The semiannual Television Critics Association is taking place. El Rey, the home of Lucha Underground, doesn’t really rate high enough to get it’s own presentation time at this point. They do rate high enough to buy the critics lunch and have a quick conversation with them over the meal, and that’s what happened yesterday.
The headline grabber was IGN’s quick interview with Skip Chaissen, who’s technically the Chief Creative Officer for El Rey, but also probably better know to use as the guy who’s in charge of the Lucha Underground vignettes. Chaissen said LU S4 “looks good” and he and Robert Rodriguez love the show, but could not confirm a renewal. This is exact same thing other El Rey/Lucha Underground people have been saying for months, both on the record and behind the scenes, but it feels like news in a vacuum of any information about Season 4. It’s not really anything we didn’t know before, it just may stop people for panicking for a couple weeks before something else triggers it.
(It remains the position of this blog that El Rey wants to bring back Season 4 and would announce it this very moment if they could, but El Rey can not afford to pay for themselves and the hold up is seeing if the other owners – MGM? other mysterious people? – also want to come back for a Season 4. It remains the position of this blog that we’re not going to get a yes or no on Season 4 until Season 3 has finished airing. It also remains the position of this blog that this uncertainty is driving everyone involved insane.)
The actual news in that piece is El Rey is having discussions about “where to place [Lucha Underground] on the schedule going forward.” That means they’re at least considering moving it off Wednesday. It’d probably help a little bit not to be heads up against the “live” airing of NXT, but there’s not many places to move too which doesn’t already have some wrestling programming. Also, my hunch is that the percentage of delayed watching (DVR, Amazon/iTunes, even Netflix) is pretty high for Lucha Underground and a chance of time isn’t going to really affect that either way.
The thing El Rey actually wanted to talk about is it’s next new show, Bushido Battleground. If you’ve ever seen a UFC or MMA or WWE show that follows people behind the scenes training for a big match and then having the big match, that seems to be what this is. It’ll be a ten episode, two hour series (notable because everything else El Rey has done has been one hour.) Lucha Underground and the current El Rey martial arts films are mentioned in the release; this show is supposed to sit along with it.
Probably literally sit along with it. As we know, the reason Season 3 was cleaved in half was because El Rey wanted Lucha Underground to still be running when they had their new series ready, and those series weren’t going to be ready until Summer 2017. That press release for Bushido Battleground does not have even an estimated air date. It took about six months for Rite of Passage & Man at Arms to go from announcement to TV screen. LUS3 ends in the middle of October 2017. Six months from today is February 2018. Expect another significant break between seasons.