1. Starting with the upcoming 2024-25 season, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon will be cut back to four episodes a week, with no new episode airing on Fridays. It was previously the only broadcast late night series to air on Fridays. This move was reportedly made as a way to cut costs on a show in a declining format. This also comes in the wake of the WGA strike, where writers landed better residuals amidst the shift of late night viewing to streaming. The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon itself is renewed through 2028, although there apparently is no clause about how many episodes per week NBC is obligated to air. Given this, how many episodes per week do you think NBC will be airing by 2028?
2. Fire Country’s first spinoff, Sheriff Country, is not set to premiere until fall 2025. Despite this, CBS is already looking ahead to a second potential Fire Country spinoff. Code named Fire Country: Surfside, the series would star Jared Padalecki of Supernatural fame, and could land on linear or streaming. This past week, CBS extended their first-look deal with Padalecki to develop shows for them, signaling he would likely also be tagged on as a producer for the potential spinoff. His character is already confirmed to debut in the upcoming season of Fire Country, as a SoCal firefighter with so-called “surfer swagger.” With what we know right now, would you order Fire Country: Surfside to series?
3. Prison Break recently returned to Netflix in the United States, and has since seen a newfound surge in viewership. It landed at #1 on the latest Nielsen streaming chart, which tracks August 5 through August 11. The FOX drama, which aired from 2005 through 2009 with a revival season in 2017, notched 1.603 billion minutes viewed across its 90 episodes. That’s an average of 17.8 million minutes viewed per episode, or roughly 414,000 views per episode. Do you think Prison Break will remain over 1 billion minutes viewed in the following week’s chart?