Andrew Haskell Saves Television - Premier Week, 2019

The man who loves television more than anyone on the planet, Andrew E. Haskell, breaks down the week in TV in order to save and preserve the greatest medium in human history. He won't stop until you put him on TV.

Flipping Through

The network season began this week and let me start off by saying while it’s typically sports tend to create some astonishing streaks in television it’s now 20 straight years that every new network sitcom has tied for “America’s number 1 new comedy”

The final season of Modern Family started this week and I think it’s probably the right time, I think the kids are older than the parents now. In fact the character of Manny Delgado was recast from Rico Rodriguez to Luiz Guzman and nobody seemed to notice

ABC also saw the season debut of sophomore comedy Single Parents, this year they are going for more realism, such as dramatizing the time my single mom tried to pass of keeping the cable on for another month as a Christmas present

The Emmys were also this week and, much like the Oscars, they went without a host. And by looking at the numbers, they had one viewer for every host.

How do we save the Emmys? It’s simple, we rank all the nominees, the last place nominee gets to steal one character from the winner. Congrats on one last win Game of Thrones, don’t go too far Peter Dinklage because Tyrion Lanister is now on This is Us

Over on CBS the NFL season continued and CBS has employed a strategy of squeezing in an extra commercial even skipping the explanation of reviewed plays to do so. Looking to get into the action ABC will replace the first 5 roses on The Bachelor with Geico commercials and NBC will skip most of the chair spins on The Voice for Tide commercials about which day is laundry day

It was announced that after almost 20 years in syndication on TBS, Seinfeld will be moving to Viacom stations. This is absolutely heartbreaking, a whole generation, including myself, discovered Seinfeld through TBS. This is like finding out August 17th has jumped in and won the rights to Christmas or that pancakes are exclusively lunch property now

Saturday Night Live started their 45th year, meaning if they were a white guy their previously liberal views will begin to be taken over with Fox News viewings.

The SNL premiere saw a production snafu when a wardrobe assistant walked on camera. Many believed the same thing happened when Kyle Mooney appeared before he explained he’s been on the show for 7 years….sort of.

Andrew’s Pitch to Disney+

Monday Night Football: A History of Us - In a joint venture with ESPN+ we look back at the stories off the field in the long history of Monday Night Football. Classic moments like falling asleep to a 10-3 Texans win over the Raiders, your boss making you stay late at the office missing the one MNF game you wanted to see this year, putting on a game quarterbacked by Rex Grossman for background noise while you and your kid finish his art project he just told you is due tomorrow, and finally, who could forget watching the Bears blowout the Lions while you watch alone at a bar finally realizing your marriage is over.

This Week in Streaming

Netflix pulled off a palace coup by announcing they have purchased the streaming rights to Seinfeld. Executives at the streaming giant are reportedly considering a Seinfeld spin-off about Wayne Knight’s Newman character dating popular recording artist Lizzo, “Newman on the Minnesota Vikings”

NBCUniversal announced their streaming service will be called Peacock, they are expecting big numbers as one executive said, “Just like Matt Lauer’s peacock you’re gonna see it even if you don’t want to”