Programming

There are only a few days left before folks will begin ringing in the New Year, but Fox Corp and NCTC are spending the final week of 2019 negotiating carriage agreements for the Fox O&Os and a number of cable networks, including Fox News, before their current deal’s Dec. 31 expiration date.

The era of “Peak TV” marked a fundamental shift in what we watch, where we watch it, and what the medium is capable of intellectually.

Broadcast saw a shakeup in the Nielsen rankings this autumn, with Fox poised to win its first fall in ratings in a decade and NBC set to snap CBS’s 18-year total viewers streak, according to Nielsen data. Fox is also going to claim its first-ever fall victory in entertainment programming only, meaning excluding sports ratings.

Lee Mendelson, the producer behind more than 50 animated TV specials featuring Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang, died on Christmas Day at his home in Hillsborough, Calif., after a long battle with cancer.

The day after Christmas was a very silent night for broadcast television, with NBC, ABC and Spanish-language network Univision splitting a three-way tie for Thursday’s primetime win in the all-important adults 18-49 demographic. Just one original program aired across the Big 4 networks, ABC’s The Great American Baking Show.

Now that they have wrapped their fall runs, TVLine is looking at how each network’s shows are stacking up thus far for the 2019-20 TV season — this time examining Fox.

As 2019 draws to a close, most of the linear networks devoted to younger audiences continue to face double-digit year-over-year declines. Variety has obtained a ranker of how the linear broadcast, cable and pay TV networks performed in 2019. Here are some of the notable highs and lows of 2019.

The crosstown match-up between the Los Angeles Clippers and Los Angeles Lakers — which saw the Clippers win 111-106 — scored a 1.8 rating and 5.6 million viewers, per preliminary data, taking ABC to an easy win on Christmas Day. Meanwhile, a repeat of the movie How The Grinch Stole Christmas on NBC came in a distant second with a 0.6 and 2.4 million. The animated half-hour version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas notched a 0.5 and 2.4 million viewers for NBC as well that night.

Despite a scoring boom and an abundance of magnetic personalities such as Antetokounmpo and James, NBA ratings on ESPN and TNT, through mid-December, were down more than 15% compared with last year. That sharp dip has exacerbated one of the toughest stretches recently for the league, which has been rocked by high-profile injuries, the Hong Kong controversy and former commissioner David Stern’s brain hemorrhage.

In the not-so-distant past (2010), TV viewers were forced to wait a week for the next installment of their favorite shows, parceled out by networks in half-hour or hour-long increments. Fast forward to 2019, when media and tech companies are subverting that schedule and the majority of viewers using U.S. TV streaming services watch an average of four hours of content in one sitting, according to Deloitte. To understand how we got here, look at Netflix

In recent years, Kacey Musgraves, John Legend and Gwen Stefani have all paid tribute to classic televised holiday variety shows, banking on baked-in holiday nostalgia.

Now that the networks have wrapped their fall runs, TVLine is looking at how each network’s shows are stacking up thus far for the 2019-20 TV season — this time examining The CW.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all networks delivered a merry slate of reruns while NBC topped Tuesday night ratings with its traditional airing of Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday classic It’s A Wonderful Life. This year, it earned a 0.7 rating in the 18-49 adult demographic and 3.61 million tuned in to watch George Bailey realize he has so much to live for. The ratings are down from last year by a tenth.

Raw numbers for Modern Family, Law & Order: SVU and Hawaii Five-0 have dropped off considerably, but they’re still relatively strong shows compared to the rest of the broadcast landscape.

It’s impossible to know what, exactly, the future holds, particularly in an era of unprecedented transformation — but that’s never stopped smart people from prognosticating. As the decade draws to a close, The Hollywood Reporter asked more than 40 of them — from the heads of studios to the faces of movements — to weigh in with their predictions for the year ahead.

More top playwriting programs are preparing students to write for the small screen. And TV writers’ rooms are scouting those classrooms for new talent.

The only original show on the big four broadcast networks Monday, a Price Is Right primetime special, also drew the night’s biggest audience.

With the new year comes much new (or new-ish) TV — as well as no fewer than three series finales. Here’s a calendar of January 2020 return dates, season premieres, final-season launches and series debuts peppered with a sprinkling of finales and specials.

From the unsolved mysteries of Lost to the happy ending of Jane the Virgin, many a prestige TV series ended in the last decade. Here are the most culturally significant ones.

The holiday season is a great time to be a kid, but December isn’t turning out to be a great time to be a cable TV network aimed at children. Ratings continue to plummet for the big kids networks, according to a report from Todd Juenger of Sanford C. Bernstein. The kids networks have been early victims of the shift to digital forms of entertainment, including streaming.

Harassment has long been a hurdle on the anchorwoman’s rise to the top. New projects, like The Morning Show and Bombshell, examine what she has to do to stay there.