Abraham J. Simpson

First there has to be an actual show, before anything is planned. Keep that skepticism handy until the show is ordered to series for CBS. Things have ways of winding up dead, on another platform or morphed into a very different form. It’s amusing however, to see how bent out of shape people get about The Talk.

Are you the demo for The Talk? My hunch is no.

Your crystal ball needs adjusting.

Always be skeptical of echo chambers that can be in both real life and social media. No argument men watch soaps, my dad watched Y&R on videotape with my mom until he died. But let’s also look at the ads being bought. While some are to a degree not gender specific, that tends to be the older-age ones. And the more gender-relevant ads that do pop up are skewed to females. Men listen to adult contemporary radio, but the ad buys from agencies are for the female audience. People who don’t like The Talk are happy to see it go, sure. But CBS is going to have the data that backs up whether enough people do like it—ok, enough women, if we’re being honest—and the degree to which it overlaps and varies from the soaps.

May 2022 in the dutiful trade press: 'Daria' Spinoff 'Jodie' Now an Animated Film, Sets Main Cast I mean, that sounds promising. A cas is set, with a big name attached. Connected to an established IP (older, but still recognizable to the target audence). Cool, must be coming soon. March 2024: Yeah, about that....never mind. Keep the grains of salt handy when it comes to something in development. And they choose (well, CBS chooses, but you get the idea) to keep Let's Make a Deal at 10 am and run the Feud repeats (alongside the approximately 19 hours that run over on Philly 57). That hour and the local avails in it are valuable. Heck, they didn't even move Drew Barrymore there to give it a full hour. Everything gets replaced someday. And Feud makes a convenient filler, since every single episode is basically Steve Harvey mugging at the camera when someone gives a euphamism for a body part or s*x act. But....giving it up entirely for a network show? Someone who wins a power struggle inside CBS might get the O&Os to go along if they blackmail the head of the station group into agreeing. But it's a really bad bet that you're getting an hour back from any affiliate group, and not terribly likely your own group is going along with it.

Would affiliates give up time? No. Not a snowball's chance in h....well, we know where. Not going to happen. Cutting back Y&R, or the Talk, is likewise not reality. They stay or they go, but they're not being trimmed. The problems with the idea of only a few days a week in some kind of checkerboard include the obvious inconsistency. Daytime is built on the same thing daily, and people are not going to be bothered with "is it Wednesday or is it Thursday that the Bold and the Beautiful is on." Or this embryonic idea of a new show. DVRs and on-demand options help, but delayed viewing is generally supplemental to "live." It doesn't replace it. You're also going to get the ad revenue only for however many number of days you put it on attributable to that show. If you're willing to find a cast that can actually act (OK, it's a soap, so it's more like chew scenery) who wants to get paid the commensurately less money while still being tied down...well, that isn't easy. And you still need to factor in the costs of the studio and sets, costumes, etc. It doesn't matter if you only use the set 2x a week, it's not any cheaper to build. The notion of running something only a couple of times and not being out of a cost crunch isn't a business reality. In theory you have two shows with less network revenue coming in but still occupying space and dealing with fixed costs. Sometimes convention is convention for valid economic reasons. If this idea ever comes to fruition, and many things reported as "in development" die "in development," it only works to replace an existing show. It doesn't work replacing Let's Make a Deal for both economic and practical reasons. Deal is no Price but it does well enough and it's a unique flex player on the schedule, airing in morning or afternoon. Mornings don't work for soaps (see Guiding Light, Santa Barbara). And getting affiliates who take Deal in the morning to give you their afternoon hour back in exchange for the morning slot is a hell of a hard sell. Heck, their own O&Os wouldn't exactly be thrilled with that...um....deal. Price is Right is going nowhere anytime soon. Y&R got its renewal, though it may well take years if this thing even progresses, so that isn't off the table. B&B has a year left on its deal; maybe it gets renewed, maybe they evaluate where development of this idea has gone before pulling the trigger on another extension. That's your most likely slot. The Talk is by no means The View, and you don't have the Chen/Moonves dynamic, but the show has carved out its own space and delivered decent numbers in an ad-friendly demographic. It would be the second option, should this concept be an hour-long one. Or it ends up being put on Paramount Plus. Or it gets shuffled off to BET. Or it morphs into a different form. Or like the rest of the developments from this arrangement, it lingers in purgatory and people forget it ever hit the trades for a day.

For starers, you're talking a substantial decline in total eyeballs who cared to watch anyone cover what is a meaningless snooze fest at this point. 19 mill to 11.4....that's like a 40% drop. Great for bargain hunting, not so great for viewership. So who tunes in to foregone conclusion coverage? The die hards looking for their fix. Not surprisingly, that benefits Fox News and MSNBC. I was curious enough in 2020 where there were still contests to watch some coverage. This year, I'd have rather watched paint dry. There was nothing up in the air--we know the top of the tickets, and to the extent there were locally contested races, those are better covered...locally.

