“Daily Mail” coming to TV

Dr. Phil and his son Jay bring the UK’s Daily Mail to TV stateside

Also: Harry officially returns for season two

Leave it to Dr. Phil and son Jay to bring a show based on a crap tabloid newspaper to TV.

But that’s what we have in Daily Mail, a project being peddled by CBS Television Distribution and found suckers in Tribune and Sinclair, whose respective companies are exploring the possibility of merging if the FCC raises the ownership cap, now capped at 39 percent.

As first reported by TVNewsCheck, the series has been cleared in over half the country. An hour-long strip, Daily Mail is expected to fill vacant time slots now held by Celebrity Name Game including WGN-TV in Chicago, which airs the now-canceled game show at 10 a.m. However, a local timeslot for Daily Mail has yet to be finalized.

In the past, big projects like this one were developed months in advance and ready to roll out during the NATPE convention to sell to stations. Reportedly, Daily Mail was under development for two years, but wasn’t ready to be sold due to a lack of time slots.

Dr. Phil McGraw, who host has his Dr. Phil talk show strip for CTD, co-produces another first-run strip titled The Doctors with his son Jay (who says nepotism isn’t dead in Hollywood?) Daily Mail is being produced in Los Angeles by Jay McGraw’s Stage 29 productions, named after the Paramount soundstage where Dr. Phil and The Doctors shoots their respective shows and was also the home for Arsenio Hall’s first syndicated talk show.

There wasn’t much released about the show – information was vague regarding whether if it would be a straight talk show or a magazine program, and no host was named. The show could be along the lines of Joan Rivers’ former show for Tribune Entertainment back in the early 1990s, which mixed tabloid talk with celebrity guest interviews.

Daily Mail is a UK-based tabloid created in 1896 by Alfred and Harold Harmsworth. According to Wikipedia, the newspaper has becaused accused of “racism, and printing sensationalist and inaccurate scare stories of science and medical research.” (In this country, we call that Fox News.)

The Daily Mail’s website often features stories you’d generally find in the National Enquirer. The site is also heavy on celebrity news in Great Britain and in the United States – in fact, the Daily Mail has a dedicated page featuring U.S. Celebrities. In late 2015, Daily Mail’s website falsely reported Tom Joyner was retiring from morning show.

In other news, NBCUniversal officially announced Harry Connick Jr.’s talk show would indeed, be back for a second season despite being downgraded in several big Fox markets, including Chicago. The show is averaging a 1.2 household rating this season. Give its expense ($35 to $40 million to produce, according to Broadcasting & Cable), the series must improve its ratings in season two or it’s over.

As reported here Monday, Harry’s second run on WPWR-TV was downgraded again to an overnight time slot. But the series retains its 2 p.m. slot on sister station WFLD-TV.

P.S. As I always point out when discussing “The Doctors”, the talk show is not related to the 1963-82 NBC soap opera of the same name.