RIP ABC Comedy
Australian broadcast channel ABC Comedy will come to an end on Dec 31 with a new channel taking its place on Jan 1, 2021.
ABC TV Plus (cool name) will run from 7.30pm to 2am daily (with ABC Kids running throughout the other hours of the day). The channel says it will celebrate Australian culture and content, complemented by an exciting suite of international shows.
I feel sorry for existing ABC Comedy fans who will now struggle to find somewhere to watch 15 year-old episodes of Spicks & Specks, along with repeats of Parks & Recreation, The Office (US), and Whose Line Is It Anyway?
ABC TV Plus will cater for all Australians with diverse new programs, from Saturday stand-up comedians to primetime premieres of religion, science and natural history documentaries, along with the best of the arts – three nights a week.
Q&A is on the move and a return for Spicks & Specks
Agenda-setting political panel show Q&A will move to Thursday nights at 8:30pm. This makes sense to me - Monday nights programming was over-loaded and this gives the ABC more political weight towards the back end of the week.
Also, panel music/comedy show Spicks & Specks will return with a new series. This sounds like an idea that people like the idea of more than being likely to actually watch it in large numbers.
I do wonder if the reason why people still think so highly of Spicks & Specks is just that the ABC hasn’t really had a successful panel comedy show since S&S went off the air. There’s been very few attempts (I rather liked Dirty Laundry Live). I don’t have a problem with an effort to bring Spicks & Specks back, but I would rather the ABC spend some time developing and trying new panel comedy formats. They work well in the UK, there’s an audience hunger for it here, and how expensive can those shows cost to make?
Read: Mediaweek
One Day at a Time cancelled. Again.
After cancellation at Netflix, the popular among writers-for-Vulture series One Day at a Time moved over to broadcast channel Pop. After one season, they’re pulling the plug.
Efforts are being made to shop the series around again. My understanding was that finding a new home the first time was difficult as the existing deal with Netflix prevented the show from being shopped around to competing streamers. One would assume that road block will still be in place and with most traditional networks now pivoting hard to embrace streaming… how many potential homes are really left for this little-watched series?
Read: Deadline
Head of The Class gets its teacher
One Day at a Time star Isabella Gomez (age 22) has already moved on with a new role as the teacher in the HBO Max reboot of Head of The Class. She’ll fill the role previously held by adults Howard Hesseman and Billy Connolly.
The reimagined Head of the Class revolves around a group of overachieving high school students who meet their greatest challenge — a first-time teacher, Alicia Adams (Gomez), who wants them to focus less on grades and more on experiencing life.
How much life has a 22 year-old professional ever really experienced? This is just dumb.
Read: Deadline
Diane Keaton gives The Godfather: Coda a thumbs up
Next month Francis Ford Coppola’s new edit of The Godfather Part 3 is released. Diane Keaton has seen it and is enthusiastic about it, having not cared much for the original version.
“It was one of the best moments of my life to watch it,” Keaton said of seeing Coppola’s new version of the movie. “To me it was a dream come true. I saw the movie in a completely different light. When I saw it way back, it was like ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ It didn’t seem to do that well and the reviews weren’t great. But Francis restructured the beginning and the end and man, I’m telling you it worked.”
Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?
This fun YouTube compilation seeks to illuminate why children of the 70s, 80s, and 90s were messed up.
YouTube slaps OANN
YouTube is a key distribution platform for US cable news outlets like Newsmax and OANN. Both are savvy about getting content and live linear streams of the news channels on multiple platforms - neither are restricted to just paid cable.
So YouTube penalising OANN yesterday is a pretty big hit for the Trump-loving news channel. After posting a video promoting a phony cure for COVID-19, YouTube has blocked OANN from publishing any new content for the next week. It has also barred it from generating any revenue off existing videos on the platform.
Read more: Axios
TeeVee Snacks
- Sorry to anyone planning to buy me a PS5 for Christmas (*tumbleweeds*), but there’s stock shortages globally. Sony promise to have more consoles hitting shelves by the end of the year. Read: Polygon
- Ed Murray, the oldest of the five Murray brothers (Bill, Brian, John, and Joel), has died. Ed was the only one of the brothers not to be an actor, but was the inspiration for the Danny Noonan character in Caddyshack (co-written by Brian Doyle-Murray and starring Bill Murray). Read: CNN
- Today’s worst-take is that the Animaniacs reboot is no good because we watch TV in a post-Bojack Horseman world. Watch next week as he argues that the Saved By The Bell reboot fails because we’ve since seen Riverdale. Read: The Verge
- Want to know when Wonder Woman 1984 is released in your part of the world? (Australia/New Zealand is Dec 26) Read: Variety
UK regulator Ofcom has found young British people watch less of the BBC and only visit the iPlayer when they already know what they want to watch (no browsing), but they value the BBC higher than other demos. Read: The Guardian
Trailer Park
The upcoming film adaptation of Clifford: The Big Red Dog has done the unthinkable: he now looks like an actual big dog. It’s supposedly in cinemas in 2021.
