Thursday nights just won’t be the same! Scandal fans will have to wait until early 2017 to find out what happens next for Olivia Pope and who wins the TV presidential election.
ABC announced its fall schedule at its upfront presentation on Tuesday, May 17, and Scandal is noticeably missing from the fall 2016 lineup. The political drama will have only 16 episodes in season 6, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
A new show about a criminal defense attorney and cable news producer, Notorious, is set to take Scandal’s 9 p.m. slot during Shondaland’s “TGIT” Thursday night schedule. Grey’s Anatomy and How to Get Away With Murder will keep their 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. airtimes, respectively.
Scandal’s delay in production comes just a few weeks after news broke that the show’s leading lady, Kerry Washington (Olivia Pope), is pregnant and expecting her second child with husband Nnamdi Asomugha. The actress, 39, first showed signs of a baby bump at the United Way of Greater Los Angeles Women’s Summit on Monday, April 25, and later cradled her belly on the red carpet during the 2016 Met Gala on Monday, May 2.
Earlier this month, Jimmy Kimmel asked Washington who she told first about her baby news: Shonda Rhimes or her parents? The Scandal star alluded that she may have called her show’s creator first. “My parents don’t want me to answer that,” she said while smiling. “I will not answer that.”
Washington was pregnant with her first child during filming for season 3 of the hit ABC show in 2014, but the pregnancy wasn’t written into Olivia’s story line. Instead, Scandal hid her burgeoning bump with oversized jackets, large purses, binders and other objects. “I was going through this amazing physical transition, this physical journey of having a baby, that my character was not going through,” she told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “It was tough for me to even maintain Olivia’s walk because of the changes.”
