We have some disappointing updates about Brilliant Minds, just as the show goes off the air for the Winter Olympics. Back in December, NBC confirmed that the series would return in March 2026 after the Winter Olympic break, but that is no longer the case.
There are just six episodes left of the season, and while NBC isn’t going to pause them indefinitely, the return is going to be much later in the year than we expected. And this isn’t a good sign for the future of the medical drama.
The original plan for NBC was to have an hour of comedy and then an hour of The Voice to lead into Brilliant Minds from Monday, March 2. However, the network has decided to extend The Voice episodes on Monday nights, pushing it into the 10 p.m. ET/PT timeslot. That means there isn’t room for the medical drama on the schedule.
No, the show isn’t moving nights, either. Rather than find a new slot, NBC has opted to push Brilliant Minds season 2 to the late spring or summer. According to TV Insider, NBC hasn’t made an official decision yet on exactly when it will air.
There are just six episodes left of the season, and the show has set up a huge mystery that fans deserve an answer to.
What does this mean for Brilliant Minds season 3?
There have already been some concerns about the future of the series, but this seems to cement the idea that NBC won’t order a third season of the medical drama. Brilliant Minds sits at the bottom of the scripted shows on the network in terms of both the average demo and the average total audience, and that’s a dangerous place to be in. We know that NBC has canceled for less!
By moving the episodes to the summer, it certainly suggests that NBC has little faith in the show’s ability to draw in the viewers. In fact, airing in the summer will push the show past the usual time of year when NBC makes some final decisions.
There have been some later decisions made in the past, but they’re not usually good ones. So, we do worry that all of this means that by May, we’ll find out that Brilliant Minds has been canceled, and we’ll just have to hope that the second season finale has the closure that we need for the mystery and the various characters.
We just have to look at how NBC is pushing the struggling comedy Stumble to see where the priorities lie. By giving the cheerleading series a post-Winter Olympics slot, it's certainly trying to get the viewers on the show. If NBC wanted to renew Brilliant Minds, it would have attempted something similar, so a push to the summer is a sign that NBC is giving up.
Brilliant Minds is available to stream on Peacock.