Found dead in Orlando-area hotel room In stunning news, Bob Saget – who was a prominent presence on television in the 1980s and 1990s, was found dead in his hotel room Sunday at the age of 65 in unincorporated Orange County, Fla., near Orlando. Saget was on tour performing stand-up comedy and was in Jacksonville Saturday night before arriving in […]
Late ’80’s, ’90s sitcoms making comeback on Hulu, Antenna TV At a time when multi-cam sitcoms are fading away faster than the pavement on the Dan Ryan Expressway, the genre seems to be making a comeback – on Hulu and Antenna TV, at least. Last week, Hulu announced it struck a deal with Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution to acquire […]
Chicago sports teams now have something in common with media companies – rebuilding when the good times end Chicagoans better get used to a word they’ve been hearing a lot: rebuild. Last week, two of Chicago’s sports franchises – the Bulls and Blackhawks announced changes that dramatically overhauled their lineups for next season. On the day of the NBA Draft, […]
Deal with CBS takes sitcom to 2019; becomes longest-running sitcom in network’s history…and two cast members get a significant raise More Bazinga ahead: CBS has renewed The Big Bang Theory for two more seasons at 24 episodes each, through the end of the 2018-19 season. This brings the episode count to 279 over twelve seasons. Big Bang now joins an […]
CBS remake scores decent sampling; Church of Tisch dominates the evening Note: These results are based on adults 18-49 preliminary ratings. On The Simpsons, Patty and Selma said they’re favorite TV show was MacGvyer, the 1985-92 ABC series featuring Richard Dean Anderson (it was even part of a plot of one 1992 episode where Selma marries Sideshow Bob.) So you […]
They’re no fools, ABC retools; ten new shows highlight 2016-17 schedule As expected, ABC has overhauled its schedule for 2016-17, the first under new ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey. Unlike NBC and Fox, who are introducing just three new shows onto their fall schedules and saving the rest for midseason, ABC is going full throttle, adding five new shows to their […]
– Mr. Records has called it a career: John Landecker, whose middle name is really “Records”, is exiting Cumulus-owned WLS-FM today. The move coincides with the arrival of new program director Brian Thomas from New York City’s Cumulus station, WNSH-FM (Nash 94.7, a Country station). Landecker said the departure of former PD Jan Jeffries had nothing to do with his decision to […]
Spike Lee can call his movie whatever he wants – but its the content that matters Chicagoans whine about the “Chiraq” name, turning the city into a bunch of Jan Bradys When filmmaker Spike Lee announced the name of his new movie to be set in Chicago was going to be named Chiraq, it set the city into a […]
The recent confrontation between WLS-AM host Bruce Wolf and African-American traffic reporter Kelli Walker just goes to show you what a complete embarrassment Chicago radio is, and the media industry is in general. In case you haven’t heard (and that’s most of you), Walker “threw some shade” at Wolf on the morning of November 18 over the issue of racism on the air […]
When snarking goes wrong No apology from T Dog Media coming Over the eight years T Dog Media has been in operation, I’ve attracted a lot of fans who support this endeavor due to my love of writing, especially about the media business (and I thank you for it.) But along the way, yours truly has also made some enemies. Mancow. Mark […]
A major blunder took place Saturday involving a local TV station – and for once it wasn’t in Chicago. And it wasn’t even a network-owned one. Nope, it took place at San Diego’s CBS affiliate, KFMB. The Midwest Television-owned station decided to pre-empt an hour of the third-round NCAA Tournament game between Michigan and Virginia Commonwealth (VCU) at 9 a.m. […]
Plus other news of note, including Rosie Show results; Brandmeier’s return; and a new game show in an unusual time slot. – Viewers welcomed back Tim Allen to network TV Tuesday night with open arms with strong sampling of his new sitcom Last Man Standing. On Tuesday, the series opened with 13.1 million viewers and grew […]
Monsters and Money in the Morning, the new morning sports and financial advice program on CBS-owned WBBM-TV, got off to a rocky start yesterday morning. According to Nielsen, the 5-to-7 a.m. outing could gather only a .6 household rating in the first hour and a .2 in the second hour. Among the 25-54 demo, it fared worse: Monsters averaged a […]
No surprise here, it’s Tyler Perry’s House of Payne. But there is a surprise when compared to other programs in the viewer’s landscape: When you take the rating from its’ syndication airings and its cable runs on TBS, Payne tops everything else among African-Americans in all of television among adults 18-34, 18-49, and 25-54, including network prime-time, beating Grey’s Anatomy […]
Good news for local fans of the TV series Scrubs: WCIU-TV has acquired the second cycle of the hit NBC comedy from Disney/ABC Domestic Television beginning in the fall of 2009. The move means the program will stay in broadcast syndication and not head for an exclusive deal on cable, which many off-network sitcoms have recently done (i.e. Home Improvement, […]