STEPHEN KING SERIES TO BOW ON CBS NEXT SUMMER

A Stephen King series that was originally set to air on the Showtime pay-TV channel will instead air on CBS’s free broadcast network. Moreover, the 13-episode series, Under the Dome, will skip the pilot stage and go directly into production, the network said on Thursday. Even more curiously, CBS announced plans to air it next […]

WILL 60 MINUTES OF SPORTS FILL VOID LEFT BY WIDE WORLD?

It has been 14 years since ABC’s Wide World of Sports, the sports anthology series, left the air after having become a veritable institution over 37 years. (Remember “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” in its intro?) Now, it’s CBS’s turn to span “the globe to bring you the constant variety of […]

EMMY SHINES SPOTLIGHT ON FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

Friday Night Lights, the critically praised but ratings-challenged drama, is going out with a bang. The show, which recently was able to stay alive by first being televised on DirecTV before being rerun on NBC, was nominated today (Thursday) as one of the five dramas in the best drama category in the 63rd Primetime Emmy […]

SHOWTIME HALTING ORIGINAL SERIES ON NETFLIX

Netflix clearly faces a thorny issue: Why should movie studios or television networks provide their content to the online video renter when they can simply make them available on their own websites and keep all the rental profits themselves? That issue was underlined on Tuesday after it was announced that Netflix had extended its deal […]

REPORT RELATIVITY MEDIA MAY PRODUCE CONTENT FOR NETFLIX

Relativity Media, which already has a deal in place with Netflix that allows the online renter to stream movies that it controls ahead of the pay-TV window, may also produce content exclusively for Netflix, the New York Post reported today, citing unnamed sources. The report comes one week after Netflix signed a deal with Media […]

NETFLIX NOW SECOND-LARGEST MOVIE “CHANNEL”

More people may be watching movies on their TV sets and computers from Netflix’s streaming service than are watching movies via pay-TV services Starz and Showtime, the Wall Street Journal observed today (Thursday). The newspaper observed that Netflix added 3.1 million new subscribers over the December holidays, bringing its total number to more than 20 […]

NO BUYERS FOR THE KENNEDYS

DirecTV has become the latest TV outlet to reject the four-hour miniseries The Kennedys that was originally set to air on the History Channel. That channel reportedly turned it down because of charges that it presented baseless speculation about the personal lives of President John F. Kennedy and other members of the Kennedy family. It […]

MUSICAL, LESBIAN SITCOM COMING TO NBC

Robert Greenblatt is expected to take over as chairman of NBC Universal TV Entertainment this week, bringing with him two edgy series that presumably had been rejected when he served as head of entertainment for Showtime. New York magazine reported on its Vulture blog that the two shows, one a musical, the other a lesbian […]

NO TAKERS FOR REJECTED JFK MINISERIES

Showtime, which jumped in to pick up a controversial miniseries about Ronald Reagan after it was dumped by corporate sibling CBS in 2004, said Wednesday that it will not do the same with a miniseries about John F. Kennedy that was rejected by the History Channel last weekend. The Kennedys has also reportedly been rejected […]

DEXTER KILLS IN SEASON FINALE

While an audience of 2.5 million for a TV show would be regarded as disastrous in the broadcasting world, in the cable world it can represent a huge success. That’s the number of people who tuned in for the season finale of Showtime’s Dexter at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, but Showtime, the No., 2 pay-TV […]

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