Week of « Prev | Next »
1-20 of 31 items « Prev | Next »
Stx Entertainment, Showtime Announce TV Output Deal and First 4 Films
34 minutes ago
Robert Simonds’ newly launched Stx Entertainment has signed Showtime Networks for a multi-year output agreement to release its movies exclusively to Showtime during the premium television window.
The deal will begin in 2015 and covers the studio’s theatrical releases through 2019.
Simonds and Gigi Pritzker partnered in March with private equity giant Tpg and China’s Hony Capital on an ambitious production venture that aims to generate as many as 10 movies a year.
Showtime has not signed a significant number of output deals since 2009 when Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM teamed to launch Epix.
Stx Entertainment also announced Tuesday that Matthew McConaughey starrer “The Free State of Jones,” based on the true story of defiant Southern farmer Newt Knight, will be among its first titles. “Jones,” unveiled during the American Film Market in November, is written, directed and produced by Gary Ross, and produced by Scott Stuber and Jon Kilik.
Route One »
- Dave McNary
Ratings: CW’s ‘Jane the Virgin’ Hits Demo High; ‘Scorpion’ Leads CBS to Victory
1 hour ago
In its first airing since star Gina Rodriguez won at the Golden Globes, CW rookie “Jane the Virgin” hit some series highs Monday, a night that also saw CBS edge past ABC for the demo lead behind “Scorpion” and “2 Broke Girls.”
According to preliminary national estimates from Nielsen, “Jane the Virgin” averaged a 0.53 rating/1 share in adults 18-49 and drew its largest overall audience (1.4 million) since the show’s series premiere. It had its best ratings to date in both adults 18-34 (0.6/2) and women 18-34 (0.9/3), up 20% and 29% respectively vs. its prior original.
“Jane,” which has already been picked up for a second season, has been more of a critical darling than a strong ratings performer, but it may have found some new viewers after Rodriguez scored a surprising victory at the Golden Globes for best actress in a TV comedy.
“The Originals” (0.63/2 in 18-49, 1.5 million viewers overall) provided a solid »
- Rick Kissell
Televisa USA Taps TV Vet Chris Philip to Head Production, Distribution (Exclusive)
1 hour ago
Televisa USA, the U.S. arm of the Mexican media giant, has tapped international sales vet Chris Philip to head its production and distribution operations.
The deal calls for Philip, who previously ran the Sierra/Engine Television banner, to package and sell projects to U.S. buyers and spearhead global sales of Televisa USA projects. Televisa USA has a compelling pitch to U.S. buyers with its vast archive of content and the fact that it has the resources to fully deficit-finance projects, Philips said.
The parent company has stepped up its English-language sales efforts in the U.S. during the past few years under the direction of Televisa USA managing director Paul Presburger. Philip will work closely with Televisa USA chief creative officer Michael Garcia and chief of operations and business affairs Ryan Likes. He reports to Presburger.
“Bringing Chris into the fold is a smart deal all the way around. »
- Cynthia Littleton
Cheryl Boone Isaacs, Bob Newhart Receiving Publicists Honors
1 hour ago
The publicists of the International Cinematographers Guild are giving their lifetime achievement award to Bob Newhart and their Presidents Award to Cheryl Boone Isaacs, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The honors will be presented at the 52nd Annual Publicists Luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on Feb. 20.
Isaacs will receive the award from Ava DuVernay, director of “Selma.” DuVernay is also a former publicist.
.”Cheryl represents the finest qualities of our profession,.” said Awards Committee chairman Henri Bollinger. .”She has an extraordinary track record as a marketing executive, while at the same time devoting her talents and influence to improving the public perception of all who contribute to the cinematic arts..”
