‘Legends Of Tomorrow’ Fans Should Prepare To Wait For New Episodes After This Week

Quite a few of The CW’s DC comics-based television series are approaching their winter hiatus, and one in particular will keep fans waiting longer than usual. Legends of Tomorrow will return in April — much later than shows like Arrow and Supergirl, which will both come back in January — according to DigitalSpy. In seasons past, when the show has taken a winter break, it’s returned in either January or February, so this late comeback is a departure from the norm.

According to DigitalSpy, Legends is pushed back so that its midseason premiere lines up with the second season finale of Black Lightning, which returns on January 21. TVSeriesFinale.com reports that last year, ratings fell during Season 3, and the show slipped out of The CW’s top three shows. But the site says Legends was still ranked in the top half of scripted series on the network, despite this decline, so it was still a relatively successful show.

The same site’s ratings ranking for Legends shows that it’s hovered between around 900,000 viewers per each episode, with a season low in November of 858,000 tuning in, and a series high for the year’s premiere at nearly a million.

Despite the lower viewership, though, Legends has been praised by multiple outlets as some of the best TV this year. IndieWire ranked Season 3, Episode 17, “Guest Starring John Noble” as the 29th best overall TV episode of the year. “Some great shows have a tipping point: They suddenly go from being a fun time to something truly special, and there’s no question that the weirdest and most delightful of the CW’s DC spinoffs arrived at this juncture toward the end of its third season,” the outlet wrote of one of the show’s most bizarre episodes to date.

Liz Shannon Miller, an IndieWire writer, called Legends “television’s most delightful series." "The show succeeds not only because the writers are having a crazy amount of fun writing it — it’s that they’re not having fun for fun’s sake, and that this never compromises an affection for Legends’ unique ensemble, which relishes its characters for their quirks,” she wrote. “It’s also openly progressive: Like the rest of the DC/CW universe, the show features LGBT characters, but in particular here bisexuality — male and female — is as ingrained in the fabric of the universe as the characters’ superpowers.”

TVLine named Legends as having one of the top 20 funniest TV moments of 2018, and the AV Club also named it one of their top tv shows of the year, placing it ahead of other hits like Billions and American Vandal. “What makes Legends one of television’s purest giddy pleasures isn’t merely its willingness to take the weirdest, silliest, most entertaining paths onto which it stumbles — though it always does, and god bless it,” Allison Shoemaker wrote for the site. “It’s that all that silly weirdness springs from the emotional lives of its characters, a gang of rogues and misfits who’ve embraced the idea that they’re destined to screw things up for the better.”

It’s unclear if there’s any reason just yet for Legends fans to worry about whether it’ll be renewed for Season 5, even though it’s a bummer that the midseason premiere is later than some would like. It hasn’t been renewed or canceled either way just yet, and TVSeriesFinale.com predicts it’ll be back for a fifth reason despite lackluster ratings. For now, fans can rest easy knowing that they’ve got at least a few more episodes coming down the pike eventually.