August 13, 2019 1:08PM PT Denis Leary has been cast in a lead role in Fox’s upcoming event series “A Moody Christmas.” The single-cam comedy follows Dan Moody as he returns home to spend Christmas with his dysfunctional family. When he arrives, he’s met with the inevitable madness of a family whose members are all
Television
It’s official: CBS and Viacom are merging, in what has been newly christened ViacomCBS Inc. Read the internal memos being circulated by the top execs at both companies. Here is the full memo from president and acting CEO of CBS Joe Ianniello, who will after the transaction become chairman-CEO of CBS: Dear Colleagues – CBS
Netflix is continuing its push into the YA space. The streamer has issued a 10-episode series order for “Ginny & Georgia,” which is described as a “mother-daughter coming of age series.” Newcomer Antonia Gentry and Brianne Howy (“The Passage”) will play the titular daughter and mother respectively. “Ginny & Georgia” centers around Ginny Miller, an
August 13, 2019 9:00AM PT As Amazon-owned Audible dives further into the audio-only originals space and ventures further asea from audiobooks, the company has struck a multi-year development deal with “The Walking Dead” comic creator Skybound Entertainment to create several projects exclusively for the audio platform. “Audible is forging groundbreaking deals with leading creators and
Quibi is developing a new comedy series that boasts Dwayne Johnson among its executive producers. Titled “Last Resort,” the series centers on a Polynesian family-run resort in Hawaii that’s suddenly thrown into a whirlwind when a tech billionaire puts in a bid to buy the land. Johnson and Dany Garcia will executive produce via Seven
The mission is nearly complete. It’s taken almost four years, but Shari Redstone has doggedly removed every obstacle that stood in the way of implementing her vision for the media empire assembled by her father, Sumner Redstone, 96, over the last half-century. The long-simmering deal to reunite CBS Corp. and Viacom under the same corporate
August 13, 2019 5:00AM PT Chris Cuomo has long maintained a lean-in” anchor style while holding forth on CNN. A video released Monday shows he sometimes displays similar brio when he’s not behind the desk. A video released by conservative media personality Brandon Straka shows an unidentified man baiting the network’s most-watched anchor at a
Israeli comedy drama “Fifty,” about a sexually and professionally frustrated screenwriter, has been greenlit by pay-TV platform Yes. It has a seasoned team behind it – with Yael Hedaya, one of the writers of “Betipul,” the show remade as “In Treatment” in the U.S. – creating the eight-parter. Daphna Levine, one of the creators of
Ava DuVernay and the cast of her most recent project “When They See Us” celebrated their Emmy nominations with a special screening of the limited series Sunday night. The four-part Netflix series about the men now known as “The Exonerated Five” received an impressive amount of recognition from the Television Academy, earning 16 nominations —
In today’s roundup, Lifetime announces the cast of “The College Admissions Scandal” and the “Vikings” creator is in development on a series about Charlemagne. CASTING Penelope Ann Miller and Mia Kirshner will headline the Lifetime movie “The College Admissions Scandal,” based on the true events of more than 50 families that fraudulently helped their children
“Succession” is proving to be a ratings success. The darkly comic HBO drama premiered its second season Sunday to a series high 1.2 million viewers, beating the previous high of 997,000 for the season 1 finale. Sunday’s viewership figure is also up an impressive 32% on the show’s series premiere which hit 918,000 viewers. The
August 12, 2019 1:39PM PT Shares of CBS and Viacom were dented in trading Monday as investors awaited news of a merger agreement between the two media companies controlled by the Redstone family. Viacom shares fell 5% to close at $28.53. CBS shares slipped 2% to close at $47.91 on what was a down day
Following in the footsteps of “Backpackers” and “Significant Mother,” Yulin Kuang’s “I Ship It” was developed for digital platform CW Seed but, come August 19 after two seasons of streaming, will receive a linear run on the CW network proper. “We have conversations early on with both the production companies and the creators about, ‘Your
The National Basketball Association wants to cut down on cases of post-midnight dribbling. The league and its two national TV partners, ESPN and WarnerMedia, have struck a new arrangement for many of the times the two media companies televise doubleheaders, according to people familiar with the matter. In an effort to offer fans a wider
Nathan Fielder has signed a one year overall deal at HBO, Variety has learned exclusively. Under the deal, Fielder will serve as executive producer on”How To…With John Wilson,” which has been ordered to series at HBO, and an untitled comedy pilot in which Fielder will star as well as write and direct. “How To…With John Wilson”
