NBC dropped a bunch of midseason scheduling news yesterday. The Office will get the high-profile spot after the Super Bowl that has, in the past, gone to events like the House episode with Mira Sorvino and the first half of the Grey's Anatomy episode where the unexploded shell blew up the poor bomb-squad guy.

The Office has had a relatively good, if slightly uneven, fall, so it's nice to see them getting the boost of that slot. If you're a fan, check out the clip above, which is the first episode in the show's new run of online-only "webisodes."

ER flatlines (sorry about that), Knight Rider crashes and burns (that too), and more, after the jump...

 

Meanwhile, ER, which you may be surprised to learn is still on, will be gone for good as of March 12, 2009, after which its Thursday slot — which it has occupied since September 1994 — will go to the very lucky new drama Kings. Not so lucky? Knight Rider, which has been cut back to 17 episodes for this season, suggesting it's probably done for good.

The most wretched news, however, is that Celebrity Apprentice has been expanded to two hours. TWO HOURS. At one hour, Celebrity Apprentice was dumb and boring, and you can bet nobody ever genuinely thought, "This show would be better if it were longer."

One report points out that it's cheaper to add another hour of an existing reality show than it is to produce a new drama. Certainly, that's true. But by that theory, you could run CBS by expanding Survivor to three hours a night and send everyone else home, and they haven't done that yet.

Having relegated new episodes of Friday Night Lights to DirecTV until January and allowed Scrubs to migrate to ABC (where it will debut January 6), NBC has about an hour per week of really good shows left (I'm counting The Office and 30 Rock; you might count more if you like the Law & Order variants), meaning that Celebrity Apprentice will take up twice as much space on the schedule as the combined total of everything else they have that's still really worth watching.

It's entirely possible that Donald Trump is never going away.