VIEWERS TUNE OUT OPRAH’S SECOND NIGHT WITH ARMSTRONG

Despite the fact that, unlike on Thursday, the second part of Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Lance Armstrong at 9:00 p.m. on Friday faced little competition from the broadcast networks, the audience plunged 44 percent to just 1.8 million. (A repeat at 11:30 p.m. drew 620,000.) Even on cable it was clobbered by such shows as […]

OPRAH: LAUNCHING OWN WAS A MISTAKE

Oprah Winfrey has acknowledged making “101 mistakes” in launching OWN, her cable channel and “absolutely” would have considered doing “something else” if she had realized how difficult the project really was. Appearing on CBS This Morning on Monday Winfrey said that the channel went on the air “when we really weren’t ready to launch.” She […]

OPRAH’S CABLE NETWORK MAKES GAINS IN FIRST QUARTER

Just when some analysts were shaking their heads over the dismal ratings for Oprah Winfrey’s cable network OWN, with some predicting that it could go down and cost Discovery Networks dearly — as much as $145 million — the network on Wednesday released a statement boasting of huge audience increases in the first quarter. In […]

ROSIE: CANCELLATION WAS “FAIR”

Rosie O’Donnell has posted a video on YouTube responding to fans who have protested that it was unfair for her talk show on OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, to have been canceled after only five months. “It was fair,” she says on the video, which was recorded on the Chicago set of The Rosie Show. […]

OPRAH WINS ACADEMY’S HUMANITARIAN AWARD

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced Tuesday that it will present its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award this year to Oprah Winfrey. It also selected James Earl Jones and makeup man Dick Smith to receive honorary Oscars. The announcement of the honorary awards was made at the same time the Academy said that […]

OPRAH: BIG ON TV, BIGGER ONLINE

Of all the regular TV shows broadcast this year, none was more talked about on the Internet than Oprah Winfrey’s final telecast last week. According to Long Island-based research firm General Sentiment, the final episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show generated more online discussion even than the finale of American Idol earlier in the week. […]

OPRAH’S FINALE: BIGGEST RATINGS SINCE 1994

Nielsen will not release final figures for another two weeks — ratings for syndicated television shows are traditionally delayed that long — but preliminary ratings for Wednesday’s finale of The Oprah Winfrey Show indicate that the show may have attracted around 18 million viewers. If so, that would have been the talk-show’s biggest audience since […]

WINFREY HAS HER UPS AND DOWNS

Oprah Winfrey must have ridden an emotional roller coaster this week as ratings for her syndicated talk show on Monday soared to their highest level since 2005 but her new cable network OWN fell below 300,000 viewers, trailing all other female-oriented cable channels. OWN averaged more than one million viewers for its opening weekend. On […]

CRUISE’S KNIGHT & DAY: NO. 1 FOR FOX IN 2010

Although its first weekend brought in just $20.5 million, making it the worst debut for a Tom Cruise-starring movie since 1992’s Far and Away, Knight and Day has gone on to become 20th Century Fox’s top-grossing 2010 release. Deadline.com is reporting that the film grossed $262.3 million worldwide, with $76.4 million attributed to its domestic […]

UNACCOUNTABLY, ANDERSON COOPER’S STAR CONTINUES TO RISE

Despite plunging ratings for his CNN show, AC 360 and criticism that when it’s not covering disasters, it’s focusing mostly on sensational tabloid topics, Anderson Cooper remains the fair-haired boy of broadcast and cable news. The latest evidence is a report that Warner Bros. Television, a corporate sibling of CNN, has signed a deal with […]