Newhart won a Grammy for Album of the Year in 1961 for “The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” His “The Bob Newhart Show” aired from 1972 until 1978 and his “Newhart” ran from 1982 to 1990. He won »
- Dave McNary
Digital Audience Ratings: Fans Pledge ‘Allegiance’ Ahead of Premiere, ‘12 Monkeys’ Goes Viral
1 hour ago
Provided by ListenFirst Media, Dar – TV measures what entertainment content is resonating most across Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube and Wikipedia combined. For more on the methodology behind Dar – TV, scroll to the bottom of the article.
Digital Audience Ratings (Dar) – TV Broadcast Monday Jan 12, 2014 – Sunday Jan 18, 2014 Rank Last Week Program Rating(000) 1 1 The Voice 11,008 2 3 Glee 6,209 3 2 America’s Funniest Home Videos 4,857 4 4 America’s Got Talent 4,392 5 7 Empire 3,033 6 - Allegiance 1,953 7 6 American Idol 1,825 8 8 The Simpsons 1,653 9 - The Flash 1,526 10 - Supernatural 1,355 -
Cable/Streaming Monday Jan 12, 2014 – Sunday Jan 18, 2014 Rank Last Week Program Rating(000) 1 4 Key and Peele 5,590 2 3 Top Gear 5,463 3 2 Pretty Little Liars 4,688 4 - House of Cards 3,639 5 7 Man Seeking Woman 2,605 6 - 12 Monkeys 2,532 7 1 The Walking Dead 2,486 8 6 WWE Raw 1,614 9 - Eye Candy 1,425 10 - Dance Moms 1,327 -
Late Night Monday Jan 12, 2014 – Sunday Jan 18, 2014 Rank Last Week Program Rating(000) 1 1 The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon 41,452 2 2 Jimmy Kimmel Live 21,281 3 3 Conan 9,753 4 4 The Graham Norton Show 4,010 5 - Late Show With David Letterman 2,971 -
Trending »
- Jason Klein
TV News Moves Beyond TV Set To Cover Obama’s State of The Union
2 hours ago
Tonight’s coverage of President Obama’s State of the Union address may serve to remind Americans anew they no longer need a TV set to experience this annual political event.
Scott Pelley will hold forth on CBS at 9 p.m., no surprise, but will also appear an hour earlier on Cbsn, the CBS News streaming-video effort, where he and a larger CBS News team will, starting at 8 p.m., preview the TV coverage – which will also be streamed live. Over at MSNBC, Krystal Ball, Dorian Warren and Josh Barro will offer analysis of the event as it happens – but on the cable-news outlet’s new Shift streaming-video hub, all as Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews host more traditional coverage on MSNBC.
CBS and MSNBC aren’t the only outlets offering coverage of the speech in multi-platform fashion, but they are putting two nascent distribution methods into the minute-by-minute fray of the current news cycle. »
- Brian Steinberg
Farewell Tours: Departing Series Underscore TV’s Muscle
2 hours ago
Television is enjoying a muscular moment.
By any measure, there’s consensus that this is a golden age of episodic storytelling. In subjects, formats and delivery systems, TV is unrestrained by past conventions, thanks to the dizzying number of linear and digital outlets looking to serve discreet audiences with distinctive shows.
Intense competition — or what FX Networks’ John Landgraf called “just literally insane” — drives even those at the top to think bigger and bolder. Showtime Networks chief David Nevins wishes he had Amazon’s “Transparent” on his air. That’s good news for the writers who will pitch him projects in the coming months.
In this environment, the twice-yearly Television Critics Assn. press tour hosted by the major broadcast, cable and now digital networks is in some ways an anachronism and in other ways more vital than ever. Viewers need all the help they can get navigating the tidal wave of new series. »
- Cynthia Littleton
Justin Bieber to be Roasted by Comedy Central
2 hours ago
Justin Bieber will be the subject of Comedy Central’s next roast, the network announced Tuesday.
“Justin has been asking us for a few years to roast him, and we just kept telling him to go create more source material first. We’re thrilled he listened,” said Kent Alterman, President, Content Development & Original Programming, Comedy Central.
