ABC

A decision on whether the network would renew the freshman drama, led by Niecy Nash-Betts, was delayed for months amid the ongoing dual WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes both of which have recently concluded. The ratings for The Rookie: Feds were modest. The network also announced it would not be moving forward with The Good Lawyer, a spinoff of The Good Doctor starring Kennedy McMann and Felicity Huffman.

As part of a larger move by Walt Disney Co., all of the company’s New York properties are slated to move in 2025 to a building in downtown New York in a neighborhood known as Hudson Square. That will include some programs already ensconced in well known studios, such as Good Morning America and Live with Kelly and Mark. The move isn’t scheduled to take place for some time, but staffers are already coming to grips with how it might affect the program’s standing in TV’s nonstop morning-news wars.

After making it known in September that he’s interested in acquiring ABC from Disney for a price tag of $10 billion, Byron Allen says he still has his eyes set on ABC and promises he’s ready play ball when Disney is ready to sell. “I think ABC’s a real possibility. They say they’re not ready,” Allen said at the UCLA Department of Neurosurgery’s Visionary Ball on Wednesday night. “When they’re ready I’m going to chase it down like a lion chases down a gazelle.” (Greg Doherty/Getty for Allen Media Group)

The Golden Bachelor continues to capture viewers’ hearts. After a solid on-air premiere and a strong showing over three days of delayed viewing and streaming, the ABC series’ momentum continued across additional days. After a week of multi-platform viewing, the Sept. 28 series premiere for The Golden Bachelor hit 9 million viewers, more than double its initial audience of 4.36 million, and almost quadrupled its rating among adults 18-49, going from 0.62 to 2.46.

In the latest TV show ratings, ABC’s The Golden Bachelor dominated Thursday in total viewers while landing in a three-way tie for the nightly demo win.

After a solid showing for its initial broadcast, The Golden Bachelor continued gathering momentum in the subsequent days — enough to hit a three-year high for the Bachelor franchise in total viewers. The Sept. 28 premiere rose to 7.7 million viewers after three days of cross-platform viewing, a gain of 3.34 million viewers (and almost 77 percent) over its on-air tally of 4.36 million. The episode also more than tripled its adults 18-49 rating, rising from 0.62 for the initial broadcast to 1.9 after three days.

Dancing With the Stars Season 32 premiere last Tuesday jumped to 6.5 million total viewers and recorded a 1.08 rating among adults 18-49 in multiplatform+3 day viewing metrics provided by Nielsen — that’s a growth of 1.72 million in total viewers and by 69% in the key demo.

ABC‘s The Golden Bachelor seems to have reenergized The Bachelor audience as the show opened to solid ratings on Thursday night, delivering the strongest debut performance from a Bachelor franchise series since 2021.

ABC is making some changes to its lineup following the resolution of the writers strike. Comedy Home Economics has been canceled and High Potential has been moved to fall 2024. ABC still has to make decisions on a renewal for The Rookie: Feds and the status of The Good Lawyer, a backdoor pilot spinoff of The Good Doctor.

After more than a decade on the CW, the iHeartMedia Jingle Ball television special is moving to ABC with a multi-year deal. This year’s “iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Tour Presented by Capital One” will feature performances by Olivia Rodrigo, Usher, Nicki Minaj, SZA, Niall Horan, OneRepublic, AJR, Sabrina Carpenter, Miguel, Jelly Roll, Big Time Rush, NCT DREAM, Flo Rida and more. (The lineup for the TV special, which will include selected performances, is TBA.)

Media entrepreneur Byron Allen, one of many parties interested in acquiring ABC and other linear TV assets from Disney, said he has “access to plenty of capital,” and Disney’s internal deliberations are the next hurdle to be cleared. Rather than financing, Allen maintained that the “real commodity is certainty of close,” given the current regulatory and industry landscape. “That’s the magic trick.”

ABC will proceed as planned with the Sept. 26 season premiere of Dancing with the Stars in light of the WGA and the studios reaching a tentative agreement Sunday night. The reality competition will kick off its thirty second season with its full celebrity cast, including Veep star Matt Walsh, a dual SAG-AFTRA and WGA member, who last Thursday “paused” his involvement in the show.

Reports that Disney CEO Bob Iger is in talks to sell the ABC network are greatly exaggerated, according to sources — and some have a hard time seeing how a deal gets done at all. Insiders emphasize that no banker has been hired and no sales book is circulating. As for reported potential buyer Nexstar, the TV station conglomerate isn’t in a good position to pay what Disney would likely be asking for ABC, according to sources close to the situation.

ABC may delay its scheduled premiere of Dancing With the Stars after striking writers targeted the show with pickets in recent days. One of the show’s celebrity participants, Matt Walsh of Veep, meanwhile, says he won’t take part in DWTS until the writers strike is over.

The storied television network and its stations have been part of Disney for 27 years. But the company’s streaming ambitions may put the unit on the block.

In the wake of two prominent talk show hosts reversing course on a return to work, striking writers in New York City have stepped up their picketing against a high-profile holdout: ABC’s The View. About 50 demonstrators showed up Tuesday outside the ABC television studio complex on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and urged arriving ABC employees not to cross the picket line.

Amid calls from the Writers Guild of America to push back its premiere during the ongoing writers strike, ABC and Disney+ are staying on track with plans to premiere a new season of Dancing with the Starsnext week. The show employs a crew of 500 people, and has one WGA writer on staff.

