You’ve Just Watched the Super Bowl. What Will You See Next?

Some of the most precious television real estate comes immediately after the National Football League’s season finale, one of the few programs to still corral a giant audience.

The network that airs the Super Bowl wants to retain as many of those viewers — 115 million people last year — as possible with the postgame slot. It has been a powerful tool to debut new shows, as CBS will do on Sunday with “Tracker,” a crime drama about the hunt for missing people that stars Justin Hartley, and it has also showcased already popular ones, such as NBC did in 1996 with “Friends.”

Either strategy can prove effective.

“It’s really a year-by-year basis when you have the Super Bowl and to think, ‘What are the different weapons you have to deploy?’” said Amy Reisenbach, the president of CBS Entertainment.

New Shows

For nearly two decades, the Super Bowl has cycled among Fox, NBC and CBS. (In 2027, ABC will air its first Super Bowl since 2006.) “There isn’t really any other platform like it on TV,” Reisenbach said, adding, “It’s a huge opportunity to get eyeballs.”

Networks plan out the postgame slot about a year ahead of time, said Dan Harrison, the executive vice president of program planning and content strategy at Fox Entertainment.

CBS chose “Tracker” in May, Reisenbach said, after executives viewed the pilot episode and felt it could appeal across demographics because of Hartley’s popularity with both men and women. The decision to debut a new show follows the strategy CBS used for “Undercover Boss” (2010) and for its two most recent Super Bowl lead-outs, “The World’s Best” (2019) and “The Equalizer” (2021).