Bieber weighed in via Twitter after Ryan Seacrest broke the news:
yes I got confirmation @JustinBieber is getting roasted by @ComedyCentral in march…love u justin but it's time lol #BieberRoast
— Ryan Seacrest (@RyanSeacrest) January 20, 2015
For years I have wanted Comedy Central to roast me. They said only if I provided them w/ more material so for a year now I have worked hard
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) January 20, 2015
Finally after all that hard work for my 21st bday it's happening. Thanks @RyanSeacrest & @ComedyCentral for the announcement. Let's do it :)
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) January 20, 2015
Lol. »
- Variety Staff
Norman Lear Talks ‘All in the Family,’ Network Age-ism and Dancing Naked
3 hours ago
Miami — Norman Lear charmed the crowd at Tuesday’s opening session of the Natpe confab, telling tales of fighting censors on “All in the Family,” struggling to get on the air today and offering his unconventional tips for longevity.
The 92-year-old TV Hall of Famer is on tubthumping tour for his memoir “Even This I Get to Experience.” “Everybody Loves Raymond” creator Phil Rosenthal, a longtime admirer of Lear’s work, led the wide-ranging Q&A session.
Even with all the channels out there today, Lear said he has had no luck trying to set up a show about a group of 60-plus retirees. He’s dubbed it “Guess Who Died?” “They don’t want to hear it,” Lear said of his efforts to sell it to the major nets.
“Let’s just spend the rest of our time complaining about that,” Rosenthal responded, noting he too was stymied in »
- Cynthia Littleton
PaleyFest Honors ‘Jane the Virgin,’ ‘Outlander,’ ‘Teen Wolf’ and More
3 hours ago
Honorees for the 32nd Annual PaleyFest have been announced by The Paley Center for Media, with new shows such as “Jane the Virgin” and “Outlander” joining old favorites including “Modern Family” and “Glee.” The annual TV fest runs from March 6-15 and will be hosted at the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland.
The full lineup includes “Homeland, “Girls,” “Jane The Virgin,” “Glee,” “Modern Family,” “Outlander,” “Teen Wolf,” and “American Horror Story: Freak Show” along with previously announced series “Scandal,” “The Good Wife,” and “Arrow” and “The Flash.” PaleyFest will also hold a salute to Comedy Central and showcase “Key & Peele,” “Broad City,” “Kroll Show,” and “Workaholics.”
Presale showrunner and studio passes to all events are available to patron and supporting Paley Center members from Jan. 20, and go on sale to the general public on Jan. 24; individual tickets are available to patron members from Jan. 24 and the general public on Jan. »
- Laura Prudom
Tyra Banks Syndicated Talkshow ‘The Fab Life’ Adds Stations for Fall Premiere
4 hours ago
Tyra Banks is on her way back to daytime syndication in the fall now that Disney/ABC Domestic TV has lined up more clearances for her talkshow “The Fab Life.”
Disney said the show has been sold in 24 of the top 25 markets. Stations in Dallas (Wfaa), Atlanta (Wsb), Boston (Wfxt), Phoenix (Knx) and Seattle (Kiro) are among the latest to pick up the show, virtually assuring “Fab” of a fall premiere.
The eight ABC O&O stations committed to the show last year. The time slots for the show in the O&O markets are unclear, but it is noteworthy that those stations committed to a new syndicated daytime hour despite the recent speculation about possible changes afoot for “The View,” which is a network-provided hour for ABC affiliates.
“Fab” (which stands for “fun and beautiful”) is billed as a lifestyle-centric roundtable featuring Banks discussion a range of how-to topics with food writer Chrissy Teigen, »
- Cynthia Littleton
BBC Rejects U.K. Producers’ Bid to Buy Youth Channel
5 hours ago
London — Two of the U.K.’s leading TV producers have tried to buy BBC youth channel BBC Three, but the broadcaster says it is not selling.
