of Matlock, with episodes airing on Thursdays before Elsbeth, a new legal drama will join Carrie Preston's series. Cupertino is bringing Mike Colter back to the network, but his show already seems like it could be uncomfortable to watch.
Cupertino will bring Mike Colter back to CBS in a lead role for the first time since Evil, which aired for once season on network TV before being moved to Paramount+ to become a streaming series. His new show won't involve the same kinds of supernatural elements, but does have one important thing in common: the creators. Robert and MIchelle King, who were previously best known for The Good Wife, created Evil long before creating Cupertino for the CBS fall 2026 premiere schedule.
Colter is best known for action-packed dramas by this point in his career, between playing Luke Cage in the MCU and the four seasons of Evil. The full trailer for Cupertino reveals that he'll once again be fighting the powers of evil, but with a switch to battling it out in a courtroom, and probably far fewer punches thrown. There are just big questions about how successful a new legal drama will be on a network packed with crime dramas like FBI and the NCIS franchise.
Cupertino Replaces Matlock In CBS's Thursday Block
Matlock became one of CBS's biggest shows as soon as it premiered in 2024, with Kathy Bates rising to the occasion as Matty Kingston, a.k.a. Matty Matlock. The network had a solid lineup on Thursday night, with Matlock in the middle. Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage and Ghosts became two of CBS's most successful comedies in their 8 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. time slots, and Elsbeth settled into the 10 p.m. time slot after Matlock. It was a formula that worked, and Matlock was arguably the anchor for all four shows.
News broke ahead of Matlock's season 2 finale that season 3 was going to be pushed back to premiere in midseason, which means that fans won't see Matty and Olympia start their own firm until early 2027 instead of this fall. CBS rearranged almost the entire Thursday night lineup as a result, including the addition of two brand-new shows to replace Ghosts and Matlock.
|
Time Slot |
Show |
Season |
|
8 p.m. |
Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage |
3 |
|
8:30 p.m. |
Eternally Yours |
1 |
|
9 p.m. |
Elsbeth |
4 |
|
10 p.m. |
Cupertino |
1 |
Matlock's delay was due to a request from creator Jennie Snyder Urman, so there's no indication that CBS executives were unhappy with the Thursday night lineup as it was. Eternally Yours was also created by Ghosts showrunners Joe Port and Joe Wiseman, who clearly have a knack for making comedies that work on Thursday nights.
That said, it's worth noting that CBS struggled the last time that it rearranged a successful night of television. After the cancellations of FBI: Most Wanted and FBI: International, which had been Tuesday night mainstays, the network shuffled the schedule to make Tuesdays into NCIS nights, and moved FBI to Mondays to join The Neighborhood, DMV, and Watson. Except for FBI, all of those shows were cancelled before the end of the 2025-2026 TV season. NCIS Tuesdays worked, but Mondays only evened out when CIA replaced Watson in the spring. Changing the Thursday night lineup carries risks.
Why Cupertino's Premise Will Expose Some Harsh Truths
On the bright side, the success of Matlock indicates that CBS does have an audience for legal dramas on Thursday nights, so that time slot is as good a place as any to launch Cupertino. Mike Colter and Rachel Keller star as Michael Price and Olivia Siffre, respectively. After Michael discovers that he's being cheated by his employer, and Olivia is fired from her previous job, the lawyers come together to represent people who are being exploited by the tech elite.
They're the Davids in the David vs. Goliath legal battles at the center of Cupertino, and the Cupertino season 1 trailer reveals that some of the Goliaths include Apple, Google, Facebook, and OpenAI. All signs point toward Michael and Olivia as characters whose crusade is easy to root for, as the little guys standing up for people who are being exploited in the world of Silicon Valley. If Cupertino follows the model of most TV legal procedurals (including Matlock and even Elsbeth), then Michael and his team will win most of their cases.
The uncomfortable element is that the good guys triumphing over the Goliaths thanks to the help of a scrappy legal team doesn't exactly reflect real life. Matty and Olympia's cases are easy to cheer for on Matlock, but they're not taking on giants like Apple and Google on a weekly basis. Weekly victories on Cupertino may not feel too realistic.
Then again, CBS hasn't had particularly realistic Thursday nights once Ghosts and Elsbeth took root, so perhaps viewers will be able to suspend their disbelief and go along for the David vs. Goliath ride of Cupertino. The new legal drama premieres on Thursday, October 8 at 10 p.m. ET on CBS, and will stream new episodes next day on Paramount+..
-
A Silicon Valley lawyer, fired after a startup steals his stock options, mounts a fierce comeback by teaming with another wronged attorney to take on the tech giants.
-
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.