Fox

A new version of the 1970s buddy cop series Starsky & Hutch is in the works at Fox, with a female twist. Fox is developing the project as a one-hour drama under its script-to-series model, Deadline has confirmed. The modern reimagining will revolve around two female detectives, Sasha Starsky and Nicole Hutchinson.

Fox Corp. has turned down unsolicited offers of more than $2 billion for its Tubi streaming service, over four times what the company paid for the business, according to people familiar with the overtures. Lachlan Murdoch, who runs Fox, wants to keep the fast-growing business, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations. Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in 2020.

Fox gave its ad supported streaming service Tubi a big push on TV’s biggest stage Sunday with two brand spots during the Super Bowl. The spots showed giant bunnies tossing people down a rabbit hole, a metaphor intended to show viewers the depth of content available on Tubi. Fox Sports also ran a promo for Tubi that made it appear as if viewers were moving from the Fox game announcers to the Tubi home screen to watch a movie.

The Television Academy and Fox Entertainment today jointly announced that the 75th Emmy Awards are scheduled for Monday, Sept. 18, live coast to coast. The ceremony will air from 8-11 p.m. ET and 5-8 p.m. PT on Fox. A week prior to the Emmy Awards telecast, the 2023 Creative Arts Emmy Awards will take place over two consecutive nights on Saturday, Sept. 9, and Sunday, Sept. 10. An edited presentation will be telecast on FXX at a later date.

The Fox News host will be getting the Super Bowl treatment this Sunday, with the cable news channel set to run a 15-second spot promoting his 11 p.m. latenight show Gutfeld! during the big game. The ad will be Fox News Channel’s only spot promoting one of its linear TV shows during the game, which is airing on the Fox broadcast network. There will also be a 10-second ad during the Fox pregame show, as well as two ads touting the Fox Nation streaming service.

The network has renewed its drama series for a third season. The pickup for the series, produced by Warner Bros. Television and Fox Entertainment, comes seven weeks after The Cleaning Lady wrapped its 12-episode second season. Season 3 will also bring a new co-showrunner: Jeannine Renshaw (In the Dark, Good Girls) has joined the series and will serve as co-showrunner alongside Miranda Kwok, who developed the show.

Fox Entertainment and Hulu have reached a multi-year content partnership which includes in-season streaming rights for Fox’s expansive programming slate and an extensive multi-platform strategic marketing alliance, the companies announced Monday. Under the terms of the agreement, all Fox primetime entertainment programming – ranging from Family Guy and The Cleaning Lady to The Masked Singer and Next Level Chef — will continue to stream on Hulu the next day following its linear telecast.

The newly formed Joint Industry Committee aims to set measurement, currency standards by an aggressive March 1 deadline. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Although most of the canceled TV show headlines of late have been focused on the big streamers, attention will soon shift to the beleaguered Big 5 broadcasters as the May upfronts draw closer. Many in-limbo shows on the 2023 Renewal Scorecard are a lock to return, but there are a handful of high-profile series on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW that remain very much on the bubble.

Fox has handed early two-season renewals to three of its animation mainstays – The Simpsons, Family Guy and Bob’s Burgers – taking them through the 2024-25 broadcast cycle. The Simpsons will extend its standing as the longest-running scripted series in television history with a renewal for its 35th and 36th seasons. Bob’s Burgers will return for seasons 14 and 15 and Family Guy for its 22nd and 23rd seasons.

The FCC has levied a fine of $504,000 against Fox for “willfully violating” commission rules on transmitting EAS tones during regular programming. The violation occurred during an NFL promo aired Nov. 28, 2021. Fox described the promotional segment as a “short comedic advertisement” for an upcoming game, which was aired as part of the Fox NFL Sunday pre-game show.

