TV Shows Take a Back Seat as Upfronts Focus on New Ad Tech

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor“Saturday Night Live” mainstay Kenan Thompson will return as host of the 2022 NHL Awards on Tuesday, June 21, the NHL announced Wednesday, as the league aims to make the event an in-person one again after a two-year hiatus spurred by the coronavirus pandemic.The televised celebration of the league’s best regular-season performances will broadcast live from  either New York City or Tampa on the second night of the 2022 Stanley Cup Final, and will appear on ESPN, Sportsnet and TVA Sports in the U.S. and Canada and 7 p.m.

Post Malone is the latest celeb to join Seth Meyers for a “Late Night” day drinking session.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorTV’s battle for new yardsticks isn’t over yet.The TV companies that own ad-tech firm OpenAP intend to make a pitch at Cannes to get advertisers to move their dollars to new kinds of measurement technologies — just as the networks are trying to roll out alternate audience-tabulation systems to Nielsen, which still sets the main currency upon which most ad deals are based.Open AP is owned by Fox, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery, which will push advertisers to “shift real dollars from panels to census,” says Brittany Slattery, chief marketing officer at OpenAP.Despite the networks’ best efforts, Nielsen remains an integral part of the audience-measurement mix. In April, the Fox-owned streaming outlet Tubi said it plans to expand its relationship with Nielsen to help advertisers measure viewing of Tubi programming across a wider array of venues.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorCBS News’ venerable  “60 Minutes” is creating a time machine, of sorts.The long-running newsmagazine will be form the bulk  of a new channel at Pluto, the ad-supported streaming outlet that is, like CBS News, part of Paramount Global. The streaming channel is expected to launch sometime this year, Bill Owens, executive producer of the show, told staffers during a town hall meeting Thursday.“The channel will allow us to share our broadcast and historic archive with the wider world,” Owens told employees.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor“Good Morning America” opened its broadcast Thursday with some of its top correspondents far from the show’s studio in New York’s Times Square. The ABC morning program is hoping to put similar distance between itself and one of its main competitors.As “GMA” launched, viewers were told the show was coming to them live “from Times Square, Kyiv, Ukraine, and London.” The references were to Robin Roberts, who had just completed an interview with Olena Zelenska, Ukraine’s First Lady, and to Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes, the “GMA 3” co anchors who have been leading the show’s coverage of the Queen’s Jubilee in London.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorAt CNN, breaking news might be broken.In a memo sent to staffers Thursday, the news outlet’s new chief indicated he felt the use of “breaking news” graphics frequently on air had rendered the technique useless, and vowed CNN would scale back use of the phrase on screen. In doing so, CNN will tamp down use of a tactic that has become all but ubiquitous in the realm of cable news.“Something I have heard from both people inside and outside the organization is complaints we overuse the ‘Breaking News’ banner.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorCan the venerable Scripps National Spelling Bee take on the look of a Winter Olympics or “American Idol”? Its backers are about to find out.Organizers of the event, which has kept Americans trying to figure out how to connect the right letters for words ranging from “sanitarium” to “xanthosis” for nearly a century, want to add new elements to the mix that might make the contest look less like something for elementary-school students and more like “America’s Got Talent.”Actor LeVar Burton, known for his turn as the host of public television’s “Reading Rainbow,” is joining the proceedings. And producers hope to boost “the Bee” with backstage looks at contestants and a set of vignettes that give viewers a peek at how the spelling champions made their way from school competitions to the national stage.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorGreta Van Susteren says she just couldn’t stay away from the immediacy of cable news.For the past few years, Van Susteren, one of the few anchors who can say they have been employed by  CNN, MSNBC and Fox News Channel, has been working as a political analyst for Gray Television and doing a show for Voice of America. Now, she’s about to get back on the grid as an anchor leading the 6 p.m. hour for conservative news outlet Newsmax.“Gray has been really fun, but here’s the big difference — there really is nothing like live news,” Van Susteren tells Variety.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorSurvive, from New York: “Saturday Night Live” will continue on without four prominent departing cast members, but most of them got a chance to offer up a few final laughs before the show completed its 47th season.Word that Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Kyle Mooney and Pete Davidson planned to leave the venerable late-night series after Saturday’s broadcast leaked out late in the week. That made appearances by the actors all the more emotional during NBC’s broadcast of SNL’s season finale. McKinnon made one more run as Ms.

Olivia Wilde steps out for a stroll through New York City on Friday (May 20).

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorWhen CNN presents an exclusive interview Sunday evening between Jake Tapper and Trevor Reed, recently released from Russia after nearly three years of imprisonment, the network has the potential to spur a new strain of activism around U.S. citizens incarcerated abroad.Reed, who spoke with Tapper for several hours Thursday in Florida, was released “because the Biden administration engaged in a prison swap with Russia, and in the past, that has been seen as controversial,” says Tapper during a recent interview. “The family wants those days to disappear.”During the hour-long special, Reed talks about his experiences overseas, some of which, Tapper says sound like something out of a “horror movie franchise.” He also speaks about his interest in helping other American families who have relatives detained unlawfully overseas.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorThis wasn’t supposed to be Joe Buck’s first assignment for ESPN.The veteran sports announcer raised eyebrows earlier this year by jumping from his longtime roost at Fox Sports to the Disney sports giant, where he and colleague Troy Aikman are set to host “Monday Night Football.” On Thursday afternoon, however, Buck was doing something completely different. Here he was, sitting alongside golf analyst Michael Collins on ESPN2, watching Tiger Woods on the green at the 2022 PGA Championship and talking to baseball great Ken Griffey Jr.

Prince William has unveiled a new memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, paying tribute to the Royal Navy's submariners and their families.The Duke of Cambridge commended their "continued resilience" at the ceremony on Wednesday. William, 39, gave a short speech in which he said: "You would be hard-pressed to find a more challenging environment to serve in." He said the new monument represents "the struggles this life of service can lead to".The Duke of Cambridge then cut a ribbon to officially unveil the new memorial. During his visit to the Staffordshire site, William met with submariners, veterans, and some of their families, including widow Diana Mayes.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorChris Wallace left a Sunday show on Fox News Channel to jump into the world of streaming at CNN. But now he’s going back to a weekend format for which he is best known:Wallace will take the reins of a new Sunday program on CNN, the network announced Wednesday during an upfront presentation for its parent company, Warner Bros.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorJo Ann Ross has long recognized when to go for the hard- sell and when to soften things up.The Paramount Global U.S. ad sales chief is, like other executives in her position, is seizing this week to pitch big advertisers as part of the media industry’s annual “upfront,” when U.S.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorWhere do you take advertisers if you want them to make a big purchase? To a department store, of course.Paramount Global will take clients who attend its upfront Wednesday afternoon to an after-party in the structure on New York’s Madison Avenue that once housed the big Barney’s department store, one way to emphasize the shopping aspect of the event, in which big U.S. TV companies hope to sell the bulk of their commercial inventory for their next programming cycle.As part of the affair, Paramount has dressed up four windows of the former shopping plaza.