It’s one of the funny realities of television ratings that — no matter what — the program that airs immediately following the Super Bowl will be among the most-watched of the year.
The time slot serves as a massive promotional vehicle for whatever network is lucky enough to air the big game each year. And this year, Fox has reportedly pivoted on its plans.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox will swap in Rob Lowe’s game show The Floor for the previously planned airing of a special episode of the drama Rescue: Hi-Surf, which aired its first season this fall. The special episode will now run the day after the Super Bowl on February 10th.
The Floor will enter its third season following the NFL title game, and continues a trend of Fox choosing to air unscripted television shows following Super Bowls on the network. Fox aired a season premiere of Gordon Ramsey’s Next Level Chef after its last Super Bowl in 2023 and a season premiere of The Masked Singer before that in 2020.
Networks have been creative in what they choose to broadcast after the Super Bowl in the past. Interestingly, NBC chose to air the Beijing Winter Olympics immediately following Super Bowl LVI in 2022 — a window that primarily featured women’s monobob and ice dance — and will likely choose to do the same thing with the Milano-Cortina games in 2026.
CBS, for its part, typically goes with a scripted drama when it gets its turn to air the Super Bowl; though they did air a live episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2016, and premiered the second season of the now long-running competition show Survivor in 2001, which is the most-watched Super Bowl lead-out of the 2000s.
A game show seems like a more widely appealing option than a scripted drama like Rescue: Hi-Surf, so props to Fox for doing what it can to retain as much of that Super Bowl audience as possible. It’ll be interesting to see how Lowe’s show compares to Super Bowl lead-outs of the past.