Fox’s new crime anthology drama Accused launched behind the Dallas Cowboys vs. San Francisco 49ers NFL game on Sunday. The twisty legal thriller from Howard Gordon kept some 8.4M viewers for the duration, setting a ratings record for Fox. But a number of them were left fuming after Fox stations across the country accidentally cut away in the final minutes, denying them the resolution of the story starring Michael Chiklis. According to sources, 13 markets were affected, representing about 8% of the country: Cleveland, Sacramento, St. Louis, Indianapolis, San Diego, Greensboro, Little Rock, Lexington, Honolulu, Springfield, Ft. Smith, Monroe and Jackson. The Fox affiliates in those markets are owned by Nexstar, and the glitch appears to be a technical issue in that company’s feed.

The opening round of the NFL playoffs drew a slightly smaller — though still huge — TV audience than it did a year ago. The six games of the wild-card round averaged about 28.4 million viewers, a 4% decline from 2022’s opening round (29.65 million). Three of the telecasts topped 30 million viewers, led by the 33.21 million for Fox’s Sunday telecast of the New York Giants’ win over the Minnesota Vikings. That contest, however, was off by about 20% from the same window last year, when 41.5 million people watched the San Francisco 49ers beat the Dallas Cowboys — the biggest audience for a wild-card game since 2015.

Two former executives are accused of paying bribes to obtain broadcast rights, including for the World Cup. Testimony could reveal what the company knew.

Most of the biggest television programmers have banded together in a new attempt to fix what they see as an audience measurement problem and promote competition to Nielsen, ending its stranglehold on the industry. Comcast NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, TelevisaUnivision and the VAB said Monday they formed a Joint Industry Committee so they can work together to set standards for measuring what they call premium video, which generates $70 billion in advertising revenue.

Now that your broadcast-TV favorites are on holiday break, TVLine is surveying how each network’s shows are stacking up thus far in the 2022-23 TV season — wrapping things up with a look at Fox.

Fox scored the most-watched telecast on Christmas Day with 25.9 million people tuning in to watch the Green Bay Packers vs. the Miami Dolphins. This marks the third year in a row that an NFL game on Fox has delivered the highest viewership on Dec. 25, competing with two other NFL matchups on other networks — Buccaneers vs. Cardinals on NBC (which scored about 17.15M viewers) and Broncos vs. Rams on CBS (which averaged 21.6M total viewers).

Old schoolers like the late Gil Schwartz of CBS used to hate it when the press would commandeer executive sessions at TCA in the aughts with questions about the death of broadcast TV. HBO had come to dominate the Emmys year after year and the perception was that programming on the Big Three just wasn’t sexy, no matter how much Schwartz would argue that the size of CBS’ audience was far more valuable than the trophies it never seemed to collect at the Shrine Auditorium. Looking back, the fact that anyone was defending broadcast TV seems positively quaint these days.

Beauty and the Beast averaged 4 million total viewers and a 0.7 demo rating, after which The Parent Test retained 1.9 mil and a 0.4. Ghosts‘ hour-long Christmas episode averaged 6.8 million viewers and a 0.6 rating, eyeing its best audience ever and matching its season high in the demo.

On Tuesday, Argentina shut out Croatia in a 3-0 match that drew 6.46M total viewers across the Fox broadcast and digital platforms. A day later, France’s 2-0 win against Morocco on Wednesday, which aired at 2 p.m. ET, delivered 6.59M total viewers across linear and digital, peaking with 8.6M viewers.

Season 4 of Lego Masterswill premiere during the 2023-24 TV season. The series, hosted and executive produced by Will Arnett, is based on the British series of the same name and sees teams of Lego enthusiasts compete in different building challenges to win a cash prize and earn the title of Lego Masters. The renewal of Celebrity Holiday Bricktacular comes ahead of the first installment, which airs on Dec. 19, 20 and 21.

Defending champion France’s 2-1 win over England on Saturday, which started at 2 p.m. ET, was seen by 13.5 million, including 8.3 million on Fox, 3.1 million on Spanish-language Telemundo, 560,000 on Fox digital platforms and 1.5 million on the Telemundo and Peacock streaming services. Argentina’s penalty-kicks victory over the Netherlands on Friday, which began at 2 p.m. ET, was viewed by 11.1 million, including 5.78 million on Fox, 3.1 million on Telemundo, 665,000 on Fox digital and 1.53 million on Peacock and Telemundo streaming.

