CBS has won the competition to carry 8 fall NFL games on Thursday nights.  Price wasn’t disclosed, but the network is believed to be paying in the neighborhood of $300M for the games, or about $37.5M per game.  (All the broadcast networks and several cablers bid for the rights, as reportedly did Google.)  In […]

  THE MYSTERIES OF LAURA:  Wednesday 8PM on NBC THE FACTS:  Laura Diamond (Debra Messing) is an NYPD homicide detective who also has to juggle her responsibilities to her young twin sons and her issues with her estranged cop husband (Josh Lucas).  The series creator is Jeff Rake, a veteran writer/producer (everything from The Practice […]

  Here are our night-by-night ratings predictions for the Fall network television season:  Monday,  Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,  Friday, and Sunday Now that we’ve gone through each night’s Fall ratings, let’s pull back and take a look at the big picture for each of the broadcast networks. ABC:  Standing still isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the […]

  In about a year, the reboot of the network late-night talk shows will be complete, now that David Letterman, cranky genius of the format, has announced that sometime in 2015 he’ll be retiring.  With Jimmy Kimmel’s move to 11:35PM and the recent ascensions of Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, it will be the first […]

  Come February, Thursday nights are going to feature an old-fashioned broadcast network slugfest, as ABC’s announcement that Scandal is moving to 9PM will put it squarely in the path of NBC’s The Blacklist when that series moves at midseason–may the best crazy plot twist-laden melodrama win.  The Scandal move is part of ABC’s new […]

  FOX may be in 4th place for the season, but it has the hot hand right now, with Spring blockbuster Empire and surprise success The Last Man On Earth livening up its season.  It’s trying to build on those with an aggressive Fall schedule (new shows are in ALL CAPS, new timeslots are in […]

  Networks like to issue news on Fridays in the hope that the items will be lost in the ether, and here are some updates that managed to escape. The back half of the season for SCANDAL is going to be even more rocket-paced than the series already is, because ABC cut the show’s order […]

  CBS was, for the most part, very CBS in its choice of new series for next season, with a pair of spin-offs, some additional procedurals, one retread sitcom and another that fits right into the network’s multi-camera family comedy sweet spot.  The biggest surprise was the omission, at least for now, of How I […]