SS8609

Looks like KPRC aired its 10am newscast for the last time on Thursday (preempted today due to schedule shuffles related to the Olympics...good luck, America!). After the (rather flighty) Olympic torch in Paris is extinguished, Drew Barrymore will be replacing it at 10am, a far superior time to 3am purgatory on KIAH. Rather surprising considering Drew is essentially a CBS property and Kelly Clarkson has her own talk show produced by NBC (and airing on Fox O&O KRIV) that very well could crowd Drew out should KPRC inevitably become an NBC O&O in the case of a Graham selloff not unlike what the Hobby Family did 30+ years ago to KPRC. Also noticed KHOU is airing Wheel of Fortune ads with Ryan Seacrest. Looks like that's staying on KHOU instead of moving over to KTRK to join the rest of the ABC O&Os that have aired it for years.

Will be curious to know what KHOU does with the 3pm hour with Daily Blast Live leaving the air, as well as the (much less important) 12:35 a.m. slot after After Midnight. For the former, the possibilities could be either a 3pm newscast with a syndicated show, Judy Justice, or something that is intended for daytime but in overnight purgatory (e.g. iCrime, Drew Barrymore, etc.). Since the Standard General deal was called off, KHOU probably has more leeway to do what they want with the timeslot now as opposed to the sort of scenario KPRC had circa '92, when the Hobby family was going bargain basement on syndicated shows, while they were trying to sell channel 2 to Young Broadcasting (that ultimately failed) and eventually did so to what is now Graham. For the latter, I'm either guessing they move their repeat of the 10 o'clock news one hour back or fill something else in the slot. If they still have Wheel of Fortune next season when Ryan Seacrest takes over (assuming that doesn't walk over suddenly to KTRK like Jeopardy! did nine years ago), perhaps a second run repeat like what KTRK has with Jeopardy!? Will also be interesting to see what KIAH does with all the real estate they have now between the soon-to-be vacant slots now held by Jerry Springer, Two and a Half Men and Black-ish. I already know The Conners will likely be on KIAH, not surprising considering Roseanne reruns were on the station when it was KHTV.

No, a courtesy. But if the FCC were to somehow impose the degree of which stations can serve the public interest to such an extent, it would likely result in the scenario I mentioned where after the late night shows conclude, the stations will simply defer to their network's overnight news feed, and it's important to note that the Big Three already have their own streaming news channels now on IPTV (ABC News Live, CBS News Streaming, NBC News Now).

Yes, I am aware that iCrime airs on the weekends on KTXH as filler material between E/I and movie or sports programming (primarily content that previously aired on KIAH before The CW added sports), thank you for the input @H-Town TV Fan! It also wouldn't shock me if it and Court Cam are being used as filler on KPRC overnight before weekdays to make up for NBC not having an overnight news program to fill the dead space between Late Night and Early Today (as KPRC does with Byron Allen-distributed programming, Funny You Should Ask being one such example). Ideally, the networks would be wise to simulcast their national news streaming platforms in the graveyard slot, as KPRC does in the 1 a.m. hour with Top Story, if not for the fact that some network affiliates (particularly in smaller markets) might fill the space with other syndicated filler to compensate for there not being a fifth or sixth station in a given market, and also given the instant $$$ some get airing infomercials in this period. It would also be nice for stations to use the dead space to do a "sign-off" legalese after the last scheduled non-infomercial or non-overnight news program of the day + a "sign-on" before the early morning newscasts, but even though Gray and Nexstar have done so, others probably won't do that either unless the FCC or NAB/NCTA find a way for broadcasters to effectively serve the public interest in harmony with the Constitution (which itself rendered the Television Code moot in the early 80s). And even there, with 200+ streaming channels, services, etc. these days (though some I would say are relatively useless, particularly on linear cable), that would be an onerous task for any broadcaster to fill.