 Allison Wallach has been promoted to oversee unscripted programming for Fox. She will take over the role of president, unscripted programming at Fox after Rob Wade, who previously oversaw the genre, was named CEO of the company in October.

Fox’s first-year series Monarch is finished. The network canceled the family drama set in the world of country music after a single season. The show’s season — now series — finale aired Tuesday night.

Fox said its coverage of the round of 16 match, which started at 10 a.m. ET on Saturday, was viewed by an average of 12.9 million. That included almost 600,000 on its digital streaming services. Telemundo said its Spanish-language coverage was seen by 3.58 million, including 1.26 million for its digital streams on Telemundo and Peacock.

In the latest TV ratings, the NBC TV-movie Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas dominated a quiet-ish Thursday in total viewers (with 6 million) and is currently tied for the nightly demo win (with a 0.5 rating). Leading out of that, a holiday edition of The Wall retained just 2.1 mil and a 0.2.

According to a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 23 percent of U.S. adults say that podcasts are how they get news, at least sometimes. FOX News’ audio network is currently number 11 in Podtrac’s list of top publishers.

The move of the Men’s World Cup from its traditional summer berth to fall doesn’t seem to have hurt TV viewing in the United States — and the presence of the U.S. team in the tournament has definitely helped. Through the first 31 group stage matches, Fox Sports is averaging 3.15 million viewers per game — a 44 percent improvement over the same time frame for the 2018 World Cup (2.19 million). Telemundo’s Spanish-language coverage is also drawing nearly 2.6 million viewers per contest on air and on Peacock and Telemundo streaming platforms.

The Cowboys 28-20 victory on Fox averaged 42 million viewers, according to Nielsen, surpassing the 41.55 million average for the Dec. 3, 1990, Monday night game between the Giants and San Francisco 49ers on ABC. Average viewer record numbers date to 1988.

The match, which kicked off at 2 p.m. ET on Friday, was seen by 15,377,000 viewers on Fox, the most for a U.S. English-language men’s soccer telecast. The figure was 6% above the 14.51 million for Brazil’s penalty-kicks win over Italy in the 1994 final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., a Sunday 3:30 p.m. ET start that July 17 viewed by 14,510,000 on ABC, according to Fox.

Andrew Craft, senior digital journalist with Fox’s LiveNOW streaming channel, shows TVNewsCheck’s Michael Depp how to multitask as producer, director and anchor while on the air for hours at a time.

Fox will make some significant changes to its schedule for midseason, unveiling eight new and returning series and moving veteran 911: Lone Star away from its previous Monday night home.

The network will also use the NFL to launch a few shows, including the missing-persons drama Alert on Jan. 8 and a post-Super Bowl premiere for Next Level Chef on Feb. 12. The courtroom anthology Accused, which debuts Jan. 22, might also follow an NFL matchup on the weekend of the divisional playoff round (though the TV schedule for the playoffs hasn’t been set).

Houston’s 5-0 win over Philadelphia on Wednesday night, which tied the Series at two games apiece, was seen by 11,809,000 viewers on Fox. That was up 9% from the 10,789,000 for Atlanta’s 3-2 win over the Astros in Game 4 last year and up 23% from the 9,563,000 for Tampa Bay’s 8-7 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 4 of 2020.

An extra-inning contest to open the World Series helped Fox draw its biggest Game One audience since 2019. The network averaged 11.48 million viewers for its broadcast of the Philadelphia Phillies’ 6-5, 10-inning victory over the Houston Astros on Friday. That’s up 6% over last year’s first game (10.81 million) and the best for a World Series opener since 12.19 million watched game one of the 2019 series. Fox also got a 2.9 rating among adults 18-49 for the game, up about 15% year to year.