In The Shadow Of The Strike, Linear Networks Struggle With Scripted & Stars At Upfronts, Turn To News & Sports
deadline.com“This is not exactly the show we expected to do today,” said Warner Bros Discovery ad boss Jon Steinlauf in opening his company’s second Upfronts presentation as a merged company.
That is both an understatement and sums up the entire week. “It’s been a very weird week,” one network boss told Deadline. While the focus of the upfronts has been increasingly moving to streaming, this year’s event highlighted the struggle that the linear broadcast networks have on the scripted side of the business.
ABC unveiled an almost entirely unscripted schedule, Gordon Ramsay cooked up another show for Fox, becoming its lynchpin, CBS announced a fall schedule that could be decimated by the strike and The CW turned to international acquisitions and reality shows instead of superheroes.
As The CW President Dennis Miller said, “the young-adult audience is not making an appointment with broadcast television today.” It was instead left to Disney+, with Marvel titles such as the upcoming binge release Echo and Lucasfilm shows such as The Acolyte, Skeleton Crew and Ahsoka and FX’s big-budget Shogun, Netflix with the return of The Crown, and Warner Bros.
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