Fox celebrated their 25th Anniversary in prime-time this past Sunday with a two-hour retrospective, featuring clips of past shows and a few cast reunions. While the network officially launched its primetime lineup on April 5, 1987 with three airings each of Married… With Children and The Tracey Ullman Show, the network actually launched on October 9, 1986 with The Late […]
Stick a fork in My Network TV? How about My Network TV sticking around for three more years? News Corp. announced Friday it has reached agreements with My Network TV affiliates to carry the programming service until 2014, and the pact include the ten Fox-owned My Network TV affiliates, including WPWR-TV in Chicago, and WWOR-TV New York and KCOP-TV in […]
In a move which illustrates once again the declining clout of broadcasters – and the growingpower of cable, Vince McMahon and the WWE have announced the departure of Friday Night Smackdown from Fox’s My Network TV and is moving it to NBC Universal-owned cable channel SyFy effective October 1. SyFy smacked down Fox with a $30 million offer to WWE, […]
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 […]
If you think radio stations in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are worrying about Arbitron’s Portable People Meters – then you haven’t seen anything yet. Television executives in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Cleveland are sweating it out over the next several months as Local People Meters – or LPMs, become the standard of measurement for television ratings measured by Nielsen. […]
Local broadcasts of Detroit Tigers, Pistons, and Red Wings games have been locked up by cable channel FSN Detroit for the next 10 years, keeping the games off of broadcast TV in the Motor City (unless their respective broadcast network partners – i.e. Fox with MLB, NBC with the NHL, etc. carries a game.) It also erases the possibility of […]
It’s My Smackdown now. The WWE and News Corp.’s My Network TV have entered into an exclusive agreement to carry the two-hour WWE Smackdown, beginning in September. The program will enter season 10 on the mini-net. Many former UPN affiliates (including WPWR in Chicago and WCGV in Milwaukee) aired Smackdown but when UPN merged with the WB to form CW […]
As CW prepares its post-strike future, many of its popular shows (and I’m stretching “popular” quite a bit here) are returning with new episodes this spring, including Smallville, Supernatural, One Tree Hill, and Reaper, while others including Gossip Girl and Everybody Hates Chris will return with new episodes in the fall. But two shows won’t return at all: The ultra […]
The CW has pulled the plug on WWE Smackdown after nine seasons, after failing to come to an agreement on renewal. The program’s final CW airing is scheduled for September 12. The program began on April 29, 1999 as a one-shot special on UPN, and joined that network’s lineup on August 26, 1999. Smackdown originally aired on Thursday nights, but […]
An article written in the Sun-Times today (how come Feder didn’t get a chance to write this?), mentions four call letters you’d better get reacquainted with – WPWR. Of course, Fox-owned WPWR-TV (Channel 50), a former UPN affiliate now-turned My Network TV affiliate has the Bears-Redskins game Thursday night, which is carried on NFL Network, which of course, you can’t […]
Interesting tidbits from the world of broadcast TV: – New Jersey residents aren’t happy with New York area WWOR-TV and accuse the Fox-owned station of backpeddling on its commitment of public service and giving the residents of the state the short shrift. WWOR is the only commercial VHF station in New Jersey. The FCC will hold a hearing tonight in […]
After years of crummy programming (infomercials, home shopping, etc.), Adelll-owned WADL-TV in Detroit is making a serious bid to compete for those TV advertising dollars with the other stations in town – by targeting the market’s African-American population. The station, which signed on in 1985, had been airing mostly paid religious fare and infomericals. At one time, the station was […]
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