There are two main reasons for Smash‘s midseason return in early 2013, an NBC rep explains.

Jennifer Salke, president NBC Entertainment, told Entertainment Weekly that the reason for the show’s late return has to do with its new showrunner.

“New showrunner Josh Safran is coming in — he’s awesome,” she said. “And we wanted him to get a chance to own [it] and get in there and have an ownership stake in the show — not just put a gun to his head and [tell him], ‘You gotta get going!’ So we wanted him to be able to stand back and have a real creative discussion about what he wants the season to be and be a big part of that.”

At the same time, scheduling the NBC musical drama for midseason will mean less interruptions between episodes.

“If it aired in the fall, it would have so many preemptions with the election and those things, you could never really run more than three or four episodes straight,” she told EW. “The midseason schedule will allow a clean run, which is important for a show like Smash, that’s very serialized, which has that core audience that gets frustrated if they don’t get to see the story from week to week.”