Programming

Despite preemptions for Chauvin trial coverage in the session ending April 25, it rose 6% to a four-week high 1.8 live-plus-same-day national Nielsen rating, taking over sole possession of first place in talk.

Fox’s 9-1-1 drew 5.78 million total viewers and a 0.9 rating, dipping week-to-week yet still topping Monday in the demo. , 9-1-1: Lone Star (5.1M/0.8) was up a tick. Over on NBC, The Voice‘s clip show (5.82M/0.75) veritably tied season lows and juuuust barely edged out 9-1-1 for Monday’s biggest audience, while “bubble” drama Debris (2.6M/0.4) was steady in the demo for a fourth straight week.

The new members are HBO’s Sarah Aubrey, ViacomCBS’s Dan Cohen, Nielsen’s Sean Cohan and Avalon’s Laura Kennedy.

Last year, Amazon’s IMDb TV was the surprise winner of Judy Sheindlin’s follow-up court TV series. While no premiere date has been set, IMDb TV executives are hopeful the new show will be able to premiere sometime this year.

Season to date, The Good Doctor is averaging 4.23 million total viewers and just shy of a 0.6 demo rating (in Live+Same Day numbers) — down about 30% from Season 3.  Among the eight dramas ABC has aired this TV season, it ranks third in both measures (trailing Station 19 and Grey’s Anatomy).

The host will bring his nightly show to a close in late June but will continue his relationship with WarnerMedia via a weekly HBO Max series.

Thursday Night Football is coming to Amazon Prime exclusively a year earlier than planned. This coming season will be the last under the league’s “tri-cast” model, which saw games carried across Fox, NFL Network and Amazon. Starting with the 2022 season, TNF will be exclusive to Amazon (with TV stations in the participating teams’ home markets airing those games as well). Amazon is paying more than $1 billion for the rights.

Dick Wolf is spearheading another extension of his venerable Law & Order franchise, and this time he has partnered with one of the key people behind another hugely successful procedural drama franchise from the last two decades, CSI‘s Carol Mendelsohn.

The renewal announcement for Kung Fu comes just under a month after the series premiered. It has enjoyed strong ratings on the network since then, making the renewal all but a certainty. It was also the only scripted CW series this season still waiting on word of a renewal going into upfronts.

ABC’s American Idol drew 5.3 million total viewers and a 0.7 rating, dipping week-to-week yet still leading Sunday in the demo. CBS’s 60 Minutes led the night in viewers (with 7.3M).

One month after the 2021 Major League Baseball regular season threw out its first pitch, virtual multichannel video programming distributors YouTube TV, Hulu Plus Live TV and Fubo TV are still without Sinclair Broadcast Group’s regional sports networks, now rebranded as Bally Sports Networks. Pricing appears to be the reason for the decision to do without the channels, and apparently there has been little movement on either side regarding negotiations.

Discovery CEO David Zaslav’s total compensation for 2020 was $37.7 million, down 18% from $45.8 million in 2019, according to a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The big change in Zaslav’s pay was that he received no option award for 2020. Last year, he received nearly  $7 million in options.

As the end of the TV season draws near, the major five U.S. English-speaking networks are poised for another dismal year, according to one longtime Nielsen metric. But considering all the issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, it might have been worse. With just a few weeks to go before the official end of the TV season, total primetime viewers dropped 12% to a collective 21.6 million viewers versus a year ago, for CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and The CW, according to Nielsen-measured live program-plus-same-day time-shifted viewing.

CNN’s six-part documentary series The Story of Late Night is a historical deep dive into the origins of the genre that still resonates today as well as a love letter to the medium. It has been overseen by Bill Carter, a man who knows a thing or two about latenight, as the former New York Times media correspondent and author of The War for Late Night and The Late Shift.

Byron Allen, founder, chairman and CEO of Allen Media Group and The Weather Group, will continue his crusade to win equity and inclusion for Black-owned media in the world of advertising by headlining  the first Black-Owned Media Upfront. The event, set for May 11 and 12 from noon to 2:30 p.m. ET, will turn a spotlight on the programming and audiences of his companies and others involved in the movement. Register here to participate.

NBC is staying in business with Dwayne Johnson and Kenan Thompson. The network has renewed comedies Young Rock and Kenan for second seasons. It marks the latest comedy renewals at the broadcaster, having ordered a second season of Mr. Mayor last month.

Nielsen and the networks it serves have long been at odds, like a student might be with a particularly tough college professor who always offers a B- but never an A. But lately, tensions have begun to boil over into the public sphere, raising anew the prospect that advertisers and media outlets may start using a broader range of measurement services as the benchmark for advertising and sponsorship sales.

Vanessa Lachey will star in NCIS: Hawai’i, becoming the first female lead of a show in the long-running franchise. Yasmine Al-Bustami and Jason Antoon have also signed on as series regulars. CBS gave a straight to series order to the spinoff, which had been in the works for several months, on April 23.

ABC’s coverage of the NFL Draft averaged 4.2 million total viewers and a 1.0 rating, easily leading Thursday night in the demo. Over on CBS, Young Sheldon (7M/0.7) was steady week-to-week and handily delivered Thursday’s biggest audience.