We're going to have to wait a little longer than usual for Elementary Season 6.
Sherlock Holmes fans got a little nervous when CBS announced its Fall 2017 schedule and Elementary Season 6 was nowhere to be found. But don't worry, detectives, Elementary Season 6 will eventually get here.
The only catch? Instead of its usual 24 episodes, Elementary Season 6 will only have 13. Then again, that might not be a bad thing. The show often has a noticeable midseason lag as it gets into more cookie cutter procedural territory, so perhaps the shorter episode order will work in its favor.
"One of the changes in having so much midseason is that, look, repeats aren't working as well as they used to," CBS CEO Les Moonves said at the network upfront. "It's good to have originals all the way through, so if you take a Code Black, it was on Wednesday night and doing decently on Wednesday night. There's no reason that Criminal Minds couldn't come off for a short period of time and you put in Code Black and you continue with originals all the way through. Same with Elementary on a Sunday night or a Thursday night, things like that. So you have a lot more leeway to do things."
To be fair, CBS did Elementary no favors this year, constantly bumping it around the Sunday night schedule whenever NFL games ran overtime, which was often.
Elementary Season 6 Release Date
It's not yet clear if Elementary will return to Sunday nights when it comes back, or if CBS may try it out in its original Thursday night slot again. If nothing else, we know that the absolute earliest Elementary Season 6 could premiere would be Sunday, January 7 or Thursday, January 11. But since Elementary Season 6 will only have 13 episodes, and can run through the spring, maybe it will be better to not bring it back to Sundays until after the Super Bowl, which is on February 4th.