MSNBC is spending $20 million on its MS NOW rebrand marketing campaign / Fox developing celebrity game show Nation’s Dumbest / Matt Bomer joins Hulu's Foster Dade
PLUS: Erika Kirk: Sinclair reached out to me to see if they could help secure an apology from Jimmy Kimmel over his Charlie Kirk shooter comment
MSNBC is spending $20 million on its MS NOW rebrand marketing campaign, which includes Rachel Maddow reading the Constitution
MSNBC’s Election Night coverage tonight will include a 60-second promotional spot featuring Rachel Maddow reading the preamble to the Constitution, interspersed with images of network personalities in an effort to promote the MS NOW name-change, which takes place on Nov. 15. “In a new ad campaign that debuts on Tuesday, MSNBC will strive to reclaim the idea of patriotism for its left-leaning, Trump-weary audience,” says The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum. “But the first order of business is to make sure those viewers — median age: 72 — keep watching the cable channel after Nov. 15, when it sheds its decades-old MSNBC identity and replaces it with a newfangled acronym, MS NOW. What’s the cost of changing two letters and adding a space? About $20 million, according to two people with knowledge of the expected expenditure on a marketing effort that will be splashed across billboards from Times Square to Los Angeles International Airport. Renaming a television network, particularly one with a fervent fan base like MSNBC, is a feat typically attempted only under duress. MS NOW came about because MSNBC’s parent company, Comcast, decided to cleave its NBCUniversal division into two distinct corporations — it’s a long story — and executives wanted ‘to avoid any potential confusion’ between the now-separated NBC News and MSNBC.” As Maddow explains to The Times, “this isn’t something that we sought, obviously.” But Maddow says she had eventually come around to having “a hook to reintroduce ourselves to people, to reintroduce ourselves to the country, and remind our viewers what it is they like about us.” She adds: “I was annoyed. And now I’m kind of happy about it.”
Fox developing celebrity game show Nation’s Dumbest
Based on a Scandinavian format that is being sold around the world by BBC Studios, Nation’s Dumbest is “the first television show where the loser is the winner,” according to deadline. “Celebrities fight it out to be eliminated from the competition as quickly as possible to avoid being crowned the nation’s dumbest. From influencers to wrestlers, comedians to politicians, the contestants are put to the test in a series of physical and mental rounds about all the things you really should know. Fox is calling its version a celebrity competition series that ‘flips the genre on its head because for the first time, the goal isn’t to win — it’s to get eliminated.’”
Matt Bomer to star in Hulu‘s YA drama pilot Foster Dade
Bomer is reteaming with his Fellow Travelers collaborators Daniel Minahan and Robbie Rogers on the TV adaptation of Nash Jenkins’ debut novel Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos. Bomer will play a literature teacher in the series set at “a sophisticated mystery set at an East Coast boarding school that explores privilege, scandal, sexuality and masculinity amid the rise of social media, millennial anxiety and pharmaceuticals,” per Deadline.
ABC sets holiday schedule, including Kevin Costner Presents: The First Christmas and Dancing with the Holidays
The network’s holiday slate includes Costner sharing the journey of the birth of Jesus, a holiday edition of Dancing with the Stars, the animated Christmas special Prep & Landing: The Snowball Protocol, The Great Christmas Light Fight and Christmas episodes of Abbott Elementary and Shifting Gears.
Erika Kirk: Sinclair reached out to me to see if they could help secure an apology from Jimmy Kimmel over his Charlie Kirk shooter comment
In an interview that will air on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime on Wednesday, Charlie Kirk’s widow was asked by Watters: “Jimmy Kimmel lied about your husband’s murder and didn’t really apologize. What would you say to Jimmy Kimmel?” Erika Kirk responded: “Same thing I told Sinclair. They asked, I haven’t really told anybody this, so they asked, ‘Do you want Jimmy to give you an apology? Do you want to be on a show? How can we make it right?’ Through our team, I responded, I said, ‘Tell them thank you, we received their note. This is not our issue, not our mess. If you want to say I’m sorry to someone who’s grieving, go right ahead. But if that’s not in your heart, don’t do it. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.’”
In her The View debut, Marjorie Taylor Greene calls out co-hosts for their past attacks against her while also calling for unity
The pro-Trump Republican U.S. representative from Georgia, who has been making headlines for pushing against the president, had a civil time in her first The View appearance this morning. Greene maintained that she hasn’t changed, but rather she “was a victim, just like you were, of media lies and stuff you read on social media. You all have attacked me many times on this show because of things you’ve read about me that weren’t true, or clips you’ve seen,” according to EW. At the end of their interview, Greene said: “A lot of people wanted me to come on this show and say nasty things, all of us to fight. I didn’t want to do that today. People with powerful voices like me and you, especially women, we need to pave a new path” forward. ALSO: The View audience applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene boast about roasting House Speaker Mike Johnson.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney dies at 84
President George W. Bush’s vice president from 2001-2009, who was an architect of the Iraq War and later a prominent Trump critic, died Monday night due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Cheney was also a Republican member of Congress representing Wyoming, President Gerald Ford’s White House chief of staff and President George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense during the 1991 Gulf War. One of Cheney’s most memorable TV appearances was, unwittingly, on Sacha Baron’s Cohen’s Showtime series Who Is America? in 2018. Cohen, in disguise as Israeli anti-terrorist expert Col. Erran Morad, got Cheney to autograph a waterboarding kit.