Jon Thoday, joint managing director of Avalon, and Jimmy Mulville, managing director of Hat Trick, told the Guardian Tuesday that they had submitted a bid to the BBC to buy the channel for £100 million ($152 million).
The BBC executive intends to take the channel off the air and transform it into an online-only platform for content in order to save about £50 million ($75.8 million) a year. The BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, on Tuesday started a formal review of the BBC management’s proposal.
Under Thoday and Mulville’s plan, BBC Three would continue to broadcast on TV, as well as being available online, and it would continue to focus on its core audience, 16 to 34 year olds. The channel’s program budget would »
- Leo Barraclough
Online Retailer Overstock.com to Launch Ott Service This Year
5 hours ago
Miami — Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com will launch an over the top content service by mid-year that aims to take advantage of the discount retailer’s Internet and mobile traffic.
Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne said the service will launch by midyear with a download-to-own and download-to-rent service. The goal is to launch a subscription streaming service by the second half of the year, or what Byrne called a “skinny Netflix” with a limited number of titles.
Byrne said the company is in the midst of setting a partnership with an outside company that already has rights to content from the major networks and studios though he would not disclose specifics. He said the initial service would have about 30,000 titles at the start, more weighted to film than TV at the start.
Access would be tied to Overstock.com’s “Club O” loyalty program that costs users $20 a year. The »
- Cynthia Littleton
Fox Stations to Launch Game Show Digital Channel From FremantleMedia
6 hours ago
FremantleMedia North America is looking to get new life out of old assets with the launch of BuzzrTV, a digital multicast channel devoted to vintage game shows.
The Fox O&O stations have picked up the channel for a summer debut in 17 top markets. The deal was brokered for FremantleMedia by distrib Debmar-Mercury.
FremantleMedia boasts the world’s largest library of game shows — some 40,000-plus episodes — through its ownership of the Goodson-Todman archive and other gameshow chestnuts such as “Let’s Make a Deal.” The classic Goodson-Todman panel shows such as “Match Game,” “What’s My Line,” “To Tell the Truth” and “Password” retain a kitschy appeal because they feature so many celebs and TV regulars from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.
The move to mine the game show vault is a no-brainer for Fremantle at a time when the largest U.S. station groups are finally starting to make »
- Cynthia Littleton
TV Review: ‘The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’
12 hours ago
Stephen Colbert left some sizable shoes to fill, and “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore” – having lost the right to use its much better name, “The Minority Report” – showed promise, while also displaying unwieldy elements that will likely require some fine-tuning. Mixing “The Daily Show’s” opening with the panel format of Bill Maher’s “Real Time,” Wilmore exhibited a quickness and light touch about sensitive topics, yet struggled to bring much coherence or flow to the overpopulated discussion that took up most of the premiere. The unknowns, at this point, outnumber the knowns, making an unqualified tip of the hat premature.
An accomplished writer and often hilarious as “The Daily Show’s” “black correspondent,” Wilmore slid right into the opening segment with a series of clever jokes, many directed at the lack of diversity in this year’s Oscar nominations, which were, he said, “so white, a grand jury »
- Brian Lowry
Larry Wilmore’s ‘Nightly Show’ Raises Laughs And Eyebrows In Comedy Central Debut
12 hours ago
Larry Wilmore presented a new Comedy Central program late Monday night that attempted two very different procedures in simultaneous fashion: tickling funny bones and drawing blood.
Rather than stock its 11:30 p.m. slot with a knockoff of its previous occupant, “The Colbert Report,” in which the host played a bloviating opinion-monger, Comedy Central leased the space out to an entirely new inhabitant. Wilmore’s “Nightly Show” goes where most other talk-show hosts – except perhaps Bill Maher – fear to tread. Wilmore, now the only African-American hosting a major late-night talk show, threw darts at Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey, and U.S. race relations, proclaiming an effort to make sure a Harry Potter line of candy bars used free-trade chocolate “the only chocolate that got justice in 2014.”
