The best, worst and WTF-est of the upfronts, plus weekly numbers for May 4-10

I had ambitions, I really did. I was going to use this newsletter to deliver certified Takes on each day of the upfronts this week, and well, since this is the first newsletter you’re all receiving since Monday, you know that didn’t happen.

As I said in that Monday post, day one was exhausting. Days two and three didn’t make anyone less tired, and between everything I wrote for The Hollywood Reporter and some non-work obligations, I just ran out of steam. I hope you won’t hold it against me.

But! Now that the song and dance of the upfronts is over and my brain fog has cleared, I do in fact have some thoughts. Here’s some more news, along with good, bad and head-scratching moments from three days of sales pitches.

• ABC’s schedule for the fall does not include High Potential, its biggest scripted series. It’ll premiere early next year so it can have a (mostly) uninterrupted run instead of the two month-plus breaks it had this season. R.J. Decker will go into the post-Dancing With the Stars hour on Tuesdays in the fall.

• Also worth noting that in the first three months of next year (plus the last day of this year), ABC will have its heavily watched New Year’s Eve special and the College Football Playoff championship (simulcast with ESPN) and the Grammys and the Super Bowl AND the Oscars. That’s a lot of big-to-gigantic audiences in front of which the network can promote High Potential and other shows.

• Season 2 of Ahsoka will premiere sometime in 2027 on Disney+, three-plus years after the first season of the Star Wars series.

• The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is moving to Netflix after 10 years on Fox Sports (and 30-plus on USA before that). Choose your Best in Show or “Dog Show!” memes.

• Netflix picked up new seasons of Running Point, My Life With the Walter Boys, Big Mistakes, Love Is Blind and Quarterback and set a fall premiere for a sequel to A Different World.

• HBO Max released a trailer for Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, in which several secondary/tertiary Big Bang Theory characters try to undo a rip in space-time. Really.

• Jimmy Kimmel always does a monologue at the Disney upfront ripping the state of the industry and his own bosses, and he had quite a bit of material to draw on this year. A sample, referring to the right-wing efforts to get him fired: “You know, usually in order for ABC to pull you off the air, you have to throw a chair at your Mormon boyfriend.”

• Kimmel also had his daughter Jane introduce a show-closing mini-set by Olivia Rodrigo — who then pulled Jane up on stage to sing with her. It was very cute.

• Hulu/FX showed several teasers (not yet online) for upcoming shows, and the most fun of the batch might have been … for a show with Lindsay Lohan? She, Shailene Woodley and Kit Harrington are starring in Count My Lies, which seemed to have a bit of a Single White Female/Hand That Rocks the Cradle vibe. Two other shows, Cry Wolf and The Spot, have great casts (Olivia Colman/Brie Larson/Shawn Hatosy and Claire Danes/Ewan McGregor, respectively) but look to be very intense dramas.

• This is maybe more “Fine, I guess, stuff,” but Netflix released trailers for two very different upcoming shows: The Hawk (Tin Cup as interpreted by Will Ferrell) and East of Eden (an adaptation of the Steinbeck novel starring Florence Pugh).

• HBO and HBO Max have a busy 2027 in store, with new seasons of The White Lotus, The Pitt, Task, Rooster and Heated Rivalry on tap.

• The whole of the Warner Bros. Discovery upfront — starting with an opening tribute to the late Ted Turner — felt, as my THR colleague Tony Maglio put it, more like a funeral than a sales pitch. The company is maybe just a few months away from being swallowed by Paramount, which will mean that a bunch of people lose their jobs and one of the most storied studios in Hollywood will be just another asset in a debt-laden behemoth backed by tech and Saudi money. WB has been part of three separate mergers already in the 2000s — and none of them ended well.

• The Star Wars and Marvel portions of the Disney presentation were pretty underwhelming. Rosario Dawson introduced a behind-the-scenes clip from Ahsoka, and Marvel brought out Robert Downey Jr., Tom Hiddleston and Paul Bettany, but all they talked about was VisionQuest, the follow-up to WandaVision (and showed a short teaser).

• The Savannah Bananas got an inordinate amount of stage time at Disney — including an opening Greatest Showman number. ESPN is showing some Bananas stuff, and one of the guys is joining Dancing With the Stars, but yeesh.

• TV advertising used to be about volume — reaching the most people possible. The whole thing was (as I discussed in my Cancel Bear posts) your show can have the most ardent fan base in the world, but if it wasn’t big enough, that didn’t matter. Now, media companies are essentially saying, “but what if it did?” Just about every presentation contained the word “fandom,” because as ads become more and more specifically targeted — your streaming algorithms are essentially spying on you the way your social media feeds are — the pitch is that an audience that’s particularly engaged with a show might be more likely to buy an advertiser’s products, and there will be on-screen ways to do just that. Unless, you know, the fandom is too busy having insane arguments about what the show owes them.

• Not actually upfront-related, but still bewildering: Netflix announced late Wednesday that it’s ending The Lincoln Lawyer, one of its more popular shows, after its fifth season. The news comes on the heels of The Night Agent, another popular show, getting an end date. I know the business model of streaming, and Netflix particularly, is to constantly cycle in new shows, but these two announcements so close together smacks of “we don’t want to renegotiate people’s contracts.” Not great.

That’s about it for the upfronts. On to the ratings charts for last week and streaming for April 13-19 …

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*This game had 7.9 million viewers with streaming on Peacock added in. A dozen games on ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock and Prime last week averaged about 5.5 million viewers, all in.

(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers. Weekend ones are noted by day.)

*Particularly once the NBA season ends, you’ll probably be seeing World News Tonight in that No. 1 spot pretty often.

**Nielsen measures live sports on Prime Video too, and the NBA is doing pretty well there.

*That’s a series high for The Pitt for the week of its second season finale. At THR, I compared each week of seasons 1 and 2, and the year to year growth is pretty incredible.

**Look at the episode count for Survivor. Holy cow.

*Because it also airs on HBO’s cable channel, Nielsen considers Euphoria (and other shows in the same situation) an “acquired” show, even though 90 percent or more of its audience comes through HBO Max. For as many times as it or other HBO-and-HBO Max shows make the streaming charts, I’ll include them with the originals.

**The premiere of Beef season 2 was way down from the first season’s opening week in 2023, falling by about 48 percent.

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