The Comcast NBCUniversal building in Los Angeles. (Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images)
Last Friday, “Access Hollywood” staffers gearing up to cover the Oscars were blindsided by the entertainment newsmagazine’s cancellation, along with NBCUniversal’s remaining syndicated programs hosted by Steve Wilkos and Karamo Brown. In doing so, the Michael Cavanagh-led studio became the first to completely bail on what was once a hugely profitable business—one that turned Oprah Winfrey into a syndication-minted billionaire and saw Dr. Phil McGraw and Dr. Mehmet Oz, with Winfrey’s backing, ride daytime fame into Donald Trump’s political orbit.
The setbacks to original syndication dovetail with the dizzying decline of linear television, which has made the preoccupation of Trump and his FCC vassal Brendan Carr with regulating broadcast television and threats to pull licenses appear even more outdated. The commission chairman continues to obsess over what’s said on “The View” and by hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, when the medium is suffering the steady drip inflicted by a thousand small cuts.
From that perspective, “Access Hollywood’s” end after 30 years shouldn’t be entirely surprising, but nevertheless came as a shock. Insiders told Status…
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Ryan Gosling in "Project Hail Mary." (Photo by Jonathan Olley)
Amazon’s ‘Hail Mary’ Pass": Jeff Bezos tweeted out a rare advance endorsement of “Project Hail Mary,” underscoring A) its importance to Amazon/MGM, and B) everyone thinks they’re a critic these days. In this case, though, Bezos was largely right, as Ryan Gosling and a faceless rock creature forge an unlikely bromance in an adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel that manages to be alternately touching, stirring and silly.
Weir might have cornered the market on bold, isolated space explorers between this and “The Martian,” although here, the protagonist’s solitude doesn’t…
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