Today may not be Ted Danson’s birthday, but it does bring with it news of a new Ted Danson sitcom. The new show, yet to be titled, will be written/produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Already given the greenlight to go straight to series, it is unknown how many episodes a season this will be, or when it’ll debut.
Fantastic news, regardless.
"We are thrilled to be back home at NBC and writing for one of the network's greatest stars of all time, Mary Steenburgen’s husband, Ted," said Fey and Carlock.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
In TV revival news that nobody wanted: Nash Bridges is set to return as a 2-hour special, again starring Don Johnson.
Johnson is set to reprise his role running San Francisco's Special Investigation Unit in what sources say is a two-hour TV special. Sources note that while the project is in its early development stages, Village Roadshow hopes that the special serves as a back-door pilot of sorts for a broader drama series.
Representatives for USA Network declined comment.
The revival will pick up with Nash Bridges, circa 2020, still running San Francisco's SIU and confronting a changing city, a new boss and a world in which police work focuses on modern data-crunching and predictive policing. Although the world around him has changed, Nash hasn't.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
Just after publishing the Always Be Watching newsletter yesterday, Netflix released its Q2 results. For the first time in 8 years, Netflix did not reach subscriber estimate numbers. Not only did it lose 130,000 customers in the second quarter of 2019, but it also added 2 million fewer international subscribers than expected.
Stock prices fell 12%. Netflix blamed a weaker content slate for the quarter and a US price hike. That all sounds reasonable to me and I probably wouldn’t be sounding alarm bells for the company just yet.
Source: Variety
Speaking of Netflix…
Over the next four weeks I will be publishing a series of articles for paid subscribers of the Always Be Watching newsletter about Netflix. Each article will explore a different aspect of Netflix. The first will be published tomorrow and it takes a look at a problem with the content curation of Netflix that is going to be a huge issue for the company once it starts facing major competition from the likes of Disney+ and HBO Max.
The Always Be Watching podcast this week has Dan & Chris talking about:
My Next Guest Needs No Introduction
The Loudest Voice
The Simpsons season 30
Parasite
You can listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast apps, or listen to it via the web HERE.
This is the cast for Fargo season 4:
Chris Rock, Jack Huston, Jason Schwartzman, Ben Whishaw, Jessie Buckley, Salvatore Esposito, Andrew Bird, Jeremie Harris, Gaetano Bruon, Anji White, Francesco Acquaroli, Emyri Crutchfield, and Amber Midthunder.
Described as a story of “immigration and assimilation and the things we do for money,” season 4 of “Fargo” is set in 1950 in Kansas City, Missouri, where two criminal syndicates — one Italian, one African-American — have struck an uneasy peace. To cement their peace, the heads of both families have traded their eldest sons. Rock will play the head of one of the syndicates, who has surrendered his son to his enemy, and who must raise his son’s enemy as his own. But then the head of the Kansas City mafia goes into the hospital for routine surgery and dies — and everything changes.
It is set to be a big weekend for movie & TV news this weekend with the San Diego Comic-Con on.
Already I’ve seen a trailer for the new Jay & Silent Bob movie (it looks, as expected, like trash), but the one that actually got me a bit excited was the Top Gun: Maverick trailer.
Oh, and then there is the trailer for It: Chapter 2
Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD is going to end with its 7th season. It defied all odds and expectations, that one.
Source: Deadline
And finally…
There’s been a lot of talk about the huge financial windfalls studios received from selling shows like Friends and The Office to streaming services. With such lucrative deals being made for older content, stars and creators of these shows are starting to ask where there money is - streaming wasn’t a thing when most of the contracts were written, so studios now are looking to bring in talent to these deals ahead of potential lawsuits.
"These deals are so high-profile, it would be insane of them to try to cheat creators out of money because that would be asking for a lawsuit," says one veteran studio executive. Insiders say producer Universal Television did its best to hold an "arm's length" auction and that several other representatives were consulted on the negotiations to ensure transparency and a fair bidding process. In the case of The Office, sources say there was more than one round of bidding, with Netflix topping out at $90 million per year and NBCUniversal willing to dole out $10 million more for all nine of the show's seasons.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
