When Harry Met Sally for yet another Super Bowl cast reunion. *sigh*

Are we tired of TV show and movie character reunions teased in early January ahead of it being for a Super Bowl TV commercial?

Here’s Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan reuniting for a When Harry Met Sally gag in a Hellmann’s mayonnaise commercial. Along with a special guest star at the end, which could be seen as a passing of the mantle from one romcom star to the next… if this wasn’t so crass in a TV ad.

I guess it was… fine…? I didn’t have this reaction to seeing it, I’ll admit:

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COVID is officially over

Like Punxsutawney Phil popping his head out of a hole to confirm whether or not there will be an early Spring, we have as official a confirmation as we are going to get on whether the COVID pandemic is done.

As per the Hollywood Reporter, the ‘One Chicago’ shows (Chicago PD, Chicago Med, and Chicago Fire) will engage in a three-way crossover on NBC. This isn’t the first crossover between the One Chicago shows, but certainly the first since COVID created changes in production protocols.

Chicago P.D.’s showrunner Gwen Sigan broke down the process further, explaining how such a major event is a collaboration between all three shows.

“It was floated at the beginning of the season that maybe we’d be able to do one this year, and then the conversations got more real maybe around September,” Sigan explained to THR. “It started with Wolf [Productions] having conversations, and then it got to the showrunners, and then we brought in the writers. It started really broad. We were just chatting about big ideas of what could we do, and then this was the one that won the battle. Then it got progressively more real as it went around [the shows’ writers] and now it’s shot and about to air. It’s crazy!”

Yeah, so crazy.

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The return of Last Week Tonight… a question, if I may…

Last Week Tonight is set to return on Feb 16 to HBO & streamer Max. Okay, it’ll be good to have it back. But, I ask this question to my Australian brothers and sisters…

Where are we going to see it?

This past weekend tens of viewers were disappointed when local streamer BINGE (owned by pay TV company Foxtel) didn’t run the new episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. The language has changed on the show listing from there being new episodes on Saturdays, to “Sharp US political satire”. Don’t expect new episodes of the show until Max launches locally (April?), I’d suggest.

But where does that leave Last Week Tonight? Will we see this return as normal? Or will that also fall into the bucket of shows unavailable down under until Max debuts?

Watch this space.

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News Desk

• Fox has broken through the $8m mark for a single Super Bowl ad. Read: Deadline

• Fuji TV execs fronted a 10-hour (!!!!) media conference over a cover-up of a sexual assault involving former boy band star-turned TV host Masahiro Nakai. Read: SMH

• David Tennant will star in the new Jack Thorne series about the UK phone hacking scandal. The Hack is an ITV-Stan co-pro. Read: Deadline

• Smallville’s Tom Welling has been arrested for a DUI. Hardly super behaviour, Tom. Read: Deadline

• Disney has signed a deal in France to shrink the window between theatrical release and on-platform Disney+ streaming release to just 9 months for feature films. Read: Screen Daily

• Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey have re-teamed for a True Detective inspired ad to push for Texas film incentives. But because the ad was posted to X (formerly good as Twitter), I’m not going to link to it.

• Lesley Manville and Tom McMullan will be back for a third time for the BBC in an adaptation of Marble Hall Murders – the third and final entry in Anthony Horowitz’s trilogy of books that includes Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders. Read: Radio Times

• In the spirit of the scramble to find TV shows that appeal to the long-underserved middle America viewership that Hollywood remembered exists thanks to Yellowstone, Netflix is reviving Little House on The Prairie. Read: Variety

• Megan Park (My Old Ass) will direct and serve as co-showrunner on new show Savage Point with Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage. Read: THR

• The UK govt is considering extending the TV license fee to anyone watching streaming video services. Read: Bloomberg

• Consumer spending in the UK across visual home entertainment has reached a new record with a £5.1 billion spend. Read: World Screen

• You can now download a full season on the Netflix iOS app with a single tap. Read: THR

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Trailer Park

Deli Boys debuts March 6 on Hulu

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That’s the newsletter for today.

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