See Also: 'Grand Master' Episode Guide

The heat was on – and CBS executives clearly felt the gamble was too rich for their blood, instead opting to pull the latest new episode of CSI: New York from its timeslot to take it out of the way of the ratings steamroller that is Fox's Major League Baseball Championship Series.

The decision was announced at last-minute Wednesday night. New York wasn't alone in pre-emption – the premieres of CBS's Kings and Queens and Center of the Universe, also due to be shown during primetime that evening, were hoisted from their respective slots.

Instead, CBS rolled out CSI: Miami's second-season episode "Money For Nothing" to cover the 9:00pm slot (what would have been New York's lead-in) and the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fourth-season outing "Suckers" in actual place of New York at 10:00pm.

This may have been a shrewd move on CBS's part; last Monday, Miami's audience share dropped leaving it in a second place for the timeslot (story). Whilst its performance was still one of the strongest of the night, there was no doubt that it had suffered a direct blow from Fox's highly popular baseball coverage.

CBS executives were no doubt anxious to avoid the same fate for fledgling spinoff New York, which has less in terms of devoted audience than its older counterpart. The same could probably be said for Kings and Queens and Center of the Universe, which would potentially suffer as shows if viewers were taken away from the pilot, which usually attracts regular viewers to begin with. In the end, CBS finished a comparatively poor fourth place for the night, though it is hard to say how much of this was due to the airing of older programming content, and how much due to heavy competition.

The episode that was scheduled to be shown, "Grand Master", will now be shown in the usual slot next Wednesday at 10:00pm, presumably bumping the season's schedule up by one. For the original programming advisory, head over to The Futon Critic.

Discuss this news item at Talk CSI!
 Add CSI Files RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a Desperate Housewives fan? Then visit GetDesperate.com!