Not to mention the painful, crushing injury a player may get on the field (though since high school football players for the most part are minors save for a few older kids, that may be controversial since some news orgs have policies against releasing the names of minors without permission). As for using iCrime as a buffer, that isn't surprising since it is for the most part filler programming just like most if not all of Trifecta's syndication product.

TEGNA is probably waiting on the syndication market to improve before they even consider the possibility of turning KTBU into a true independent similar in format to what KUBE was before it chose to go "shopping". Also important to note that Houston's sports media landscape is for the most part secure as the Astros and Rockets took over AT&T SportsNet and turned it into Space City, the Texans probably have a long-term deal with KTRK for the long haul and have for years, and the Dynamo are exclusive to Apple (for now). They may get a shot at the NHL should Space City pass them up (which may not be likely given Tilman Fertitta is the runaway favorite to own Houston's eventual NHL team and will likely want it on Space City, even if it means relegating them to a secondary feed at times). As for what team is most likely to be poached by TEGNA for a sports broadcasting deal, I would say the Rockies are the favorite since they can use the closing of AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain as an opportunity to acquire the Rockies rights and build KTVD around the Rockies (perhaps even changing the calls to something more suitable), as opposed to fighting for airtime with the Nuggets and Avs on Altitude even though the overlap between MLB and NBA/NHL is relatively minimal since the start of the baseball season coincides with the winter sports' playoff schedule now almost exclusively on ESPN/TNT.

Just decided to do a little channelsurfing before I go to bed: * Comics Unleashed on KHOU has a young (likely stuffed full of Jack in the Box tacos) Billy Gardell. Good, we know you eventually made it! Next… * Late Night with Seth Meyers on KPRC has Jim Gaffigan on from the beginning of last March when Trump and DeSantis were tied for the GOP presidential nomination and everyone was watching college basketball tournaments for (mostly one and done unless you’re Fairleigh Dickinson) March Madness auto bids. Next… * KTRK is airing a repeat of Live with Kelly & Mark from this morning with the lead in The Golden Bachelor. Next… * KIAH is airing a repeat of KTRK’s 10pm news. Likely with the first innings of a baseball game the Astros just won over the Mariners. Next… * KRIV is airing Person, Place or Thing. Wouldn’t be shocked if this is doing the most well at midnight even if the ratings are hashmarks considering the weak syndication market and the strikes (one of which thankfully just ended). Which more than justifies sister station KTXH airing a repeat of the Isiah Factor Uncensored that aired 90 minutes prior on the mothership. It’s Hump Day on the last week of September. This is not even close to a dream. Just waiting on the nanny from The Nanny to make a deal…

Except WISC, WKBT and WBKB are all CBS on the primary end and WJFW is NBC and licensed to a city in the northern reaches of the Wausau market. Though it is not impossible to envision such a scenario as WBOY in Clarksburg, W.V. was NBC in an otherwise all-CBS West Virginia Media Holdings prior to the Nexstar buyout (and ironically the only station to lead its market as well). But there is also the question of what happens to Rockfleet's other two stations in Bangor, Maine (ABC affiliate WVII and Fox LPTV WFVX)? Does Morgan Murphy expand into New England? Or do they sell off to Hearst which already has WMTW in nearby Portland Poland Spring?

And it wound up being roadkill for Oprah anyway. Name one station that even bothered to carry Oprah at a time other than the afternoon or early evening...especially during this period when she came to really dominate what had become a saturated talk show mine field. Or the aforementioned Crimetime After Primetime to tide them over until the strikes end, possibly at least the WGA by the end of this week or next for sure. But if anything, who misses the days of CBS News Nightwatch? Forget what eventually happened to their longtime host, but it's hard to argue that if Charlie Rose (again as I said) kept his pants zipped, his PBS interviews would likely be airing on CBS as filler.