Welcome back to Tune In: our weekly newsletter offering a guide to the best of the week’s TV. Each week, Variety’s TV team combs through the week’s schedule, selecting our picks of what to watch and when/how to watch them. This week, “Mindhunter” returns for season 2 on Netflix, and “The Righteous Gemstones” debuts on
August 12, 2019 8:46AM PT After sinking to an all time low in 2018, this year’s Teen Choice Awards faired even worse. The Fox broadcast was watched by only 722,000 viewers during its 8 to 10 p.m. broadcast and registered a meager 0.2 rating. That viewership figure is down around 30% on the 1 million
August 12, 2019 8:00AM PT The third annual Tribeca TV Festival is set to unspool next month with the premiere screening of “Transparent’s” musical finale episode and a 25th anniversary “Friends” reunion event. Tribeca’s TV fest runs Sept. 12-15 at Lower Manhattan’s Regal Battery Park. Other highlights of the lineup include the series premieres of
Apple has released a first look at its upcoming drama, “The Morning Show,” starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell and Reese Witherspoon. The series, showrun by Kerry Ehrin, is a fictional look at the goings-on of early morning television. Apple also said Monday that the show will debut exclusively on Apple TV Plus this fall. In
HBO Max and BBC Three are partnering on a comedy series that hails from comedian Rose Matfeo. “Starstruck,” the six episode comedy series, will follow twenty-something Rose (Matafeo), a millennial in London, juggling two dead-end jobs and navigating the awkward morning-after when she discovers the complications of accidentally sleeping with a movie star. BBC Three
August 12, 2019 7:00AM PT Breaker, the blockchain-enabled entertainment platform, is getting into the television game. The company has added six-part miniseries “Bad Banks” to its library of film and music titles. The series is directed by Christian Schwochow, who previously oversaw episodes of “The Crown” and backed by Kino Lorber. It aired in Germany
August 12, 2019 6:22AM PT [embedded content] “The Crown” comes back for its third season on Netflix on Nov. 17. The new season of the wildly popular royal drama stars Oscar-winner Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth II, taking over the role from Claire Foy, who played the monarch in the first two series. Tobias Menzies
August 12, 2019 2:15AM PT Production has started on German crime drama ‘Dark Woods,’ based on the 1989 disappearance of a woman who was the sister of a high-ranking German police officer. It will star Matthias Brandt (“Babylon Berlin”), Karoline Schuch (“Hanna’s Journey”), and August Wittgenstein (“Das Boot”). Silke Bodenbender (“Vater Mutter Morder”) and Nicholas
Jameela Jamil is calling for celebrities and social media influencers to stop airbrushing photos. “I know it’s hard because we are perpetually scrutinized and criticized in this industry, but I’m begging other influencers, actors, and models to join me in not allowing airbrushing,” she wrote on Twitter. “We have to stop setting standards for others
The third season of Hulu’s dystopian drama “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as showrunner Bruce Miller puts it, saw an “opportunity to do something rebellious drop in [June’s] lap.” The titular handmaid (played by Elisabeth Moss) learned about an underground network that could smuggle people out of the oppressive regime of Gilead and decided she had to
August 9, 2019 4:10PM PT In today’s TV news roundup, USA releases the trailer for the Jason Bourne spinoff series “Treadstone,” and MTV sets a release date for the “The Challenge: War of the Worlds 2.” DATES: [embedded content] MTV’s “The Challenge: War of the Worlds 2” is set to premiere Aug. 28 with expanded
It’s not always easy to decide what to watch on Netflix, since even the streaming company’s sophisticated algorithms can’t always figure out what you might like even if it’s different than what you usually choose. Whether you’re in the mood for the crude humor of Nick Kroll’s adult animated series “Big Mouth,” or you’d rather
Danny McBride may be the reigning national avatar of a very specific sort of white male frustration. On his HBO series “Eastbound & Down” and “Vice Principals” — both of which he co-created with Jody Hill and starred in — he brought life to a pair of downwardly mobile fellows who had already wrung every
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet watched the third season of “GLOW,” streaming now on Netflix. What happens in Las Vegas now may stay there, as the infamous tourism slogan claims, but what the characters of “GLOW” experience in the Nevada town during the third season of their streaming comedy will certainly
Facebook might be about to save free TV. With the news that the social network is dusting off plans to trial selling subscription services through Facebook Watch (á la Roku, Amazon, Apple etc.), and also plans to release their own streaming device, Facebook is demonstrating it has its eyes on new video revenue streams. Should