"Previously On..."
A recurring look at recent TV I've watched, notable industry news, items from my archive & their significance, and the history of TV programming as told through the pages of TV Guide.
The Hunting Wives (Netflix): I watched the pilot of episode of this Netflix series when it dropped on July 21 but was not intrigued enough to binge episodes at that point. I have since watched episode two and started episode three but have now given up.
I am a fan of Primetime -style soaps but I found the characters here so shallow and so bland that I just did not care what happened to them. In particular, the character played by Brittany Show is so easily manipulated by everyone around her that it undermines making her the focal point of the story.
007 Road To A Million (Amazon). The first season of this attempt by MGM to leverage its very expensive James Bond IP in an Amazing Race-style unscripted series utilizing 007 film locations found very little audience. Per Luminate it averaged only 600K viewers after 30 days - ranking very low among Prime originals especially ones with such prominent IP.
Many critics have savaged the show for the odd use of Brian Cox as “The Controller” - half host and half fictional character. That criticism continues into S2 as The Guardian writes “I didn’t think anything could sully my rewatching of Succession, but this feels as if it could easily succeed. If it does, I will sue Cox and his agent for not saying no, just once.”
To be fair there are good reviews of the show and I was a fan of S1 and enjoyed S2 as well. The contestants are interesting, the settings are grand, the production values are lush, the Bond film easter eggs are fun to spot and I kind of like the goofy role that Cox plays.
I am surprised the show returned given the very low S1 audience tune-in but I think Amazon is using different metrics and criteria when it comes to 007.
All eight episodes were released as a binge.
Hostage (Netflix): A five-part political thriller with a terrible generic title that is part The Diplomat, part Borgen, part Madam Secretary and part 24 is actually quite gripping through the first three episodes. They are full of twists and turns with no slow spots. The acting is strong as anchored by its leads Julie Delpy and BAFTA winner Suranne Jones.
However it goes a bit off the rails in the last two episodes with villains who can do whatever they want and very inept British internal security services who are also traitors.
Quick premise overview: The Prime Ministers of the UK and France are holding a summit to solve a medicine shortage in England and an immigration problem in France. However both women end up facing personal crises created by the bad guys to sabotage the meeting.
It is also confusing how the UK seems to be the only country in this fictional world that has a very severe medicine drought and no explanation is given as to why.
Dark Skies (NBC): I loved this one season science fiction series from 96/97 that reimagines American history with all major events orchestrated by the aliens who landed at Roswell including the assassination of JFK, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, etc. etc. It wasn’t great science fiction per se but it was a lot of fun. I am now rewatching the show on DVD (yes I still have DVD players - four actually) and am enjoying it a bit less than in its original run but enough to keep going.
Love Life on Netflix: I have seen little-to-no coverage of the fact that HBO Max’s two-season original scripted romance series starring Anna Kendrick and William Jackson Harper from 2020-2021 is now on Netflix. This is actually quite an important event because it is one of the first times that a streaming exclusive from one service has been sold to another.
I have commented often in the past that the biggest threat facing the TV business is that most TV series made after 2020 have little little library value because they are made for streaming and are too short, too serialized and too identified with the original streamer. Without library value the TV business model starts to collapse.
Yet here we have a 20-episode, serialized program with a different storyline in each of the two seasons being sold as a library title.
If this type of licensing can be repeated at scale and include cable networks and local stations then the model can stay afloat. But the Love Life example has a number of qualifiers that likely makes it an outlier.
1) The show was originally released when HBO Max had just launched and the program did not make much of a cultural dent so it is barely associated with the original platform. Most new viewers will think it’s a Netflix original.
2) It is a Lionsgate series so as an independent studio without a streaming platform now that it has split from Starz its primary mission is to sell all of its series whenever it can.
3) Warner likely has no interest in keeping the show on its books for HBO Max based on its prior write down actions and they probably had to authorize the deal. On the other hand series made for Netflix, Hulu, Amazon or Apple may not have that same luxury even if from an outside studio.
4) Netflix is likely the only buyer for such a show - it has already boosted viewing from 1K-2K per week on HBO Max to 1.1M views in the first full week as shown below. Love Life debuted on Netflix on 8/5/25, in week 31. The show has already declined drastically after a week two peak either because it is so short or there is no long tail interest, or both. It is hard to imagine any other streamer or a cable network or a local station being inspired by this data.
Source: Luminate
New Fox App: Two new streaming apps from legacy media companies were released this week. The one with the bigger splash is the one I don’t use - ESPN - so I cannot comment on it’s pros and cons. But over the next 5-10 years ESPN will undoubtedly enhance its capabilities and content slate as it tries its best to steal share of sports fans willing to pay more money than most for streaming video.