That’s not a joke you’d expect Jimmy Fallon to be able to make.
It’s not clear that the show’s producers want to make people laugh, »
- Brian Steinberg
Tony Verna, Inventor of Instant Replay in Sports TV, Dies at 81
17 hours ago
Anthony F. Verna, a producer of television sports and the inventor of the instant replay, died January 18 in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 81.
Verna debuted his invention during CBS’ telecast of the Army-Navy Game from Philadelphia, his hometown, in 1963. Before the instant replay was first used during that telecast, Verna had announcer Lindsey Nelson explain to the audience that “this is not live! Ladies and gentlemen, Army has not scored again.”
He directed the broadcast of the Kentucky Derby a dozen times, as well as five Super Bowls, NBA and NHL championship games, the Olympics and, in France, Grand Prix racing.
“By any measure, a career spent directing major sporting events like the Super Bowl and the Kentucky Derby would be accomplishment enough,” said DGA president Paris Barclay upon learning of the director’s death. “But Tony Verna’s legacy replays on television sets around the world every day. With »
- Variety Staff
Cookie Monster Gets First Special on PBS’ Kids Lineup
20 hours ago
Cookie Monster has shuffled about “Sesame Street” for decades, but he’s about to break out of the long-running kids program and get his own one-hour spotlight on PBS.
In “The Cookie Thief,” the blue-furred, googly-eyed creature will quickly become the prime suspect when works of art go missing from a newly opened cookie-art museum in the Sesame neighborhood. Cookie Monster must clear his name when a robust collection of paintings including the “Muncha Lisa” and “Girl With the Cookie Earring” comes under threat. Rachel Dratch, who held forth on “Saturday Night Live,” will serve as a guest star on the program.
At the heart of the new show is an exploration of the concepts of self-regulation, including impulse control, following directions and managing emotions. “These are important skills that all kids need when starting preschool and throughout their lives,” said Carol-Lynn Parente, executive producer of “Sesame Street,” in a statement. »
- Brian Steinberg
The Islamic State Plans TV Channel, According to Reports
20 hours ago
According to reports in both Israeli and international media this week, the Islamic State has a 24-hour television channel in the works.
The station, which if launched will take Isis’ well-polished propaganda machine to an entirely new level, will feature round-the-clock news and commentary that supports its jihadist ideology.
The terror organization has waged a shockingly bloody campaign in recent months to seize large swaths of Iraq and Syria, and it has utilized both Twitter and YouTube, as well as Iraqi radio bandwidth, to spread its message and galvanize support among terrorist sympathizers. It has its own English-language magazine, Daqib, as well as a video series, on both YouTube and other content-sharing sites, dubbed “The Flames of War.”
Earlier this week, Isis posted two Arabic-language short teasers purportedly for the upcoming station, a channel that will be called the Islamic Caliphate Broadcast. Both featured sharply edited still images and promise in-depth video to come. »
- Debra Kamin
Kate McKinnon Spoofs Justin Bieber On ‘SNL’ — See His Response
20 hours ago
“Saturday Night Live” comedienne Kate McKinnon brought her uncanny Justin Bieber impersonation to the screen once again on Jan. 17. This time, McKinnon took aim at the singer’s recent Calvin Klein campaign.
In the parody, a fully tatted McKinnon spoofs the drum-playing Bieber’s sensual black-and-white advertisement — and his bulge — alongside “SNL” actress Cecily Strong, who parodies Lara Stone, the blonde model seen in the original spring 2015 jeans campaign, which was released on Jan. 6.
On Jan. 18, Bieber took to Twitter to respond.
@nbcsnl well played. Lol.
— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) January 18, 2015
As of Jan. 19, the “Saturday Night Live” parody has amassed 350,000-plus more views than Calvin Klein’s video on YouTube, raking in nearly 2.4 million views in just one day.
»
- Elizabeth Wagmeister
1-20 of 31 items « Prev | Next »