That would be absurd. Disney is not just going to sell ABC without ESPN. Because a big chunk of ABC’s ratings are tied to ESPN and the sports department runs as one joint unit, it would be impossible to sell to Allen in this sense without causing a mass disruption of the sports media market. The most ideal situation for ABC and ESPN would be Hearst teaming with Berkshire Hathaway (just like the latter funded Capital Cities’ purchase of ABC long ago) to buy the networks and perhaps National Geographic which could be collapsed into the A&E Networks structure. I would however consider Freeform instead of FX though - since FX is still in form a Fox network at heart airing Fox repeats, even if they are no longer a News Corporation Fox entity. All that Hearst can then do is turn its ABC affiliates into O&Os along with WBAL in Baltimore (which Hearst has owned from day one in 1948), and sell most of the rest of its stations to Scripps. It’s not that Byron Allen isn’t capable of pulling off a big acquisition, but to me him acquiring a significant share of Gray and playing a key cog in further investing into the Atlanta media scene where the likes of Tyler Perry and Steve Harvey have had a sizable presence (and Allen already has links to CBS via TWC and NBC dating back to his days with Real People) would make more sense. Atlanta is already home to TWC as well and has been since day one.

It’s too bad that because of Worldwide Pants you can’t have old Tom Snyder repeats from back in the day with the iconic David Sanborn theme music. It’s also too bad that because he couldn’t keep his drawers zipped some years ago, we can’t have repeats of Charlie Rose and his own iconic theme and presentation as well. It’s even too bad it’s not anywhere close to the 2024 presidential sweepstakes - if it were, CBS could have had extended presidential coverage in the presentation of the old CBS News Nightwatch. At this point, anything is better than continuously rerunning James Corden. I’d even go with a reboot of Crimetime After Primetime at this point just to kill time until the damn strikes end! Except I think it’s baloney. Antenna TV should just suck it up and make a deal with NBC to air Carson repeats as they originally aired - complete with the Ed McMahon intros and Carson’s monologues. Especially since a lot of their affiliates are NBC affiliates themselves on the primary end. And for Letterman? Nexstar has Rewind TV now and they could use that to air vintage Letterman from the NBC era, maybe even the CBS era without modifications. Gen X and even elder millennial parents should have the opportunity to show their kids what comedy was like in their days. It’s not like they’re trying to rip off NBC as if the trademarks are so sacrosanct (Bud Melman/Calvert DeForest has been a bag of bones for several years now - like NBC is worried about Nexstar profiting off of airing old Letterman repeats as they were intended?).

Scripps should simply make a move on KXGN and spin off the radio stations. If anything, I think that the Billings and Glendive markets, as well as Great Falls and Helena, should be merged since KXGN and KTVQ are essentially one and the same minus the separate KXGN operations that can easily be collapsed into the Billings mothership, and which wouldn’t be any different from Cowles acquiring KYUS from the Marks estate and merging it into KULR, for which KYUS is already a semi-satellite, since KYUS’s COL of Miles City sometimes gets associated with Glendive. As for Great Falls and Helena, since CBS, ABC and Fox already have full-power signals in the former and LPTV satellites in the latter, with the reverse being true for NBC especially since the old KTGF went bye-bye in 2009, it would also make sense to combine those two as well. Nielsen can easily replace the voids where Glendive and Helena disappear by splitting Waco and Bryan-College Station into two markets, since Waco is a Baylor and Cowboys market and BCS revolves around Texas A&M and is closer to the Texans (BCS viewers also get most of the Houston stations on cable, whereas Waco has long gotten DFW stations from cable including WFAA and KERA), and also splitting off the Lewiston/Pullman and Moscow areas into one market with KLEW and KWSU. This could, however, result in some interesting circumstances in the Palouse with Daystar’s KQUP potentially either attempting to move north to Spokane or sell off to a commercial operator such as Cowles or Morgan Murphy with intentions to expand one of the Spokane stations to a semi-satellite of either KHQ or KXLY (and both groups already control the NBC and ABC duopolies in central Washington). And in Waco, there would be no PBS station, which may prompt KERA or KLRN (or perhaps even Baylor which long abandoned KWBU) to look at buying or converting a station to a PBS satellite in central Texas. And if Puerto Rico becomes a state, Nielsen can accommodate the vast San Juan market - likely to be in the top 25 or at least the top 30 - by collapsing Charlottesville and Harrisonburg, whose stations somewhat feed off one another corporate-wise, into one market. This could trigger some potential sales here though as well as terrain issues given that both Shenandoah Valley markets are split by the Blue Ridge mountains and Shenandoah National Park, though combining the two may give ABC/ESPN more market leverage for ACC football telecasts involving UVA, maybe not as much as Roanoke with Virginia Tech, but certainly just as much or more so than smaller SEC markets like Columbus, Ga. (Auburn) or Columbus, Miss. (Mississippi State). Of course, this all remains speculation, but it could very well be a possibility down the line.

