Television Academy Appoints Linda Swain Vice President, Membership and Outreach (TV News Roundup)

Drew Barrymore, Tamron Hall and Scott Evans are among the stars set to present at the Daytime Emmy Awards on June 24.Hosted by Kevin Frazier and Nischelle Turner from Entertainment Tonight, the 49th Annual Daytime Emmy Awards will also see many other notable personalities present, including: Jerry O’Connell and Natalie Morales from “The Talk”; Deborah Norville from “Inside Edition”; Deidre Hall and James Reynolds from “Beyond Salem”; Krista Allen, Lawrence Saint-Victor and Tanner Novlan from “The Bold and the Beautiful”; Tanisha Harper, Cameron Mathison and Laura Wright from “General Hospital”; Galen Gering and Camila Banus from “Days of our Lives”; and Sean Dominic, Christian Le Blanc and Tracey Bregman from “The Young and the Restless.” In addition, Suzanne Rogers will present the lifetime achievement award to John Aniston during the ceremony. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences also announced the presenters for the upcoming Creative Arts & Lifestyle Awards, which will stream on Friday.

Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” will premiere July 28, HBO Max has announced.The release date was announced via a first look teaser for the series, which shows a mysterious figure cutting up and burning pictures of the five main characters: Imogen (Bailee Madison), Minnie (Malia Pyles), Noa (Maia Reficco), Tabby (Chandler Kinney) and Faran (Zaria).The new series is a sequel to the original series that focuses on a completely new set of teenagers in the blue-collar town of Millwood, Pa. The five main characters are tormented by someone operating under the identity of “A,” an alias assumed by villains from the original show, who knows the secrets of both the teenagers, and their parents.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorIn today’s podcast roundup, domestic guru Martha Stewart teams with iHeartMedia for a talk-show podcast; ESPN expands its partnership with Peyton Manning for a new slate of podcasts; Audible taps Dominic Monaghan for a new spin on Sherlock Holmes’ famous nemesis, Moriarty; SiriusXM premieres original scripted podcast “Marvel’s Wastelanders: Wolverine”; and more.Martha Stewart is no stranger to podcasts — and she has been a mainstay of TV, magazines and other media for years. Now she’s hosting her first-ever original podcast series, “The Martha Stewart Podcast,” slated to premiere June 22, produced in partnership with iHeartRadio.

Selome Hailu Syrinthia Studer has joined Paramount’s global content licensing division as executive vice president of international productions.After being promoted from serving as executive vice president of Nickelodeon and Awesomeness Films, she will now oversee content strategy, development and production of local language and micro-budget films for the studio’s new business unit. Her purview will focus on originals and culturally specific local language remakes sourced from Paramount Pictures’ film library, with projects releasing via limited theatrical or direct-to-consumer platforms globally.

Kamala Harris is showing her support for the LGBTQ+ community! The Vice President made a special appeareance at Capitol Pride in Washington where she was joined on stage by Rupaul’s Drag Race Season 13 winner Symone, becoming the first Vice President to attend a Pride event.During her speech, Harris talked about the 31 people arrested in Idaho during a Pride event, for conspiracy to riot. “No one should fear going to a Pride celebration because of a white supremacist,” she stated.The Vice President was accompanied by her husband Douglas Emhoff, and she took a moment to reference the deadly Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando where 49 people were killed, as it was the sixth anniversaty of the tragedy.“No one should fear going to a nightclub for fear that a terrorist might try to take them down,” Harris said, adding “No one should fear loving who they love.”“Our children in Texas and Florida should not fear who they are,” she delcared, denouncing the controversial ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.

Sasha Urban editorMartin Luther King III will host a new docuseries produced by Calabasas Film and Media, the company announced Monday.Titled “Protect/Serve,” the series sees King, the oldest child of revered civil right activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., moderate a series of conversations with law enforcement officials, activists, grass-roots organization founders, DAs and other prominent figures. The conversations will focus on the role of police in America and the origins of institutional racism, with a goal of finding solutions to these problems.

Jennifer Maas TV Business WriterDisney Branded Television has promoted Meredith Roberts to executive vice president of TV animation, the studio said Monday.The promotion comes for Roberts following “outstanding creative and operational oversight of the Disney Television Animation studio during a period of significant growth,” per Disney Branded TV.Most recently senior vice president/general manager of Television Animation at Disney Branded TV, Roberts has managed the division since  2018, overseeing development and current animated content and production for kids 6-14 and families, including traditional 2D and CG series, movies and shorts distributed on Disney+ and Disney Channel.The studio has 1,200 half-hours of animated content currently in production for Disney’s streaming and linear platforms, and during Roberts’ tenure in 2020, Disney Television Animation earned more Daytime Emmy Award nods than at any other point in its 38-year history. “A leader of incredible vision and a true champion of artistic talent, Meredith has set a new bar for Disney Television Animation, building upon the single greatest animation legacy in the world to lead a team that is creating the most innovative, magical animated storytelling in the business,” Ayo Davis, president of Disney Branded Television, said during the announcement at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in Annecy, France on Monday.

were arrested by police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, under suspicion of conspiring to riot at a nearby Pride celebration.“No one should fear loving who they love!” the Vice President said. “Our children in Texas and Florida should not fear who they are! Black and brown and women of color — transgender women — should not pay [with] their lives! We should not have to be dealing with three hundred laws in states around our country that are attacking our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters!…“We will continue to build unity, we will continue to build coalitions, we will always be fueled by knowing we have so much more in common than what separates us,” she concluded.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorIn today’s podcast roundup, Luminary drops a three-part interview with the late Bob Saget; “Too Hot to Handle” and “The Circle” star Chloe Veitch is launching a sex and dating podcast; USG Audio’s first scripted podcast, thriller “The End Up” from executive producer Sam Esmail, is premiering at the Tribeca Festival; and more.Luminary, the subscription-based podcast and audio entertainment platform, this week premiered one of the last interviews with comedian and actor Bob Saget on its original show “Til This Day With Radio Rahim.” Saget, who died in January, sat for the interview with Radio Rahim in May 2021. Across three chapters, totaling about one hour, the duo cover topics including Saget’s deep love for friends and family, his dreams and future goals for his career in film, his unfiltered thoughts about Hollywood elite and his unique relationship with Tom Hanks.

