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Thoughts on the possibility of The Talk being replaced by another new soap (The Gates) at CBS Daytime

by Sports Benches

We saw that coming last week when a new soap is in the works around a rich African-American family at CBS Daytime called The Gates. Now we know that this goes ahead, the episodes would go for an hour long at 2pm weekdays in place of The Talk.

The Young & The Restless and even Bold & The Beautiful isn’t going anywhere despite Bold being renewed a few years less than Y & R who remains the best performing soap on the air. When it comes to game shows, The Price is Right has been running for several decades since 1972 & it’s something CBS wants keep on running while Let’s Make a Deal won’t be axed whose ratings is good & game shows like TPIR doesn’t produce a lot of $$$ – they can both continue like Bold and Y & R unless things go south.

Now The Talk is a daytime talk show rivalling ABC’s The View where you can currently catch it at 7-8am weekdays here on Network 10 & anytime on 10 Play as the episodes are only a few days behind the US. The panel has been an all-female panel for the majority until Sharon Osborne was fired three years ago & they since got two full-time male panelists onboard months after her dismissal with Jerry O’Connell & Akbar Gbajabiamila.  Ratings wise, they are currently the lowest on their current line-up & is also ranked 3rd on overall daytime talk shows. But again, the show had another new face behind the scenes recently in the hope of turning things around named Rob Crabbe from the now finished The Late Late Show with James Corden. And yet, there’s no news yet if The Talk will be back for the 15th season later this year where we should find out in the next few months.

If this show comes back again, then sounds good as Crabbe still needs more time to make The Talk working again. But it also doesn’t generate much interest amongst Australians where Network 10 has been airing them way early in the morning from 5-6am, then 6-7am and now 7-8 am rather than during the day – which unfortunately didn’t work a long time ago. So it wouldn’t be a surprise if The Talk will be axed soon enough so CBS can give another soap (The Gates) the chance to fill its shoes and dominate the 2pm timeslot, while 10 can have another low budget or repeat time filler content that isn’t part of the CBS staple at the same time since they aren’t able to compete with Seven and Nine in the mornings.

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Entertainment

Thoughts on Freeform’s future as a basic cable channel with a bunch of new reality TV rather than scripted content along the way

by Sports Benches

Lots of unscripted stuff coming Freeform’s way over the last 12 months with two new ones being added this week, while some in their current original scripted library, Good Trouble has just finished its book after five seasons & 88 episodes on air & Grown-ish’s 2nd half of the sixth and final season will resume on Wednesdays from the 27th March to May 22nd. Where to go to from here after this? Having reversed their plans to have While You Were Breeding on the air late last year despite having a finished production of all 10 episodes. 

All we know so far over the last two years is that they shot a pilot called AZNBBRL, a teenage drama following three Asian-American girls with a desire to follow their own way rather than their parents. But we haven’t heard much since then & it looks like that won’t be going forward & lots of people would have moved on by now since Freeform went with a different direction over time, which led to the reverse cancellation of While You Were Breeding. Freeform also added just two in-development projects throughout last year. One was Knife’s Edge (a horror drama where a Mother & Daughter is against vampires based on a book) just before the Strikes began in April & another most recent back in November was RUSH (a High School drama from Israel called The Station about their lives as first responders). Again, not much progress for both since then with no direction being finalised for Freeform’s original scripted programming over the next few months.

A few weeks ago, Craig Enrich who is the president of Disney Television Group & looks after Disney’s family of networks, said that Freeform won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. He didn’t say much about what they will do about scripted stuff going forward but he did point out about the success of having reality content amongst a female focused audience & that the syndicated repeats & movie event nights are also here to stay. So there you have it, despite people cutting the cord in recent years, reality TV, repeats and movies has kept Freeform alive today until things go south & they find no other way to keep that channel going at some point in the near future. I guess RUSH & Knife’s Edge would still play a role onto the pilot stage & hope things will work out since there’s not much to offer on the comedy side, but it looks like it would be a thing of the past if Freeform think it would cost too much $$$ to chuck in a bunch of new scripted content like it used to be.

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Entertainment

Thoughts on ABC Network continuing to order scripted TV pilots while CBS & FOX are leaning on new shows straight off the bat

by Sports Benches

The talk of having pilots coming out for the next US TV season in late 2024-early 2025 has emerged recently with CBS choosing not to make any orders & will select future shows via the long-term development process just like Fox whose system nowadays relies on the straight-to-series order process. But ABC will keep on ordering pilots both for the drama and comedy side as they will continue to choose quality over quantity (like 1-2 new shows for drama & comedy) once they’ve reviewed them following the pilot stage.

No surprise there considering they will have one new show that was postponed from last year in High Potential (a crime comedy drama based from France) whereas most of this Fall will focus on the storylines from most returning dramas and comedies that was interrupted during the first half of this 2023-24 prime-time TV season due to the Hollywood strikes including a few more reality/unscripted content. With that being said, a couple of new shows after High Potential would be introduced in January-February of 2025.

We don’t know which shows will be up in contention as time will tell later on but they did have a couple of comedy pilots being lined up after they decided not to order any new sitcoms into series last year when Keeping It Together & Public Defenders failed to meet the requirements they were hoping for being set by Abbott Elementary. 

So all in all, ABC won’t follow Fox & even CBS for the foreseeable future by having all of their future shows being available to the public when most unsuccessful pilots are locked up somewhere in a vault & will most likely never been seen again. I wish they can have all of their yearly unsuccessful pilots being put out only online though like they did with Bad Management (an unsuccessful half-hour sitcom pilot) back in late 2013 but don’t think they will do that again I’m afraid.

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Entertainment

Thoughts on The Spiderwick Chronicles getting a new home at The Roku Channel with hope of While You Were Breeding also landing a lifeline elsewhere from Freeform

by Sports Benches

Well, we found one recently unaired cancelled Disney + show ahead of its premiere that saw them land a new home at The Roku Channel (streaming service) a days ago, which is called The Spiderwick Chronicles. We will now see eight instead of the originally planned six episodes going into early next year, having finished filming during the production beforehand. 

If you’d like to know a bit about the plot, it’s based on a children’s fantasy novel around the Grace’s family discovery after they’ve moved into their ancestral home (Estate). That’s great news to hear & also even better to watch all eight episodes for free too thanks to Roku where it would’ve been gone behind a paywall if that show wasn’t cancelled on Disney +. Plus, we will expect to watch it on Paramount + here in Australia since they’re the International distributor, even though Disney’s 20th Television is listed as the co-producers of the show.

All we can hope now is for While You Were Breeding, a comedy drama travel show, to get a new home too after they were given the chop recently by Freeform – despite finishing all ten episodes in production beforehand. Yes, that show was also set behind a paywall but I would love to see it on Roku or a similar paid streaming service too, especially when this year’s film strikes have changed Freeform’s way over time before they were left out of it. As said, unaired pilots or even unaired scripted programming rarely get a 2nd chance. But this can be done if appropriate & we’d like to see While You Were Breeding on the air on a different streaming service of any kind with the help of Freeform via their studios arm sooner rather than later.

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