Jimmy Kimmel Live! will welcome the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers on tonight’s show
Dodger fan Jimmy Kimmel announced the booking of “a bunch of Dodgers” on Monday’s show after their World Series Game 7 defeat of the Toronto Blue Jays, resulting in the first back-to-back World Series championships since the 1999-2000 New York Yankees.
Michiel Huisman joins Mayfair Witches for Season 3
The Game of Thrones alum will play Michael, whom Variety describes “as a carpenter who built an inn that he runs himself. Though he hides a dark secret, his carefully constructed life begins to crumble when he falls in love with” Alexandra Daddario’s Rowan Mayfair.
Original Homeland creator Gideon Raff to serve as showrunner on Apple TV espionage series Safe Houses
Raff, who created the Israeli series Prisoners of War that was adapted as Showtime’s Homeland, will lead the eight-part Safe Houses based on Dan Fesperman’s 2018 novel of the same name. “Safe Houses is a fast-paced international espionage thriller set in the aftermath of the killing of a high-ranking CIA officer in Madrid,” per Deadline. “The show is centered on Sofia Jiménez, a fugitive agent accused of the crime, and Ambassador Elizabeth Winthrop, his widow, as they each investigate the murder from opposite sides, unraveling a vast conspiracy that could upend the balance of global power.”
College Football Playoff reveals TV schedule, with TNT games again going up against the NFL
“The main change comes in the first round, the only round in which the television broadcasts are split between two partners,” explains Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner. “As a result of ESPN’s sublicense agreement with TNT Sports, TNT will again air two first round games this season. Last year, those games were played in the noon ET and mid-afternoon windows during the first Saturday of the CFP. Both games competed directly with a NFL doubleheader in the same windows. This year, TNT’s games will air in the mid-afternoon window and the primetime window that Saturday, with ESPN taking the noon ET kickoff.”
Drew Barrymore reunites with Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan after 27 years
Gilligan visited The Drew Barrymore Show on Tuesday to promote his new Apple TV series Pluribus. Gilligan wrote the script for the 1998 Drew Barrymore-Luke Wilson film Home Fries for an NYU film class. The film, directed by Dean Parisot, was a box office bomb.
Rob Riggle to host American Valor: A Salute to Our Heroes for the sixth time
The syndicated Veterans Day special will air nationally in syndication on Nov. 15.
Nickelodeon announces a new The Loud House Christmas movie
A Loud House Christmas Movie: Naughty or Nice is set to premiere on Nov. 21. Watch the trailer.
Bowen Yang fulfills his life-long dream of auditioning for The Voice
Watch the SNL star crash the NBC reality show as part of his Wicked: For Good promotion.
Ted Danson is on a juicy new case in Netflix’s A Man on the Inside’s Season 2 trailer
Danson reprises his private investigator Charles Nieuwendyk role, joined by his wife Mary Steenburgen as a music teacher and Max Greenfield as a college president, when the Mike Schur Netflix comedy returns Nov. 20.
Netflix teases Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, starring Helena Bonham Carter and Martin Freeman
The period drama series set in 1925 England premieres Jan. 15, 2026.
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills showcases a new villain in Season 15 trailer
New cast member Amanda Frances seemingly feuds with everyone when the Bravo reality show returns Dec. 4.
Watch PBS Masterpiece’s Miss Scarlet Season 6 trailer
In Season 6, Kate Phillips’ Eliza’s detective business thriving, but her personal life is entering new territory as she attempts to follow her heart and develop a relationship with Inspector Alexander Blake, played by Tom Durant-Pritchard. Miss Scarlet Season 6 premieres Jan. 11, 2026.
Netflix’s The Carman Family Deaths trailer promises a twisty true-crime story
“A dramatic rescue at sea spirals into a murder mystery in this twisty true-crime documentary examining why Nathan Carman, a young man with autism, became a suspect in his mother’s mysterious 2016 disappearance and his wealthy grandfather’s 2013 homicide,” Netflix says of the documentary premiering Nov. 19.
Sky unveils the trailer for Matt Smith’s The Death of Bunny Munro
Smith plays the title character, a sex-addicted door-to-door salesman whose world transforms following his wife’s suicide, in the British series premiering Nov. 20.