But it looks like KPRC did pick up Fast: Home Rescue off of The Weather Channel for the 1AM hour late Sunday night. The ET weekend hour (now airing at 1AM late Saturday night) will still re-air afterwards at 2AM when all of H-Town is asleep to prep for the morning commute…

Some additional observations from Houston on the purgatory known as non-sports weekend programming… At KPRC, Impractical Jokers is DONE, and their usual time slots this coming Saturday are listed on Xfinity and TVPassport as “To Be Announced”. The Saturday schedule has the weekend Entertainment Tonight run airing at 1:02am and Byron Allen’s The American Athlete running at 2:30am - on BOTH late Saturday AND late Sunday night. A new locally produced foodie show, Eat Like a Local from noted Houston chef Chris Shepherd, will re-air Sunday night following their long-running Sports Sunday; this program will primarily air at 10am Saturday mornings between KPRC’s Saturday morning filler newscasts and various NBC sports and E/I programs. KHOU remains virtually unchanged save for The Equalizer replacing the now canceled Magnum P.I. on the CMV weekend block, slotted at 12:30am Saturday night and 1:30am Sunday night between fellow CMV warehouse stablemate SEAL Team and non-CMV Murdoch Mysteries repeats from the CBC. And at KIAH, much like fellow truTV import Impractical Jokers, The Carbonaro Effect is also DONE, as the weekend reruns of The Big Bang Theory will take the Sunday night 1am slot. Pawn Stars and Storage Wars remain where they are now in the 2am and 3am hours, and Major Crimes appears to be airing in the Saturday night 2am slot instead of a run of PS. The rest of the weekend outside of CW, CW Sports, a few local shows, Nexstar must-runs and some smaller-tier HBCU football games will be a hodgepodge of movies and reruns, but after some 25 years or so Friends will not be one of them. Call this year The One Where We Got Kicked Out of Houston…“We” referring to those six lovable roomies from a now-bygone era lounging on the couch at Central Perk. No significant weekend changes at KTRK, KRIV or KTXH.

If WKMG’s sister station in Houston (KPRC) is any indication, the weekend edition of ET will probably air right before WKMG flashes over to the CBS Overnight News since KPRC (which ironically was WESH’s sister station under the ownership of the Hobby family and even once shared WESH’s “2” logo that originated at KPRC in 1985) airs it at midnight late Sunday following the 10pm news as well as Sports Sunday, The Texas Bucket List and The Winning Walk (Dr. Ed Young’s sermons from Second Baptist Church in Houston). As for WFTV passing on ET and choosing to air Court Cam, there is basically no room there since they’re not giving up Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! anytime soon, also considering it’s a cornerstone affiliate of ABC (along with WSB and WSOC) which already carries its celebrity and million-dollar championship editions in primetime and will be doing so as long as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA are feuding with the executives and AMPTP. And that’s another thing, also considering Disney’s outsized economic role (and also role as a political punching bag) in central Florida as well as Court Cam being off-net from a quasi-sister network (A&E) co-owned with WESH’s parent company. Also, on another note KRON is about to gain some leverage in the college sports ad wars on the weekends in the Bay Area - the ACC just voted to accept Cal and Stanford into their conference along with SMU in Nexstar’s home base of DFW beginning in 2024.