Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!”

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Wednesday, February 2nd, 2022. 

GOOD RIDDANCE, JEFF ZUCKER
As you have no doubt heard by now, CNN head Jeff Zucker has resigned after the network's investigation into Chris Cuomo discovered Zucker had an ongoing relationship with a CNN employee that he had failed to disclose.

When it comes to examining Zucker's impact at CNN and at NBC (where he spent 22 years), it's important to separate business success from cultural impact. And while there's no dismissing Zucker's success at both networks, he also represented some of the worst instincts of the television industry. 

A number of people are pointing to Zucker's championing of Donald Trump while he was running NBC and I suppose the most kind reading of that relationship is that Zucker didn't realize the monster he was creating when he championed The Apprentice. But that relationship also is the perfect distillation of Zucker's approach to the TV business. He always wanted to win, and if doing so required working with people who weren't the best example of ethics or personal behavior - well, that's the cost of doing business.

But it's Zucker's stint at CNN that arguably had the most negative impact on American culture and the way we see each other. Zucker has always leaned heavily into treating the news cycle and national politics like it was a sporting event. Every story is a zero sum game, picking the winner and loser is more important than the facts or advancing any understanding of the subject matter. It's always been ironic to me that conservatives see CNN as wildly liberal, since the hallmark of the Zucker years at CNN is a certain amoral unconcern with anything but driving ratings. 

For some context, I highly recommend reading this 2017 NY Times profile which provides a depressing look at Zucker and his programming philosophy at CNN:

But CNN was the first major news organization to give Trump’s campaign prolonged and sustained attention. He was a regular guest in the network’s studios from the earliest days of the Republican primaries, often at Zucker’s suggestion. (For a while, according to the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, Trump referred to Zucker as his “personal booker.”) When Trump preferred not to appear in person, he frequently called in. Nor did CNN ever miss an opportunity to broadcast a Trump rally or speech, building the suspense with live footage of an empty lectern and breathless chyrons: “DONALD TRUMP EXPECTED TO SPEAK ANY MINUTE.” Kalev Leetaru, a data scientist, using information obtained from the TV News Archive, calculated that CNN mentioned Trump’s name nearly eight times more frequently than that of the second-place finisher, Ted Cruz, during the primaries.

The NY Times profile also hints at some of the unsettling personal relationships that have dogged Zucker since his days at NBC:

Perched on the window sill of Zucker’s office, among the pictures of his family, is a framed cartoon of him shaking hands with Trump. “Another Trump stooge on the payroll, Don Don!” a plump-looking Zucker says. “Big league move, Zucker,” Trump replies. It was drawn by the political cartoonist Sean Corcoran last summer, when CNN hired the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a contributor just days after he was fired by the campaign. I was surprised to find it in Zucker’s office. His critics saw the hiring of Lewandowski — who was accused of assaulting a female reporter and was still getting paychecks from the campaign during his five-month stint at CNN — as emblematic of everything that was wrong with Zucker and CNN. Namely, that he was more interested in staging fights and creating spectacles than in producing journalism. But Zucker doesn’t engage in second-guessing, let alone soul-searching.

“I don’t like that cartoon,” said CNN’s chief marketing officer, Allison Gollust, who was in Zucker’s office when I asked about it. “I don’t know why you framed it.”

Allison Gollust has worked for Zucker on-and-off since his NBC days and in fact, Katie Couric made a point of mentioning her puzzling relationship with Zucker in her recent autobiography:

As it turns out, multiple outlets are reporting that Gollust (who leads marketing and communications for CNN) is the person that Zucker was having an undisclosed relationship with at CNN: 

Gollust has worked with Zucker for years, having led his corporate communications team at NBC, and re-joining him at CNN in 2013 (ironically, before joining CNN she worked as Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s communications director). A personal relationship had long been rumored between the two among staff and by executives at other companies, although they never disclosed it publicly.

Gollust provided CNN's Brian Stelter with a statement, but I still have so many questions:

“Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years,” Gollust told Stelter in a statement. “Recently, our relationship changed during COVID. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time.”

I have no idea if the editorial focus at CNN will change at all in the short-term. Everything seems to be on hold until the planned WarnerMedia merger with Discovery takes place later this year.

But this messy resignation, following the clown car disaster that ended Chris Cuomo's CNN career, points to a deep ethical problem at the network. And one serious enough that it requires a deep housecleaning.

VIAPLAY, LIFETIME AND STARZ AT TUESDAY'S TCAS
The Television Critics Association is continuing its Winter TCA gathering this week and we're moving into the cable portion of the very long event.

Today there are presentations from the Nordic streamer Viaplay, Lifetime and Starz. Tomorrow is Epix and Discovery+ and Friday is Apple TV+. 

There's not much to report so far from today’s sessions, aside from some casting additions and "first look" images from a few shows.

PRIMARY ENGAGEMENT MEDIA
I regularly get questions from people in the industry asking me about my overall business plan - both for the newsletter and for AllYourScreens.com. 

