Programming

Stations have snapped up professional sports rights from struggling RSNs, but could find themselves edged out by direct-to-consumer streamers.

Pat Sajak’s final run on Wheel of Fortune is quickly coming to a close. After more than four decades as host of the iconic game show, Sajak’s final episode will air on Friday, June 7. His farewell episode, which taped last Friday, will serve as Wheel‘s Season 41 finale.

Thee women’s NCAA Semifinals on ESPN shattered viewership records Friday, as all-time NCAA basketball scoring leader Caitlin Clark led her Iowa Hawkeyes to a thrilling win over the UConn Huskies, 71-69, in a game that wasn’t decided until the final seconds. UConn-Iowa delivered 14.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched women’s college basketball game ever, according to Nielsen’s Fast Nationals. Viewership peaked at 17 million viewers for Iowa-UConn, while South Carolina and North Carolina State peaked at 9 million viewers. Pictured: Iowa guard Caitlin Clark with head coach Lisa Bluder during the second half. (Morry Gash/AP)

NBC has decided not to proceed with a third season of its Quantum Leap reboot starring Raymond Lee. The news comes more than a month after the two-hour Season 2 finale aired Feb. 20. The development is not entirely surprising as the series, from Universal Television, had been on the bubble. That is in contrast to last season when Quantum Leap received a very early renewal in December 2022.

Leeza Gibbons is extending her multi-year relationship with KTLA Los Angeles. The Emmy-winning host, writer and producer has signed a new deal with the Nexstar CW affiliate. Under the pact, Gibbons, who has co-hosted the annual Rose Parade since 2017, will return as co-host for 2025. She also will co-host Remarkable Women, Nexstar’s nationally televised annual special that honors the contributions of women in communities across the United States.

IATSE leadership told members on Friday that they’re gaining “momentum” in negotiations with the studios, as another local union reached a tentative agreement. IATSE Local 871, which represents script supervisors, writers’ assistants, accountants and others, reached an agreement on its craft-specific issues on Wednesday. That makes seven of the 13 West Coast locals that have reached tentative deals.

Faith Stowers, a former Vanderpump Rules cast member, accused NBCUniversal on Friday of racist harassment and retaliation, becoming the latest Bravo star to sue over her treatment on a popular reality show. Stowers appeared on Seasons 4 and 5 of the series, which aired from 2015 to 2017. In her lawsuit, she alleges that castmate Lala Kent brandished a knife at her during an argument in Season 4, held it to her neck and threatened to “cut a bitch.”

The Amazon-owned streaming service will televise 21 games, including the Championship Game of the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup.

NBC’s Chicago Med was the most-watched show on Wednesday (6.4 million/0.5) , while CBS’s Survivor dominated the night in the coveted 18-49 demographic with a 0.8.

Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen opened with a bang on Netflix. The series, a spinoff of Ritchie’s 2019 film, delivered almost 1.21 billion minutes of viewing over its first four days (it premiered March 7), according to Nielsen’s streaming rankings for March 4-10. It ranked second among all streaming series for the week, behind Love Is Blind (1.5 billion minutes), which repeated as the top overall title.

The Jennifer Hudson Show will spend the week of April 8 with the cast of ABC’s Emmy-winning comedy, Abbott Elementary. Series star and creator and multiple Emmy-winner Quinta Brunson, who plays optimistic second-grade teacher Jeanine Teagues at the fictional Philadelphia school, will kick off the week on Monday, sitting down with Hudson in the show’s Burbank, Calif., studio. Pictured: Jennifer Hudson will chat with Chris Perfetti (l) and Quinta Brunson during the show’s Abbott Elementary week.

ESPN‘s planned streaming product will be part of the Disney bundle when it launches in 2025. CEO Bob Iger said during recorded remarks at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting that the stand-alone ESPN streamer will be available through Disney+ for subscribers who bundle their Disney streaming services. He compared the ESPN integration into Disney+ to that of Hulu, which formally launched a week ago.

Greg Gutfeld isn’t your typical Fox News personality. But he is turning in to something that is more traditional at the Fox Corp.-backed cable outlet. Gutfeld will continue his co-hosting duties at the roundtable show The Five as well as his 10 p.m. program, Gutfeld!, a looser take on the issues of the day that marks a bid by Fox News to woo the younger TV viewers who might watch latenight programs such as The Late Show With Stephen Colbert on CBS or The Daily Show on Comedy Central. The third anniversary of the 10 p.m. program arrives Friday.

Preparing to complete what had seemed just last fall to be a highly unlikely successful bankruptcy restructuring, Diamond Sports Group on Wednesday announced a multiyear carriage renewal deal with what is now the largest pay TV operator in the U.S., Charter Communications.

Along the murky lines that intertwine sports, entertainment and, yes, politics, the ethos of being bad has never been so good. Say what you want. Do you want. The public eats it up. And for decades, somehow, the garish world of professional wrestling has sat smack in the middle of it all.

The crime drama recently scored its most watched episode to date in multi-platform viewing.

A former ABC director of development is taking the network, parent company Disney and John Ridley to court for gender, racial and economic discrimination, claiming they firing her when she complained about the alleged situation. In a nine-claim complaint filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Asta Jonasson says she was pink-slipped in 2022 after more than a decade at ABC after putting in writing her frequently mentioned grievances about being overlooked for promotions and underpaid.