Programming

After shopping her Judge Judy library around the industry for as much as $200 million, Judy Sheindlin’s stable of more than 5,200 episodes has landed back at CBS. The deal also includes several more seasons of future episodes of the No. 1 syndicated series.

Summer continues to take its toll on first-run, with only Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Hot Bench, Judge Mathis, Divorce Court and Access Hollywood moving up in the week ending July 30.

ABC’s The Bachelorette closed out its 13th cycle on season highs Monday night. The three-hour episode averaged a 2.1 rating among adults 18-49 and 7.5 million viewers, surging from the penultimate episode. It was also the closest its been all summer to the previous season, trailing the 2016 finale by only 8% in the key demo.

David Letterman is returning to a regular TV gig, setting a deal with Netflix for a show that will combine long-form interviews with reports from the field. Netflix has ordered six episodes of the hourlong series, to be produced by New York-based RadicalMedia and Letterman’s Worldwide Pants banner. The untitled show is targeted to debut next year.

To dig into out-of-home (OOH) viewing, Nielsen analyzed data to see what content Americans are consuming beyond the comfort of their own couches. The analysis, which looked into total day out-of-home TV viewership from the beginning of 2017 to the end of May, uncovered a bevy of trends — some intuitive, and some surprising — that begin to scratch the surface of this new horizon in measured behavior.

Two decades ago ago, Barbara Walters had a groundbreaking idea. She wanted to launch a talk show where she could stop by, on top of her full-time job on 20/20, to spar with a multi-generational panel of women about the headlines of the day. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of a show that changed the rules of daytime TV, ABC is re-airing the first episode of The View this Friday.

For those existing Xfinity TV customers who pay $5.99 for a monthly upgrade, they can get FX+, a commercial-free option of FX Networks: FX and FXX. It will be available Sept. 5.

Fox’s American Grit closed out its second season Sunday with a modest showing in the overnight ratings. Big Brother (1.9, 6.6 million) on CBS was again the top-rated and most-watched show of the night. Candy Crush (0.5, 2.2 million) was even at 9.

There are rumblings at the highest executive levels that AT&T’s top executives are considering divesting some Time Warner assets — including news organization CNN and celebrity gossip site TMZ — after they merge.

If this is the Platinum Age of Television, why is everything starting to look rusty? The commercial broadcast networks last week trotted out the casts of their fall shows at the annual Television Critics Association meeting in Los Angeles. The new season, about six weeks away, looks shockingly like previous ones. Where’s the creativity? Where are the fresh ideas?

How much lived experience should a person have before tackling certain TV or movie projects? I’m talking about shows and films that confront stories, maybe controversial stories, about communities long pushed to the margins by Hollywood. How much — from the inside — does a writer or director or producer need to know and understand, in their bones, about a place or a culture in order to portray and explore it with nuance and intelligence?

ABC is going against the prevailing winds in TV and making a big bet on family values. The network is banking on the strength of its comedy roster this fall by expanding its Tuesday sitcom block from one to two hours. The clutch of family-centric laffers that will air from 8 to 10 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday represent the most well-defined comedy brand among the Big Four networks at present.

ABC has renewed Celebrity Family Feud and The $100,000 Pyramid. The renewals were announced Sunday after the network picked up an additional season of fellow summer game show Match Game.

An email purported to be from the hacker or hackers behind the HBO breach is making a fresh wave of threats against the network. While the sender of the email appeared to use a pseudonym, the sender offered evidence of hacked materials to buttress the claim.

Brown Sugar, the new subscription-video-on-demand service from Bounce, is now available on the Roku platform. Roku customers can now watch Brown Sugar’s library of iconic black movies, all un-edited and commercial-free as they were originally seen […]

The NFL Hall of Fame game on NBC easily beat out all of its broadcast competition in the Thursday overnight ratings. The game, which saw the Arizona Cardinals square off against the Dallas Cowboys, is currently averaging a 2.3 rating in adults 18-49 and 7.8 million total viewers. However, due to the nature of live sports, those numbers are not time zone adjusted and will likely change later today when the final numbers are calculated.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. (AP) — Steve Harvey says he learned two things after catching heat for a leaked memo. In an email to his staff for “The Steve Harvey Show,” […]

NBC wants business writers and critics to focus more on overall viewing, not just live program viewing measures. The revenue from delayed viewing is “significant,” says Bob Greenblatt, chairman, NBC Entertainment.