The app I did download, which does not require a fee if you have a cable subscription, is Fox One which contains all current Fox programming. I am a Fox entertainment viewer - Doc, Family Guy, Gordon Ramsay, various recent dramas - but I am also a Hulu subscriber and non-Fox News or NFL viewer so there really is no value for me. It is very short on non-news content and there is no library or exclusive programming.
At $19.99 a month its clearly priced for NFL fans as there is no incentive for anyone else to sign up at that price unless they don’t have cable and don’t have Hulu. It’s other big draw is going to be Fox News given the loyalty to that brand but one has to imagine that those super fans already have cable or Fox Nation.
Dexter:Original Sin Unrenewed: For the second time this Summer a premium scripted TV show was cancelled after one season despite a second-season pick-up. The first was Amazon’s Etoile in June and now the Dexter prequel Original Sin. Neither show performed well per Luminate data and have antithetical IP positions.
Dexter: Original Sin is based on well-established IP and is part of a relatively large revival moment for Dexter with two other recent series - New Blood and Resurrection. I really enjoyed Original Sin, especially from a casting POV. Since Dexter is a Paramount title it is not surprising to see a new regime undo some of the decisions of its predecessors.
Etoile was an original concept but set in the narrow-appeal world of ballet and did not fit in to the Amazon brand of series based on action novels.
We are likely to see either more season two back-outs or slower season two pickups moving forward.
Quinn Martin Helps A Viewer Find Reruns: For readers who do not know, Quinn Martin was one of the biggest TV producers of the 1960s and 1970s with such series as The FBI, Cannon, Barnaby Jones, and The Streets of San Francisco. He was also a producer on The Untouchables.
His first hit show as EP was The Fugitive starring David Janssen which inspired the Harrison Ford movie of the same name. Part two of the final episode which aired in 1967, and in which Dr. Richard Kimble finally captures the one-armed man who murdered his wife and framed him, was the most-watched tv series telecast of all time until the Who Shot Jr. reveal in 1980.
It achieved a 45.9 HH rating / 72 share on ABC at the end of August, 4.5 months after the 4th and final season finale, a risky scheduling strategy that paid off.
In this letter just two weeks later a TV viewer, who of course had no internet or other scheduling resource other then the current week’s TV Guide or newspapers, asked Martin himself when the two episodes would air again, a ballsy move. Martin states that he does not know of a date but does know that it will re-air.
Let’s take a deep dive into the pages of the 1966/67 TV Guide Fall Preview which document some momentous events in TV and also some smaller but notable ones.
This issue formerly introduces two billion dollar pieces of intellectual property with both Star Trek and Mission Impossible debuting here (although Star Trek had technically premiered the prior week on 9/8). Both came from Desilu studios and when Paramount bought Desilu they ended up at that studio with successful content from one or both over the last four decades.
Naturally there was no indication at the time that these series would become franchises that are still relevant almost 60 years later.
Here is the Fall grid for the new season. Notice that network scheduling began at 7:30 which ended in 1971 when the FCC implemented the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR) to curtail the networks’ grasp on so much programming. That rule ended in 1996.
This ad for the official start of the NFL’s 1966/67 season is historically important because the first Super Bowl was played at the end of this season, on 1/15/67. Note that both NBC and CBS carried the first “big game”.
Many people associate the 1950’s with black and white TV and the 1960s as a decade of color programming. That is true to some degree but as we see here, as late as 1966 The Fugitive was still broadcasting in B&W and it wasn’t until the fourth season, in the Fall of that year, when it switched to color.
Part marketing gimmick and perhaps part legitimate attempt at marketing research is this ABC ad/poll for its Fall lineup where viewers are invited to give a quality rating for each series on a scale of 1-3 with punny statements for each program. I actually think this could have been more valuable insight for ABC without the puns.
Jack Paar was the second host of The Tonight show between Steve Allen and Johnny Carson but I was confused when I saw this ad. Why is there a Jack Paar branded movie on a local TV station? Turns out this TV Guide is for Northern New England and in 1963 Paar bought WMTW in Portland Maine and owned it until 1967 so he apparently hosted and/or programmed his own movie slot during that time.
The language and images in these two ads would not pass muster today.
Not only is “Full-blooded Indian” cringe-inducing, but casting Burt Reynolds as a Native American would be called out.
Notice that apparently in 1966 only women go “marketing”.
The Green Hornet was a one-season spin-off of Batman that lacked its fun tone which is why it failed but it did introduce Bruce Lee to America.
The Time Tunnel is just one of the great Irwin Allen series I love from the decade.
You know those offers for silly items that appeared in all publications that appealed to middle America from the 1960s-1990s? Sometimes people actually sent them in!