The broadcast network, which had several NFL matchups on its slate already for the fall, will simulcast the remaining portion of the MNF schedule (10 games’ worth) with ESPN. The move will likely increase Monday Night Football’s overall audience over games that are only on ESPN — the Sept. 11 season opener on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 drew the biggest audience since the franchise’s move to cable — and will also complete what had been a rather fluid ABC schedule for the fall, as it and other networks try to program a full week while writers and actors remain on strike.

Usually when a person or company sells something, the primary motivation is getting back as much money as possible. Disne’s motivation to potentially sell ABC and its owned affiliates, linear cable networks and a minority stake in ESPN isn’t predicated on what these assets will fetch in a sale. It’s about signaling to investors the time has come to stop thinking about Disney as old media.

ABC has opted not to proceed with a third season of The Wonder Years. The news comes a month after the reboot of the classic coming-of-age comedy wrapped its Season 2 run on the network. Originally slated for a midseason return, The Wonder Years‘ second season was pushed to summer, hinting at the show’s potential fate as summer has traditionally been used as a destination for broadcast scripted series that have either been canceled or are likely to be.

The Disney-owned newsroom was jolted on Thursday after a report suggested that the outlet could soon be expelled from the Magic Kingdom. Bloomberg’s Christopher Palmeri and Thomas Buckley reported that Disney has “held exploratory talks” about selling ABC to Nexstar Media Group. The duo also reported that media mogul Byron Allen has also spoken with Disney about a possible deal.

The Walt Disney Co. said in a statement Thursday that it is “open to considering a variety of strategic options for our linear businesses,” but shot down a report that it was in active discussions to sell its ABC broadcast network and stations. “At this time The Walt Disney Company has made no decision with respect to the divestiture of ABC or any other property and any report to that effect is unfounded,” the statement continued.

Comedian and media mogul Byron Allen has made a $10 billion offer for ABC and other linear networks owned by the Walt Disney Co., a spokesman for Allen and Allen Media Group confirmed. TV station owner Nexstar, which bought the CW Network, also has expressed interest in buying ABC and its stations from Disney.

Walt Disney Co. has held exploratory talks about selling its ABC network and TV stations to local broadcaster Nexstar Media Group Inc., according to people familiar with the discussions. The talks are preliminary and haven’t involved a specific valuation, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public. Nexstar would only be interested at the right price. A spokesperson for Nexstar declined to comment.

Just one day ahead of its full cast reveal, ABC has set a date for Season 32 of Dancing With the Stars. The next battle for the Mirrorball Trophy will begin on Tuesday, Sept. 26 (8/7C) with a special extended premiere, followed by a DWTS-themed episode of Celebrity Family Feud at 10:31 p.m.

ESPN and 18 other Disney networks as well as ABC stations have gone dark across Spectrum, the No. 2 cable TV service in the U.S. Charter Communications, which runs Spectrum, and Disney had been locked in a distribution dispute since well before the U.S. Open tennis tournament began this week. In the coming days, college football and the NFL will kick off, potentially putting two massive sports properties on the list of programming unavailable to Spectrum customers. Along with the ESPN family of networks, the carriage fight also involves FX and a number of non-sports networks as well as ABC stations.

Disney Advertising said that commercial inventory on the U.S. Open tennis tournament is sold out. The event, televised on ABC, ESPN and ESPN Plus, has more than 20 sponsors and nearly 150 advertisers. Presenting sponsors include American Express, Cadillac, Evian, Fidelity Investments, Heineken Silver and IBM.

ABC is loading up Aug. 23 primetime with Abbott Elementary. Four Season 2 episodes deemed to be fan favorites by the network will air in primetime that night.

The Bachelor franchise is taking over Thursday nights on ABC this fall. Its latest series, The Golden Bachelor, will premiere on at 8 p.m. Sept. 28, followed by Season 9 of Bachelor in Paradise at 9 p.m.

ABC’s game show lineup is making a splash on Sunday nights. Celebrity Family Feud and The $100,000 Pyramid recently drew their biggest audiences of the summer, according to Nielsen data. After seven days of delayed viewing for the July 30 episodes, both posted double-digit audience gains.

Several of the country’s biggest entertainment and streaming companies are teaming up to fight hundreds of local broadcasters over a years-old provision that would determine whether they are forced to negotiate directly with those local stations for distribution deals.  The Preserve Viewer Choice Coalition, which launched Wednesday, is made up of major entertainment companies and their broadcast networks, including Disney/ABC, Paramount/CBS, Fox Corp./Fox, NBCUniversal/NBC/Telemundo, Warner Bros. Discovery, Univision and Roku.

The ABC daytime soap is now employing temporary writers — that is, writers who have agreed to work despite the strike — to pen upcoming episodes. Sources say that so-called “fi-core” writers (or “financial core,” meaning they have rescinded their guild membership to pursue work) were brought on last week to start generating scripts in anticipation of the pre-strike stockpile running out.

The Bachelorette is going to start handing out her roses a little earlier. ABC is making some changes to its summer primetime lineup, with The Bachelorette moving back to its usual Mondays at 8/7c time slot. (The current season, with Charity Lawson looking for love, has been airing Mondays at 9 p.m. since it premiered last month.) The time slot change goes into effect next Monday, July 24. In a corresponding move, the celebrity-adjacent reality competition Claim to Fame will move to Mondays at 10, after debuting in the Mondays at 8 p.m. time slot.

ABC is working to bring back Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to the network after the format’s brief dalliance with HGTV. The network is developing a reboot of the series, which ran on ABC between 2004 and 2012, with Clea Shearer and Joanna Teplin, who created global lifestyle brand The Home Edit.