It’s an interesting concept. How it works out, or doesn’t, will be dissected six ways from Sunday.

So far that several year old CBS/NAACP partnership has yielded no shows. Development and deployment are different animals. Makes for lovely, juicy headlines but the reality is quite often different.

That’s because it is hyperbole. The world is not frozen in time and there is not one single way to do things. Sometimes things are done for variety, sometimes because something is temporarily unavailable, sometimes because in the judgement of those tasked with making the decision, something wasn’t working. We’re not talking about an assembly line where doing things to precise specifications every time is a matter of quality and safety. It’s perfectly fine to draw from several options.

Yes, different newscasts can be shot differently. It's ok to use the tools at one's disposal in different ways and does not constitute "the bar being lowered" or similar hyperbole.

They can certainly use her for the few weekends Brittany would be off. But clearly they need to use her on a regular basis and that would seem to mean the part-timer gets less shifts.

Good debut, seems absolutely fine. The question of how they use a 6th body remains. The social media responses that this brings them back to what they had previously is technically true but also misleading, since one was primarily the traffic reporter with some weather hits (and of course in fairness covering the earliest part of the morning show and the prep, with David Murphy also doing noon four days a week). Give her some early morning duty to give Karen a well-earned later start (later being relative) some days? That would seemingly make Payton the built in coverage for Karen’s days off in that scenario. So no more weekday shows for Sowers (for the most part). Have her do noon and any afternoon coverage on Brittany’s days off? That puts Adam back to evenings only, and also removes a weekday slot from Chris most week. And it’s two days a week. Flex her all over for coverage (who loses out?) and reporting on weather topics? Maybe. Maybe a coincidence, but the timing is interesting that on the day she debuts, Sowers talks about plans to do more of his home-based livestreams.

I graduated high school in 1988. And I’m freaking old as dirt. What I did back them matters not a bit, nor does the fact that back then it was a big fish in a bigger pond. Sorry, it’s 2024, and being “number one” among three surviving and limping contenders is hardly trophy worthy. CBS could plop a polka music show on its schedule a guaranteed it will be number one in the category of broadcast polka music shows. Im looking at what matters: sellable audience eyeballs. If CBS can make enough bucks to wring some more life out of an ancient cast and recycled plots, props to them. But can we acknowledge that model is much closer to its end than its beginning? The world moves on, and no advertiser or media buyer is looking at what happened in the Regan administration era to place ad buys today.

Number one among….three broadcast soaps? That isn’t exactly an achievement.

One other thought—not saying a move to streaming happens or doesn’t, or that this would happen or not but it is not unheard of for renewals to be nixed even after being announced. If CBS finds it to be the best viable option for the short term, great for them. (Same for ABC with GH.) More power to them. They’ve made Price and Deal work. But at the same time, it’s just a reality that the landscape is changing and it’s not going back.

No, that is not just a new desk. That’s either the Telemundo studio or they significantly changed the NBC studio. My bet is the former.

That’s both subjective of course, and unwieldy to try to put into simplistic terms. So many variable that “how are they” has no concise answer.

Easy peasy

Maybe she’s the one who wants to get out earlier for the weekend this time.

There’s a limit to how much you can cede. Over time, I think on balance the networks gave a good amount relative to the way compensation has shifted. That time slot remains valuable enough that it’s not so much as a “cold dead hands” deal so much as not abandoning a still valuable daypart. It’s always going to be a balancing act - at least as long as the model holds up. Nothing saying it won’t undergo another seismic shift, but the Kimmel slot isn’t going to be that shot across the bow. and this all assumes he actually does make this his final contract. Let’s be honest, we’ve heard this from many a person over the years and seen it not happen.

. I could be named People’s Sexiest Man Alive. Neither is going to happen.

Indeed, great point. Hey, if they sell it to Byron Allen, look for lots of content from his library there.

Realistically, the network isn't giving up that real estate to NBC and CBS. The benefits, hypothetical at that, of stations like WPVI for example doing an hour of news are more than offset by the lost revenue of abandoning the genre. Of course, there is the money to be made from those who view later in clips or on-demand, et al. Non-owned stations making more cash does nothing for Disney directly. Keeping something competitive in that slot does. They may try and fail with an initial replacement. Such is life. But if, and it's a big if based on one comment at this point, he leaves after this contract, that slot is going to remain in ABC's control. Personally, I'd love to see Nightline reclaim the spot, but I know that isn't the smart business play here. It's just a personal preference from someone with no skin in the game.

There can be common threads, but no situations are identical. Each station has its own unique competitors and market dynamics at work. In some cases (a la KDKA as noted) that has worked to the station's benefit. Others, not so much. Sometimes you can employ a solid plan and execute it well, and still not show big results, if the competition hasn't given people enough reason to go elsewhere. And your network performance matters; while a really strong local affiliate can outperform and even give the parent network a bit of a boost there, by and large, you're also partially at the mercy of factors outside your control.