Upfronts 2026: The Year That Scripted Series Made A Broadcast Comeback

To paraphrase the famous musical title, a funny thing happened on the way to the upfronts this year. One by one, the four major broadcast network announced their 2026-27 lineups, and each of them featured more scripted series than the current season.

The turnaround was so unexpected that the trend went unnoticed by many, including likely the Netflix upfront speechwriters.

“Other companies are spending the majority of their budget on sports and cutting back on scripted shows,” Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria said onstage at the streamer’s presentation, which was held on Wednesday afternoon, after all broadcast networks had unveiled their 2026-27 plans.

In recent years, amid sliding linear ratings, industry contraction and the impact of the pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strikes, that statement would’ve been correct. But not this year.

CBS is adding three new drama series (Cupertino, NCIS: New York, Einstein) and one comedy (Eternally Yours) while canceling one drama (Watson) and two comedies (The Neighborhood, DMV) for a net increase of 1.5 hours of scripted programming.

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NBC is adding two new drama series (The Rockford Files, Line of Fire) and two new comedies (Sunset P.I., Newlyweds) while canceling one of each (Beautiful Minds, Stumble) for a net gain of 1.5 scripted hours which may be revised down — but remain in positive territory — depending on the fate of the network’s last show on the bubble, The Hunting Party.

Fox is adding two new drama series, Baywatch and The Interrogator, while canceling one comedy, Going Dutch, for another net increase of 1.5 hours.

And then there is ABC, which is adding a new drama series, The Rookie: North, without canceling a single scripted show. Last year, ABC picked up two dramas and one comedy for 2025-26 — 9-1-1: Nashville, R.J. Decker and the Scrubs reboot — while not bringing back one drama, Doctor Odyssey and one comedy, The Conners. The other broadcast networks canceled more scripted series than they picked up for the 2025-26 season.

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“We are thrilled that not only we were able to renew R.J., but also that we’re adding to our slate for the second straight year with Rookie: North, that’s something that no other network can say heading into this upfront week,” Ari Goldman, SVP, Content Strategy and Scheduling, told Deadline after the 11th hour renewal of the Scott Speedman freshman drama and series order to The Rookie spinoff earlier this week. “We not only are growing our scripted slate but for the first time in, literally, the history of ABC, have renewed every one of our scripted series, and they’re renewed because they’re all performing well.”

It’s hard to pinpoint the reason for the scripted comeback on broadcast. Some of it could be a recalibration after a recent pullback. CBS, NBC and Fox all went down year-to-year with their scripted slates last season, marginally for CBS and Fox and significantly for NBC, which canceled five drama series (four homegrown and Canadian import Transplant), and two comedy series while adding only two new comedies to make room for the NBA’s arrival to the network this past fall. (In 2026-27, NBC has extra two and a half weeks worth of primetime inventory to fill that was taken up by the Winter Olympics this season, though the network is adding more sports in the fall via NBCUniversal’s deal with Major League Baseball.)

The broadcast scripted expansion also could be a delayed reaction to a seismic event like the one Fox Entertainment CEO Rob Wade referenced on the network’s upfront call on Sunday.

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He brought up the 2019 Disney acquisition of Fox assets, including Fox’s main supplier of scripted programming, 20th Television, which had been producing shows for the network under a vertically integrated business model that no longer worked for independent Fox.

“Going back to the Disney transaction, if you remember, we had a lot of 20th shows on the network, we had shows like The Resident, 9-1-1, 9-1-1: Lone Star which just continued,” Wade said. “That gave [Fox Network President] Michael [Thorn] and his team the opportunity to build a scripted slate off the back of that. (We didn’t have the same problem with the unscripted slate). To go out and suddenly replace five or six scripted shows all in one go is foolhardy because you don’t have the schedule, the marketing muscle, the audience doesn’t have the bandwidth to cope with that, if you launch six shows all the ones, it’s very hard for the audience to find all six at once. So what we’ve been doing over the last five or six years is slowly building that slate up.”

There is also the matter of order sizes. Broadcast schedules are rigid, with a set number of primetime hours each season that cannot expand. Also, to balance their offerings to viewers — and their budgets — the networks mix expensive sports and scripted programming with lower-priced reality fare.

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For instance, CBS, whose scripted portfolio includes the most watched series on broadcast in Marshals and Tracker, is adding three new dramas and one comedy while canceling a drama and two comedies. But that translates to a net gain of just 12 scripted hours because, as Deadline reported exclusively, the network is cutting the orders of several returning series for 2026-27, including Fire Country (from 20 to 13 episodes), NCIS: Origins (from 18 to 10) and NCIS: Sydney (from 20 to 10).

The other broadcast networks are going with a version of that too. ABC’s Goldman admitted that the decision to pick up both R.J. Decker and The Rookie: North would result in trimming the episode orders for some series next season.

“We’re still working through the precise episode counts across the board,” he said. “Some of our shows are going to stay exactly as they’ve been, but I do think we’re always looking to make decisions that make financial sense for the company, so some counts may adjust at the end of the day.”

Goldman was quick to emphasize that “nothing that would ever impact the creative. We’re always in the business of growing the libraries of these shows for streaming, not only here, but across the globe, and so we’re very serious about staying in that game and doing whatever it takes to strengthen that portfolio.”

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That is an important point for vertically integrated networks like ABC, CBS and NBC as more episodes ordered from their sister studios grow the series’ libraries that can be monetized downstream, internationally and on streaming, building a revenue stream for the parent company. (It was another upfronts dominated by vertical integration as the three networks leaned heavily on new series from their sibling studios except for the Rookie spinoff, which is a co-production with Lionsgate.)

This is also why Fox is starting to own some of its scripted series while also being disciplined in its approach to dramas and live-action comedies by adopting models involving more modest license fees.

Even with episode order sizes taking a haircut, having more scripted series on the broadcast networks benefits the creative community, creating more jobs for writers, actors — as well as crews and auxiliary business when the shows are made in the U.S. — allowing more people to be employed, support their families and meet their health insurance coverage minimums.