Programming

Roku has vehemently denied an anonymously sourced Digiday report that it is meeting with media companies to discuss making original shows. “We are not working on originals,” a Roku rep told Next TV in an email exchange.

Netflix is the latest company to pull out of SXSW 2020, a source familiar with the situation tells Variety, canceling five film screenings and a panel for upcoming series #BlackExcellence with Kenya Barris and Rashida Jones.

Deborah Norville will be honored on today’s Inside Edition for her quarter-century tenure as the syndicated magazine show’s anchor. She says its enduring popularity with viewers comes from being “in a different lane” than other syndicated magazines.

“I’d be lying if I said the journey had been an easy one. There have been some good days, but a lot of not-so-good days,” the longtime Jeopardy host said in a video message posted online Wednesday.

MipTV, one of the leading international television conferences and markets, has been canceled due to concerns related to the coronavirus. The event was scheduled to take place March 30-April 2 in Cannes. Organizers Reed Midem announced that all of the events surrounding MipTV, including Mip Formats, Mip Doc and Canneseries, have also been canceled.

News coverage of Super Tuesday primary voting didn’t bring great returns to the broadcast networks in the early Nielsen numbers. Fox’s The Resident drew its biggest audience of the season opposite primary election coverage on ABC, CBS and Fox.

Amazon Studios will no longer be going to SXSW. The two screenings and panels planned for Tales of the Loop and Upload, in addition to a consumer marketing activation, have been canceled amid concerns over the spread of coronavirus. The move follows Facebook and Twitter’s recent decisions to withdraw their participation from the annual music, technology and entertainment festival in Austin, Texas.

NBC Sports said Tuesday it had passed $1.25 billion in Olympic ad sales and sold 90% of its inventory, with nearly five months still to go before the opening ceremonies.

CBS News’ coverage of the Democratic presidential debate from South Carolina last week was easily the most-watched event on television, with 15.34 million viewers. The newsmagazine 60 Minutes, which featured Scott Pelley’s interview with Democrat Mike Bloomberg, came in second for the week, Nielsen said.

Comcast Chairman-CEO Brian Roberts expressed cautious optimism that the summer Olympics in Tokyo will proceed as scheduled despite growing fears that the coronavirus outbreak could force a postponement to the games set for July 24-Aug. 9. “What I know is it’s full-steam ahead,” Roberts said Tuesday. If the Tokyo games are postponed, NBCU has insurance to mitigate the losses for the company, Roberts said.

Despite airing repeats on all five days, the already renewed for year two courtroom jumped 13% to a 0.9 live-plus-same-day national Nielsen rating, one of the few shows to make an upward move in the week ending Feb 23.

The annual Women Tell All episode of The Bachelor topped the 2019 edition and helped ABC score a win among adults 18-49 in primetime Monday. NBC’s The Voice, meanwhile, was the most-watched show of the night and put up ratings virtually identical to its premiere last week.

The series, which wrapped its 13-episode run on Feb. 22 — the final two episodes were shunted off to a Saturday night well after the bulk of episodes had aired — was among the lowest-rated shows on the Big Four networks this season.

James Lipton, the elegant, articulate wordsmith and theater academic whose desire to give his acting students a greater insight into their art led to the popular Bravo series Inside the Actors Studio, has died, his wife Kedakai Turner said. He was 93.

American Idol‘s same-day ratings came down a little bit for the second consecutive week, but the ABC singing competition still led primetime Sunday in adults 18-49. It also gave another boost to The Rookie. NBC’s Little Big Shots, meanwhile, took a good-sized hit in the show’s time-period debut.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show will welcome Judge Judy Sheindlin on Monday and in a preview of the episode, Sheindlin will be striking the gavel for the last season of the long-running and wildly popular court series Judge Judy after 25 years — but she’s not hanging up her robe just yet. She already has her new series Judy Justice waiting in the wings.

CBS’s Hawaii Five-0 will be coming to an end. The popular action crime drama series will wrap its 10-year, 240-episode run with a two-hour series finale on Friday, April 3.