TV shows are getting cancelled, along with (maybe) one promising showrunner

A mid-week Christmas always makes it hard to plan ahead. Are we in the last two days of the working year this week? Or will people still be going into the office on Monday and Tuesday next week?

My office at my day job (because ABW doesn’t pay the bills… try and change that with a subscription… *cough*) shuts down on Friday. But is that the case for everyone? I just can’t tell anymore.

So, what have we got for the next 48 hours? There’s the Superman movie teaser trailer. And then there will be a lot of taking out the trash with stories networks and studios are hoping folks will ignore and/or forget about by the time everyone gets back to work.

Always Be Watching will continue to publish through to the end of the year. Expect the usual daily newsletters through to Christmas eve. Then, between Christmas and the first week of 2025 I’ll publish every 2-3 days - this will include some Best of 2024 lists.

Then from January 6 onwards, it’ll be business as usual.

• New FX comedy English Teacher is justifiably making a lot of Top 10 end of year lists, which is leaving a lot of people asking why a second season hasn’t yet been announced. It may be connected to sexual assault allegations straight-identified actor Jon Ebeling has levelled at English Teacher showrunner and star Brian Jordan Alvarez. Read: Vulture

• Disney is under fire after making a change to upcoming animated Pixar show Win or Lose which will remove a plot related to a transgender character (who remains in the show). Read: THR

• With 15 series and four films, Australian streamer Stan says it leads the local market in commissions. Read: C21

• Meanwhile Screen Australia’s annual Drama Report found a drop in annual spending on Australian production - down 29 per cent at $1.697 billion in 2023-24. Read: SMH

• Netflix has been fined $4.8m after violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. The Dutch Data Protection Authority found the streamer during 2018-2020 didn’t give customers enough information about how their data is handled in its privacy statements or in responses to queries on how that data was used. Read: WSJ

• Alan Sepinwall has his list of the best 10 TV episodes of 2024. Read: Rolling Stone

• Netflix and Skydance Sports are partnering on a docuseries about Rafael Nadal who “reflects on the milestones that defined him and the final chapter of his legendary journey.” Read: thefutoncritic

• Want to read a really wonky blog from the Netflix engineering team about how automation was built into the operational needs of a personalisation system? Sure you do.

• Reading like an episode of Are You Being Served is this Indiewire article about efforts to restore the works of noted large bosom enthusiast Russ Meyer. It’s actually a really interesting read about the difficulties of film restoration and how it was made harder here by Meyer not leaving behind heirs to manage his estate.

• Bad Monkey has been renewed for a second season with Vince Vaughn at Apple TV+. Read: THR

• It’s official: Girls5Eva has ben cancelled by Netflix. Read: THR

• Mayor of Kingstown has been renewed for a fourth season by Paramount+. Read: THR

• The Old Man has been cancelled at FX after two seasons and multiple production shutdowns. Read: THR

• Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research program on abortion based at the University of California San Francisco has released its annual Abortion Onscreen report. It saw an increase in stories about abortion on TV (66 up from 49 last year), but researcher Steph Herold says they largely do not mirror reality. Read: NPR

• Another week, another Nine exec leaving the Aussie broadcaster. This time it is chief sales officer Michael Stephenson. A difficult time to resign from Nine with all of the execs leaving following a recent culture review. mi3 suggest his exit was because he wants to run a media company. SMH suggests he might be off to run Omnicom Media Group. Nine is still yet to announce who will be it’s next CEO (following the departure of former CEO Mike Sneesby).

• Speaking of Nine, it has partnered with A+E Media Group on two new FAST channels: The LMN: Lifetime Movie Network and (the confusingly-named) HISTORY2. Confusing only because HISTORY isn’t on the platform. Read: TV Tonight

• Hit Israeli show Shtisel has a prequel spin-off to be titled Kugel. It will follow father-daughter duo Nuchem and Libi Shtisel and move from Israel to 1990s Antwerp, Belgium. According to THR it debuts in 2025, but The Jerusalem Post was previewing it ahead of broadcast last week on Israeli TV network Yes Drama.

Paramount+ has just announced it has picked up South Korean drama Queen Woo for the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Latin America, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France. It debuts Dec 23 on the streamer and looks/sounds pretty cool.

It's the Goguryeo era of imperial rule in Korea, and the heirless King Go-guk-cheon (Ji Chang-wook) is dead. Without a son to inherit the king's throne, the five tribes across the land fiercely battle for power. It falls on the newly-widowed Queen Woo (Jeon Jong-seo) to establish a new king - and ensure her people's survival - by marrying one of the king's power-hungry brothers in the next 24 hours. If the five tribes hear of the king's death, a similar fate awaits Queen Woo. Can she find the right suitor in time to prevent the collapse of the Goguryeo Kingdom?

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That’s the newsletter for today.

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Check out Dan’s video podcast Best Movie Year, currently looking back at the films of 1987. This week’s movie: Sylvester Stallone’s arm-wrestling family melodrama Over The Top.

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