Jim Mackay: Last News

Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel has amassed three dozen Sports Emmys during its 29 seasons, and now its host is getting the career treatment. The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said today that Bryant Gumbel with receive the 2023 Sports Emmys Lifetime Achievement.

Jon Burlingame editor Dick Ebersol is one of the seminal figures in the past 50 years of broadcast television. He helped create “Saturday Night Live”; he hired Brandon Tartikoff, genius programmer and innovator, to revive NBC’s primetime fortunes. As president of NBC Sports, he oversaw the network’s Olympic strategy for many years. “Sunday Night Football” was his idea. Ebersol recounts the high (and sometimes low) points of his career in television in a new autobiography, “From Saturday Night to Sunday Night: My Forty Years of Laughter, Tears and Touchdowns in TV,” published this week by Simon & Schuster. While all of the great moments in his career were at NBC, Ebersol, now 75, started as a researcher at ABC Sports in 1967. Legendary ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge, Ebersol tells Variety, “was the most important figure in my life,” and the executive who eventually took on Ebersol as a trusted associate.

Black Bird,” a limited series starring Taron Egerton and Paul Walter Hauser, will premiere on Apple TV Plus this July 8, the streamer announced Thursday.Based on James Keene and Hillel Levin’s true crime memoir “In With The Devil: A Fallen Hero, A Serial Killer, and A Dangerous Bargain for Redemption,” “Black Bird” stars Egerton as Keene, a police officer’s son who is sentenced to 10 years in a minimum security prison for drug dealing. While serving his sentence, he is offered a chance for early parole, on the condition that he move to a prison for the criminally insane and befriend serial killer Larry Hall (Hauser). Keene reluctantly agrees to the unusual case, and develops a complicated relationship with Hall as he attempts to discover the truth behind the murders the convict is suspected of committing.

EXCLUSIVE: Verve talent agency is bolstering its roster with a number of high-level executive producers and directors from Dick Wolf’s camp, including Arthur Forney, Fred Berner, Reza Tabrizi, Jim McKay, Michael Pressman, as well as consultant Connie Rice. The additions follow Verve’s acquisition of Paul Alan Smith’s New Deal Mfg. Co. last month.