Menudo: Forever Young,” the HBO Max docuseries about the titular Latin American boy band, has been released.Directed by filmmakers Angel Manuel Soto and Kristofer Ríos, the four-part docuseries follows the rise of Menudo, a Puerto Rican musical group formed in 1977 by producer Edgardo Díaz that became one of the most popular boy bands in history, selling 20 million records worldwide during the 1980s. The series chronicles the group’s meteoric rise in the ’80s, and the fall it suffered during the ’90s, after sexual abuse allegations against Díaz surfaced.

Ellen DeGeneres’ emotional goodbye to daytime ended her flagship talk show on a ratings high note.The May 26 series finale of “Ellen” yielded a season high 1.8 rating among adults 18-49, according to live + same day Nielsen data. The number marks a 30 percent improvement from the ratings of the show at the same time last year, and a 64 percent improvement over ratings for the show from the week prior.

Tony Awards.In addition to the three, the full presenter list for the awards ceremony, which honors the best in theater over the last year, includes Broadway stars like Danny Burstein, Len Cariou, Lilli Cooper, Cynthia Erivo, Raúl Esparza Renée Elise Goldsberry, David Alan Grier, Nathan Lane, Telly Leung, Judith Light, Ruthie Ann Miles, Patina Miller, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bebe Neuwirth, Kelli O’Hara, Bernadette Peters, Jeremy Pope, Chita Rivera, Phillipa Soo, Aaron Tveit and Adrienne Warren. In addition, film and television actors such as Utkarsh Ambudkar, Skylar Astin, Zach Braff, Danielle Brooks, Jessica Chastain, Bryan Cranston, Wilson Cruz, Colman Domingo, Anthony Edwards, Laurence Fishburne, Tony Goldwyn, Vanessa Hudgens, Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Lucas, Gaten Matarazzo, Sarah Paulson, Billy Porter, LaTanya Richardson, Tony Shalhoub, Sarah Silverman, George Takei and Patrick Wilson will also present awards during the evening.

Tales of the Walking Dead” will premiere Sunday, August 14 at 9 p.m. ET on AMC and AMC+, with the first two episodes streaming that same night on AMC+.

Surface,” the new eight-episode psychological thriller series starring “The Morning Show” alum Gugu Mbatha-Raw, will premiere globally with the first three episodes on Friday, July 29 on Apple TV+. New episodes will air weekly every Friday after the premiere.The series follows Mbatha-Raw’s character of Sophie after a traumatic head injury has left her with extreme memory loss. Set in San Francisco, Sophie embarks on a quest to put the pieces of her life back together with the help of her husband and friends.

Paul F. Dean Jr. has been elected 13th international vice president of IATSE in a unanimous vote of the union’s general executive board. Dean, who is the theatrical business manager of IATSE Local One in New York, succeeds James J. Claffey Jr., former president of Local One, who stepped down from IATSE’s executive board last month.

Rutherford Falls,” which premieres all eight of its episodes on June 16. From co-creators Sierra Teller Ornelas, Michael Schur and Ed Helms, the series follows best friends Nathan Rutherford (Helms) and Reagan Wells (Jana Schmieding) as they tackle their careers, love lives and big changes to their small town and the Native American reservation it borders, brought on by casino executive Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes).Ornelas said in a statement, “Ed Helms, Mike Schur, and I had an absolute blast making a show that’s heartfelt, laugh-out-loud funny, and depicts Native Americans in ways you never see on television.

Michael Schneider Variety Editor at LargeThe “hanging episode rule” has been hung out to dry. The Television Academy’s Board of Governors has eliminated the rule beginning with next year’s 2023 Emmy competition.As currently in use through this year’s competition, the “hanging episode rule” currently allows a series (including limited or anthology) that premieres current-season episodes after the May 31 eligibility deadline, but prior to the start of nomination-round voting, to post those episodes on a platform available to Academy members by May 31 for episode eligibility in the current Emmy competition.That will change beginning with the next eligibility year (June 1, 2022-May 31, 2023).

The Television Academy has appointed veteran marketer Linda Swain as vice president, membership and outreach, to provide strategic leadership to both grow membership and deepen the Academy’s connection with current members. The new role was created as part of the Academy’s diversity, equity, and inclusion goals and objectives set in 2021.

Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorIn today’s podcast news roundup, Marc Maron goes into business with Acast; iHeartMedia orders slate of podcasts from Bloomberg Media; Financial Times and Pushkin Industries probe the porn biz; Sony Music goes into “Binge” mode; American Girl Doll launches podcast network; and more.Top podcaster Marc Maron inked a three-year deal with indie podcast platform Acast for his podcast “WTF With Marc Maron.” The podcast will now be hosted, monetized and distributed via Acast, and Maron’s show will also be making use of the platform’s paid memberships offering, Acast+. Maron’s podcast has approximately 55 million listens per year, primarily in North America. Maron launched “WTF” in 2009, and since then has become a mainstay in the podcasting world.