There just aren’t enough drama reruns in the world to keep TNT afloat in its current state, so Warner Bros. Discovery is changing things up. Really, it’s turning back the clock.
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As first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by IndieWire, WBD is looking to bring original scripted drama back to TNT, which, when it wasn’t airing live sports, had become a dumping ground for drama reruns and action films. The company will also open the WB movie library to reboot several films as made-for-TV movies or series for TNT. We’re probably not going to get a “Batgirl” or “Coyote vs. Acme” series .
Why the reversion in strategy? Well, Warner Bros. Discovery recently lost its most-valuable asset , the NBA, to Amazon Prime Video (essentially). An NBA-less TNT just does not command the roughly $3-per-customer rate that cable providers pay WBD. That’s quite pricey — but it’s no ESPN. As we recently learned from Fubo’s successful injunction case against Venu Sports, Disney charges cable providers $9.42 per customer to carry ESPN; Venu is a joint venture between Disney, WBD, and Fox.
Warner Bros. Discovery has carriage-deal negotiations with cable giants Comcast and Charter coming back around in a few years. Other sports rights — it recently signed new deals to secure the French Open (tennis) and Big East college basketball, and already has some college football and NHL games — will help some. Having originals back in primetime could help some more. The key word being some — this sum doesn’t add up to the NBA .
In June 2021, cable accounted for 40.1 percent of all TV viewing. In June 2024, it was 26.7 percent . Not a numbers person? OK, here’s how dead cable is : a bunch of FX shows don’t even air on FX — they stream exclusively on Hulu.
But cable is still the platform that primarily drives revenue, profit, and cash flow for many media giants, including Warner Bros. Discovery. These days, it just drives a whole lot less; WBD declared its overall linear-TV business was worth $9 billion less than it previously thought , and losing the NBA counted for a big chunk of that. Still with $37.5 billion in debt, cable czar David Zaslav’s gotta squeeze every penny out of the medium before you cut the cord. That means the new shows need to be made on the cheap — a decent enough lemonade-out-of-lemons strategy. Zaslav, who became Discovery, Inc. CEO in 2006 the year after its flagship channel launched hit series “Deadliest Catch,” is riding this cable wave until it crashes — or capsizes all boats.
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Soon, it will be Channing Dungey who is captaining the sinking ship. When Kathleen Finch retires at the end of the year, WBTV Group CEO Dungey will inherit oversight of the so-called “TNets” — TNT, TBS, and truTV — as well as HGTV, Food Network, the Discovery Channel, and ID.
TNT has dove headfirst into its previously-charted territory. The network has ordered “The Librarians: The Next Chapter,” a sequel to the supernatural adventure series “The Librarians,” which aired a decade ago on the network for four seasons. “The Librarians” (2014-2018) was itself a spinoff of the Noah Wyle-led TV movie series, “The Librarian.” Wyle will produce the new series.
“The Librarian”/”The Librarians” aired back in TNT’s “We Know Drama” heyday. At the time, TNT was a highly-rated cable channel with originals like “Saving Grace” (2007-2010), “Rizzoli & Isles” (2010-2016), and “The Last Ship” (2014-2018). Since then, no one has been able to define exactly what TNT is or should be. Facing a similar identity crisis are its sister networks TBS, which generally airs sitcom reruns and a little bit of baseball, and truTV, home of “Impractical Jokers” and some old reality shows.
Even within a declining medium, those TNets are having a rough time. TNT was the fifth-most-watched cable channel of 2022 . It fell to 10th in 2023 . TBS dropped from seventh in ’22 to 14th in ’23, and truTV was always kind of irrelevant.
TNT has also ordered the original four-hour miniseries, working-titled “Debriefing the President,” which dramatizes the real-life story of CIA analyst John Nixon, who in 2003 became the first American to positively identify and interrogate Saddam Hussein. It will air in 2025 — if cable is still around by then.
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