The Six Pack is back, but this edition is straight out of bizarro world: perennial loser NBC in the winner’s circle while top-ranked WLS-TV is in loserland? As Vince Lombardi would say, “What’s going on here?” Well, WIQI is the loser’s circle again, so it’s all not that unusual… the week’s winners and losers:
Winners
– NBC. Belated congrats to NBC, who drew an estimated 219 million viewers across its platforms for its coverage of the XXX Olympiad from London, making it the most watched television event of all time.
– Jimmy Kimmel. ABC moved his successful talker opposite Jay Leno and David Letterman, making the network a serious player in the late-night talk show wars for the first time in a long time. Nightline, on the other hand, loses its longtime slot and is downgraded to face Jimmy Fallon and Craig Ferguson
– Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson. Unlike others in the industry, the esteemed anchor duo finally got an end date – and get to go out on their own terms. Both men this week signed a six-month contract extension with CBS-owned WBBM-TV and plan to exit their 6 p.m. anchoring gigs through February 2013. On March 1, 5 and 10 p.m. anchors Rob Johnson and Kate Sullivan step in and take over the 6 p.m. newscast. CBS 2 has seen a ratings resurgence this year with most of their newscasts.
Losers. Okay, what looks out of place here? Lord knows it isn’t WIQI…
The Simpsons. Fox-owned WFLD is cutting back on the three-times-a-day reruns of Homer & Co. this fall, replacing the 5 p.m. airing with TMZ and the 10:30 p.m. airing with new magazine Dish Nation. No word yet on what time slot (or slots) The Simpsons would be relocated to – if that’s the case, but it could be worse… in Atlanta, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Louisville (among others), stations who held the syndication rights to The Simpsons pulled the show off their schedules completely.
WIQI. Yours truly made a passing reference to this “format flip” (or whatever you call it) on Twitter ten days ago as the former all-news station is also now a former Adult Hits station – WIQI moved to the Hot AC arena on August 16 as the station added more currents to the playlist and removing most, if not all of the 1990’s-era tunes. Operations manager Jim Richards took to social media to explain to angry fans (wait… there were fans?) the move and admitted i101 “swung the pendulum too far” (wow, genius… no kidding.) You’d think i101’s Facebook page were invaded by angry ABC soap fans…
ABC 7. If you missed Tuesday night’s 10 p.m. newscast, you missed a rare off-night for the usually solid and top-rated news operation as WLS-TV was plagued with technical difficulties, which became the talk of the town Wednesday morning:
Blame it on new computer software, which was installed this week at the station. Of curse, this is not the first time an unusual incident had happened during an ABC 7 newscast: remember this incident from December 2007? And let’s not forget the time a on-the-lam robbery suspect entered into the station’s 190 N. State Street building in 1990 during a newscast and forced WLS-TV to go off the air for a few hours.
I bet you angry ABC soap fans were rolling over the floor laughing at at this…