Disney to Shut Down FX+ Subscription Service; “Varsity Blues” Revival in the Works at Quibi

-Did You Know?:
Phil Donahue’s long-running daytime talk show, “Donahue,“ was the first in the genre that included audience participation. The show had a 29-year run on national television that began in locally in Dayton, Ohio in 1966 and ended in New York City in 1996.

Household Ratings/Share
CBS: 3.3/ 6, ABC: 3.0/ 6, NBC: 1.7/ 3, Fox: 0.7/ 1, CW: 0.3/ 1

Percent Change from the Year-Ago Evening:
CBS: no change, ABC: – 3, NBC: -23, Fox: -30

Ratings Breakdown:
An encore telecast of newsmagazine “60 Minutes” led CBS to modest Sunday overnight victory, with a 10 percent advantage over second-place ABC. But ABC is the network to beat in adults 18-49 thanks to its 8-11 p.m. game show rotation of “Celebrity Family Feud” (3.6 rating/7 share in households at 8 p.m.), “The $100,000 Pyramid” (3.4/ 6 at 9 p.m.) and “To Tell the Truth” (2.8/ 5 at 10 p.m.). All three game shows led their time periods in the overnight households.

For the remainder of the analysis for Sunday, July 14, click here

Fast Affiliate Ratings
Friday 7/12/19: Click here
Saturday 7/13/19: Click here

Live + Same Day Ratings
Monday 7/08/19: Click here
Tuesday 7/09/19: Click here
Wednesday 7/10/19: Click here

Live+7 Day Ratings – Week of June 24: Click here

Source: Nielsen Media Research

Debuting On This Day in 1968: Classic ABC Daytime Soap “One Life To Live
I vividly recall the outrage from the fans when ABC canceled daytime dramas “All My Children” and “One Life to Live” within a few months of each other in 2011 and 2012, respectively. The network made the decision to get rid of the two in favor of lifestyle talkers “The Chew” and “The Revolution,” both of which are no longer on the air. “The Revolution,” in fact, was telecast for a brief six months.

ABC’s third veteran daytime drama, “General Hospital,” was also on the extinction list until the fans protested.

Brian Frons, who was running ABC’s daytime division at the time, alluded to the “extensive research into what today’s daytime viewers want” to justify the cancellations of “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.” And the daytime audience, as a result, feared that the demise of the duo (plus rumors of “General Hospital’s” exit) would signal the beginning of the end of the daytime soap opera. For more, click here

“Varsity Blues” Revival in the Works at Quibi
Quibi, the streaming app from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, has put in development Varsity Blues, a modern take on the 1999 movie, with the film’s original producers Mike Tollin and Tova Laiter attached. The project comes from Tollin and Peter Guber’s MSM and Paramount Television.

Written by Tripper Clancy, “Varsity Blues”will follow a high school football team in West Canaan, Texas, and their abusive coach. James Van Der Beek (“Dawson’s Creek”) played Jonathan Moxon in the 1999 film, who faced challenges dealing with his coach and his football-obsessed dad.

Plans are for Quibi to launch in spring, 2020. Cable net CMT had spearheaded a “Varsity Blues” reboot in 2016, but never moved forward.

PBS Announces Six-Part “South By Somewhere”
Celebrity chef, author and restaurateur Vivian Howard, who previously hosted “A Chef’s Life,” will return to PBS in also culinary-themed “South By Somewhere.” The new six-part series is described as a culinary tour, exploring dishes that are uniting cultures and creating new traditions across the American South.

The logline: In “Somewhere in Time,” premiering on PBS in Winter/Spring 2020, Vivian travels the changing South in search of the dishes that connect us all — dumplings, hand pies, porridge and more — but which are expressed in delightfully different ways across cultures. Along the way, she meets new friends and teachers, and as she says, discovers “how breaking bread and sharing a meal can create a comfortable place to have meaningful, memorable conversations.”

With each episode, Vivian finds that although we’re different, our appetites are very much the same.

“South By Somewhere” is produced for PBS by Markay Media, a Durham, N.C.-based television and documentary film company owned by award-winning filmmaker Cynthia Hill.

Disney to Shut Down FX+ Subscription Service
The FX+ subscription series will be officially shit down on August 20th, according to a notice on the streamer’s website. “There is no need to cancel your subscription. If you subscribe through your TV provider, your TV provider will discontinue billing you for the service,” the company wrote in a note posted on the site.

Launched two years ago with Comcast, FX+ is the latest casualty of Disney’s acquisition of much of 21st Century Fox’s assets and much of FX’s content being moved into the Disney-led Hulu service.

FX+ was designed to deliver an ad-free experience, with a $5.99 monthly fee charged onto an existing pay-TV subscription for the access to more than 1,400 hours of FX programming.

Quality or Quantity? If you had a choice of the following two options, which one would you choose? – Click here

Linear or Digital…or Both – Click here

Bounce will premiere the fifth season of sitcom “In the Cut” on Monday, July 15 with two back-to-back episodes beginning at 9 p.m. ET. The series stars Dorien Wilson (“The Parks”) as Jay Weaver, a barbershop owner who meets a young man named Kenny (Ken Lawson) the unknown biological son from a fling thirty years ago.

Season two of Netflix crime drama “Mindhunter” will be available for streaming on Friday, August 16. Picking up in 1979, the focus will be on the Atlanta murders of 1979 to 1981, where a series of murders were committed in Atlanta from the middle of 1979 until May 1981. Over the two-year period, at least 28 children, adolescents, and adults were killed.

The third — and final — season of HBO drama “The Deuce” will open on Monday, September 9th. The series features, starring James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhall, tells the story of the Golden Age of porn, and the legalization and rise of the porn industry in New City City that began in the 1970s

Two-time Emmy winner Randi Clarke Lennon will be joining the new first-run daytime talk show “Tamron Hall” as director. She comes to the upcoming Disney-ABC talker from “CBS This Morning,” where she directed the show since it launched in 2012. Lennon joined “The Early Show” as an associate director in 2008 and also has directed multiple specials for CBS News (including inaugurations, election coverage and presidential town halls). Prior to working at CBS she was an associate director on “The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet,” “Last Call with Carson Daly” and CNBC’s “On The Money.” Additionally, she was an associate director at The Food Network and CBS Sports, and has held positions at “Dateline” and “The View.”