In today's edition of his newsletter The Rebooting, Brian Morrissey talks about "primary engagement media" and I'm not sure that I can come up with a better explanation of what I am trying to do here:

• Primary engagement is people subscribing to your newsletter or podcast, it’s people actively coming to a publication instead of arriving from a random link on a tech platform. 

• Primary engagement media knows its audience, even to the degree that audience is a community. 

• It has the kind of differentiated point of view that breeds loyalty. In publishing, this is content written for people rather than for algorithms. 

• Primary engagement media companies obsess more about content quality than distribution gimmicks.

• It is often tied to an individual versus an institutional brand.

TWEET OF THE DAY
There is no better example of the type of journalism coming from Entertainment Weekly in 2022 than a tweet sponsored by Audible highlighting a piece containing a generic "EW Staff" byline:

HOW DO YOU DEFINE JEWS?
I've read a number of hot takes about Whoopi Goldberg's comments on The View about Jews and Holocaust and most of the takes seem to focus on the question of whether or not her two-week suspension from the show is a good decision. 

But I haven't seen much thoughtful discussion about what she said and why she might have said. Yair Rosenberg’s newsletter, Deep Shtetl, has a really smart take on it. And when I talk about entertainment reporting that is both smart and unique, this would be a great example of what I mean:

Goldberg is not an anti-Semite, but she was confused—and understandably so. In my experience, mistakes like hers often happen because well-meaning people have trouble fitting Jews into their usual boxes. They don’t know how to define Jews, and so they resort to their own frames of reference, like “race” or “religion,” and project them onto the Jewish experience. But Jewish identity doesn’t conform to Western categories, despite centuries of attempts by society to shoehorn it in. This makes sense, because Judaism predates Western categories. It’s not quite a religion, because one can be Jewish regardless of observance or specific belief. (Einstein, for example, was proudly Jewish but not religiously observant.) But it’s also not quite a race, because people can convert in! It’s not merely a culture or an ethnicity, because that leaves out all the religious components. And it’s not simply a nationality, because although Jews do have a homeland and many identify as part of a nation, others do not.

Instead, Judaism is an amalgam of all these things—more like a family (into which one can be adopted) than a sectarian Western faith tradition—and so there’s no great way to classify it in English. A lot of confusion results from attempts to reduce this complexity to something more palatable for contemporary conceptions.

Rosenberg’s newsletter focuses on "the intersection of politics, culture, and religion." It's not meant to be an entertainment-centric newsletter (and it's not). But this is a good example of approaching an entertainment story in a way that is more than just "who did what."

YES, BUT WHERE IS THREE DOG NIGHT?
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced its nominee list for the 2022 class, with 17 acts making it past the first round: Pat Benatar, Judas Priest, Kate Bush, Beck, Rage Against the Machine, Eminem, Fela Kuti, Carly Simon, Dolly Parton, Dionne Warwick, Eurythmics, MC5, New York Dolls, Lionel Richie, A Tribe Called Quest, Devo, and Duran Duran. The list will be cut down again later this spring and the finalists will be inducted in a ceremony to be aired on HBO this fall.

The seminal punk band MC5 has made the preliminary cut five times and honestly, they should just give the band the nod this year. The MC5 were certainly an incredibly influential band, even if their recorded output was spotty.

ODDS AND SODS
* James Bonsall (season 17), Rick Leach (season 18), Connor Brennan (season 17), Ivan Hall (season 16), Justin Glaze (season 17), Andrew Spencer (season 17), and Rodney Mathews (season 18) from ABC’s The Bachelorette join the nationwide tour of The Bachelor Live On Stage. Hosted by Bachelorette Becca Kufrin, who was most recently seen on season seven of Bachelor in Paradise, the concert tour has 41 stops. Which is pretty impressive. Or sad. I'm not sure which.

* Shudder is premiering its original movie Night's End on Thursday, March 31st. Directed by Jennifer Reeder, the film centers around an anxious shut-in who unwittingly moves into a haunted apartment and hires a mysterious stranger to perform an exorcism which takes a horrific turn.

* Bounce will premiere the sixth and final season of Saints And Sinners on Sunday, April 3rd.

* Comcast and ViacomCBS have received “full regulatory approval” to create European streaming joint venture SkyShowtime, the companies said on Wednesday.

WHAT'S NEW FOR WEDNESDAY
Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:

Celebrity Big Brother Season Three Premiere (CBS)
Dark Desire Season Two Premiere (Netflix)
Eternal Enemies: Revealed (NatGeo Wild)
Eye Of The Leopard: Revealed (NatGeo Wild)
Meat Eater Season Ten Part Two Premiere (Netflix)
Nova: Arctic Sinkholes (PBS)
Pam & Tommy Series Premiere (Hulu)
Skyville Live: Gregg Allman (CMT)
The Tinder Swindler (Netflix)
True Dating Stories Season Premiere (Vice)

Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU THURSDAY! 

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.