TV Talk: Broadcast bounces back, ‘Doctor Odyssey’ returns
Share this post:
A funny thing happened on the way to the death of traditional broadcast TV in the streaming era: Broadcast rebounded while cable seems to be the patient who won’t make it.
Look no further than the fall 2024 broadcast season that produced multiple success stories: ABC’s “High Potential,” CBS’s “Matlock” and NBC’s “St. Denis Medical” and “Happy’s Place” have all been renewed for the 2025-26 TV season. Broadcasters’ deals with sports leagues, especially the NFL, also make them valuable to media companies while cable networks’ sports deals crumble (see: TNT losing the NBA after the current season).
A little further behind ratings-wise, but generating buzz due to a threesome among its lead characters, ABC’s “Doctor Odyssey” returns for the second half of its first season tonight at 9 on WTAE with the first of a shark attack-two-parter, followed on March 20 by a crossover episode that finds “9-1-1” character Athena Grant (Angela Bassett) investigating a case aboard the Odyssey during Casino Week.
Just as heightened procedurals “Matlock” and “High Potential” blend weekly stories with an ongoing, serialized storyline, “Doctor Odyssey’s” mix of “9-1-1” and “The Love Boat” offers a weekly close-ended story as well as a serialized plots largely focused on the love triangle among cruise ship doctor Max Bankman (Joshua Jackson, “Dawson’s Creek”) and his medical teammates, Avery (Phillipa Soo, “Hamilton”) and Tristan (Sean Teale, “The Gifted”).
In the show’s fall finale, Avery discovered she’s pregnant but doesn’t know if Max or Tristan is the father.
“I love the episode layout so much,” Teale said in a phone interview late last month. “We need these overarching themes that trace the whole season. I would find it hard if we visited with them only 40 minutes. This structure allows us to bring on a new diaspora of people or an industry, some segment of society that deserves to have their life explored, and those things impact our characters. It’s a knockout structure, the best of both worlds.”
That’s also what media companies are finding as they navigate the shift to streaming. While media conglomerates have pulled back their spending on linear TV content generally, it’s far more noticeable on the cable side. Few original scripted shows populate cable networks that once debuted dozens of titles annually (think: Freeform, Comedy Central, USA, Syfy, TNT, TBS).
In a 2024 year-end report, entertainment industry analytics company Luminate called broadcast TV “surprisingly resilient.” The new normal has become for companies to tout total viewing for a show — not just on a broadcast network but that linear viewership added to viewing via streaming. That’s how ABC could boast the Tim Allen sitcom “Shifting Gears” grew 173%, counting seven days of viewing after the show’s January broadcast premiere. Fox’s already-renewed “Doc” grew its audience 609% within 11 days of its premiere when cobbling together linear and streaming viewing.
“(ABC cop drama) ‘The Rookie’ is one of our strongest performers on Hulu, ranking as the No. 2 drama on the platform,” said Disney Television Group president Craig Erwich during the Television Critics Association February 2024 press tour. “ ‘The Rookie’ premiered in 2018 and has since generated (more than) 500 million hours viewed on Hulu. … Nearly half of those hours occurred in just the last year. Fans are still discovering the show.”
“The Rookie” creator Alexi Hawley also created “The Recruit” for Netflix. Other than a heavier serialized element in “The Recruit,” Hawley doesn’t approach writing that series differently than he does “The Rookie.”
“One of the conversations that was had with Netflix in season one was about what they’ve discovered their optimal running time of a streaming show is,” Hawley said earlier this year. “You just assume it doesn’t matter (on streaming), right? But for them, 45-to-55-minutes is the sweet spot, which is not that far from (broadcast) network. Network is 42 (minutes) and change. To a certain extent, audiences have internalized that. … People still like a story to be told in, like, 45 minutes.”
Teale said “Doctor Odyssey” already filmed its first-season finale as the cast awaits word on a second-season renewal. Does the finale give closure (like a procedural) or end on a cliffhanger (like a serial)?
“There is resolution, and more questions asked, too,” Teale said. “Classic us. We did a bit of everything.”
‘Daredevil: Born Again’
Disney+’s “Daredevil: Born Again” (new episode release at 9 p.m. Tuesday) was a stitched-together affair with filming complete on at least six episodes before Marvel fired the first set of showrunners and reconceived the series.
The Frankensteined result is evident in the first two episodes released this week.
The first, better episode’s script, which brings back the “Daredevil” Netflix series’ characters Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson) and Benjamin “Dex” Poindexter (Wilson Bethel), is credited to new showrunner Dario Scardapane (“The Punisher”). The second episode’s script is credited to the original, fired showrunners Chris Ord and Matt Corman.
For the balance of the season, the show’s tone hews closer to episode one, which makes this an extremely violent, gory and darker Marvel series closer to Max’s “The Penguin” than past Disney+ Marvel shows. On the plus side, “Daredevil: Born Again” offers more focus on the characters and their motivations, a deeper superhero show than we often get. That’s particularly true of any scenes featuring Kingpin/Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio, the show’s MVP), a timely villain if ever there was one.
As for the characters from the Netflix show that fans are excited to see return, two of them come back late in this first season of “Born Again,” which suggests enough of the original contours of the season were retained that it proved difficult to insert Karen and Dex until late in the season’s run of episodes. Perhaps these characters will figure more prominently in the already ordered second season of “Daredevil: Born Again.”
Canceled
CBS canceled “FBI: Most Wanted” and “FBI: International.”
ESPN canceled “Around the Horn” after 23 years, with its last episode airing May 23.
Disney+ dropped its plan for a “Tiana” animated musical series based on the Disney film “The Princess and the Frog.”
Channel surfing
Final ratings show Sunday’s Oscar telecast drew 19.7 million viewers, up 1% from 2024 and a five-year ratings high.