Programming

The 93rd Academy Awards drew 9.85 million viewers and a 1.9 rating among adults 18-49 on Sunday. That’s a steep drop from from last year’s 23.64 million viewers and 5.3 in the key ad demographic — both of which were the previous all-time lows.

The new multicast network will air classic TV hits from the 1980s and 1990s designed to attract Gen X viewers, much like its Antenna TV does for baby boomers with its 1960s and ’70s programming.

As the coronavirus infections surge in and around Toronto once again, Star Trek Discovery has hit the pause button on production. Months into shooting its fourth season, the Sonequa Martin-Green-led series has shuttered for the next two weeks due to a contact that was a little too close for comfort for CBS Studios. Discovery is penciled in to turn the lights and phasers back on around May 6.

Netflix had a big night at the Oscars, bringing home a total of seven total trophies — leading all studios — although the streamer failed to grab the prize in the best picture category and came up empty in the acting categories. Netflix had come into Sunday night with 36 nominations, far more than any other studio.

According to FilmLA’s latest report, TV and film projects in the city show more signs of rebounding after a major downturn amid the pandemic. After the COVID-19 surge in January and the voluntary industry production pause that resulted, permit applications surged 45% from February (with 777 applications) to March (with 1,125 applications).

The NCIS franchise will be back to three series on CBS next season. The network has renewed veteran NCIS: Los Angeles for a 13th season. Additionally, the network has given a straight-to-series order to new offshoot NCIS: Hawaii, the first installment in the NCIS franchise with a female lead.

General Motors, one of the nation’s largest advertisers, is trying to build new roads for minority-owned media outlets, part of a broader push on Madison Avenue to address a large gap between what is spent on large national media properties and media companies operated by owners from diverse backgrounds.

The multiple Emmy winner will host his third interview show for HBO beginning later this spring. Back on the Record With Bob Costas — the title is a nod to his first series at the premium cabler, On the Record — will air four times a year and feature in-depth interviews with prominent figures in sports, entertainment and pop culture and discussions about the sports issues of the day.

Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen put a fork in Season 19 with 2.8 million total viewers and a 0.8 rating, tying ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy for the Thursday demo win.

Licensing issues have gutted the soundtracks of many beloved series on streaming services, resulting in bewildering music cues and missing theme songs.

Disney Plus’ first and second episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the most viewed SVOD original series during the week of March 22-28. According to Nielsen, the first two episodes of the six part series garnered 628 million minutes of U.S. viewing.

It’s tricky being an indie in TV these days: On the one hand, there are a growing number of outlets, particularly in the streaming space, hungry for premium content and anxious to grow their volume, fast. But those streamers are increasingly looking in-house for their fare: Either they’re paying top dollar to grab A-list producers or intellectual property, rebooting popular titles already in their library, or relying on their sister studios to keep everything in the family.

ABC’s Academy Awards telecast may not draw as many viewers as it has in the past, but it will still air a full suite of commercials. The network has sold out all of its available advertising inventory for the annual awards event, Jerry Daniello, SVP, entertainment brand solutions, for Disney Advertising Sales, said in an interview. The company finalized its sales earlier this week, he said.

A start-up men’s basketball league, with plans to pay college students up to $150,000 and compete with the NCAA, has inked a media rights deal, setting the stage for its debut later this year. The Professional Collegiate League reached a pact with Next Level, a network owned by a former Obama administration official, that will air its games both on linear TV and streaming platforms.

Even in a TV landscape strewn with new streaming services, media is still all about the bundle. The rise of mighty new platforms bolstered with high-wattage content has been heralded as evidence of the great un-bundling in the pay TV sector, a trend that does not bode well for Hollywood’s balance sheets. But as the TV marketplace has expanded over the past year, most of the major players are focused on using their marquee content to assemble their own proprietary bundles.

Nielsen said it launched Nielsen Streaming Video Ratings, a syndicated service that measures total viewership and advanced audience demographic insights by streaming platforms along side traditional linear TV ratings. At launch the Streaming Video Ratings will cover 10 top streaming platforms plus seven categories of apps. Some are of the services being measured, subscription based, others are ad supported, network, social, gaming, MVPDs and vMVPDs.

ABC’s The Conners on Wednesday drew 2.8 million total viewers and a 0.4 demo rating, down 29% and 33% from last week to mark series lows. On NBC, Chicago Med (6.9M/0.9) ticked up and copped Wednesday’s biggest audience, while Fox’s two-hour The Masked Singer averaged 4.9M/1.2, steady week-to-week.

HBO Max and HBO have reached 44.2 million U.S. subscribers, AT&T revealed in its first-quarter 2021 earnings report Thursday. That’s up from the 41 million combined subs the company reported at the end of 2020, a tally that beat the company’s initial projection by two years.

Jeopardy today announced the final guest hosts for Season 37: George Stephanopoulos, Robin Roberts, LeVar Burton and David Faber. As previously announced, Joe Buck is also part of this final batch.