‘Running With the Wolves' Review: Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos on ESPN
'Wolves,' also the nickname of the Campobasso players, is a different kind of show than 'Wrexham,' beginning with the fact that Ms. Ripa and Mr. Consuelos are married, and Messrs. Reynolds and McElhenney are not. The chemical equations are different. And the running gag is that Ms. Ripa apparently thought buying a troubled calcio squad was all about Mr. Consuelos scratching a sports itch and would be the gateway to him buying her a villa in Italy. As of episode 4 of this four-part season (there will be more), no real estate has been acquired. But there's enough stress to fill St. Peter's Basilica.
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USA Today
22 minutes ago
- USA Today
Florida stays put in ESPN team recruiting rankings to close summer
Florida's position remains unchanged at No. 12 on the ESPN class of 2026 team recruiting rankings at the close of July. August 1 kicks off a dead period until the season begins. While Florida didn't add anyone during the second half of July, the work done over the summer has Billy Napier's recruiting staff in position to sign another top-10 class. Retaining the verbal commitments until the early signing period in November is critical, but the foundation for an elite class is there. Landing a few more of the team's top targets over the season should do the trick. There were several minor shakeups inside the top 25 since the last update. Miami moved up to No. 9, sending Oregon down a spot. Florida State gained a spot on Florida, passing Clemson for the No. 13-ranked class. Tennessee jumped two spots from No. 17 to No. 19, and Penn State dropped to No. 16. North Carolina also fell a spot to No. 17. The rest of the field stayed put, except Texas Tech, which jumped into the No. 25 spot. What ESPN says about Florida's 2026 recruiting class "Landing one of the top defenders in the country is the fastest way to climb the recruiting rankings, and that's exactly what Billy Napier did by securing five-star defensive end JaReylan McCoy. Ranked No. 9 overall and the second-best defender in the ESPN 300, McCoy would be Florida's highest-rated defensive signee in more than a decade. "A late close helped the Gators rise in the past cycle, but they've ascended much earlier this time around with an active summer. In June, they added a pair of dynamic pass catchers in Marquez Daniel and Justin Williams, as well as Georgia running back Carsyn Baker. "An early but key pickup was QB Will Griffin, who came on board in June 2024. A big-bodied passer with a strong arm and good accuracy, he could eventually be a nice transition from current QB DJ Lagway. Napier's staff has also bolstered both lines of scrimmage with several high-upside prospects ranked just outside the ESPN 300, adding critical depth as Florida looks to reassert itself in the SEC." ESPN's 2026 college football recruiting class rankings top 25 Follow us @GatorsWire on X, formerly known as Twitter, as well as Bluesky, and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Florida Gators news, notes and opinions.
NBC News
23 minutes ago
- NBC News
The death of cable TV may be the birth of streaming sports aggregation
For about a decade, media executives have heavily invested in live sports as the primary value proposition for consumers to keep subscribing to traditional pay television. While tens of millions of Americans have ditched cable for a variety of streaming services, ESPN's marquee live sports have remained exclusive to cable subscribers. The broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox) have been able to charge increasingly high fees to pay TV operators because they've invested in NFL games and college football, the most-watched American programming. When ESPN launches its direct-to-consumer service (likely next month), for the first time ever, Americans will be able to consume all major sports without having to subscribe to cable. (By the way, Disney — ESPN's majority owner — reports earnings next week. Sources suggest to me and my colleague Mike Ozanian that would be a logical time for ESPN to announce not only the DTC launch date but also the finalized details of its deal for NFL Media assets, which I reported on in last week's newsletter. Spokespeople for the NFL and ESPN declined to comment.) The changes in the pay TV landscape have led to one question that's dominated the strategic choices of the biggest media companies for the last decade: Will traditional pay TV die off completely, or will it level out and exist for decades to come as a profitable, albeit smaller, business? There was an interesting data point last week in Charter Communications' earnings report that suggests the answer could be the latter. Charter's earnings results weren't good. The stock fell 18% after the company reported it lost 117,000 internet customers during the quarter. Companies like Charter and CNBC's parent company, Comcast, have largely traded on residential broadband additions (or subtractions) for many years. Still, a bit hidden in the Charter numbers, the second-largest U.S. cable company reported a decline of just 80,000 video customers in the quarter. A year ago, that number was 408,000 in the same quarter. That's a five-fold improvement. There may be two reasons for plateauing losses. First, Charter has aggressively added 'free' access to streaming services for customers who pay for the full bundle of cable networks. It's, of course, not actually free — consumers are still paying for it, but it's included in the cost of the bundle. This has probably made cable subscribers less likely to cancel their plans. Now, if a customer cancels cable, that household is also giving up access to Disney's Disney+ and Hulu, NBCUniversal's Peacock, Paramount Global's Paramount+, and Warner Bros. Discovery's (soon to be just Warner. Bros.) HBO Max. When ESPN's direct-to-consumer application launches in the coming weeks, a cable customer would also lose access to that. Charter CEO Chris Winfrey noted in last week's earnings conference call that those offerings add up to 'over $100 worth of programmer apps.' 'That's going to be the stickiest product,' Winfrey said. 'It's going to be the best for customers and for programmers, us, and it's going to be the best for our broadband churn as well.' Second — and this one's the biggie to look out for — it's at least possible that pay TV losses are finally subsiding after more than a decade of losses. Comcast posted its earnings release Thursday morning and reported video customer losses of 325,000, an improvement over 419,000 losses in the year-earlier period. It's possible most of the U.S. households that want to cancel cable have now canceled, and the ones remaining plan to stick around for a little while. If that's the case, cable TV may effectively morph into the primary aggregation video service for sports. You may remember Venu, the never-launched sports streaming application from Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery. For $42.99 per month, Venu planned to give customers all sports owned by Disney/ESPN, Fox and WBD's Turner Sports. Experts estimated the offering included about 60% of all sports on TV. Over time, Venu hoped to add Paramount Global and NBCUniversal to the mix, according to people familiar with the matter. That would have given consumers most sports, outside of regional sports networks and the NFL and NBA packages on Amazon. Venu's value proposition was its price — $42.99. I highly doubt we'll see a service like Venu come to market at that low of a price. Fox is getting ready to launch its new streaming service, Fox One, which will give non-cable customers access to all of Fox's pay TV programming. While Fox hasn't revealed the pricing for the service yet, it won't be cheap. 'Pricing will be healthy and not a discounted price,' Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said in May. Fox doesn't want you to cancel cable TV, so it won't incentivize churn by coming to market at a low price. 'We do not want to lose a traditional cable subscriber to Fox One,' Murdoch said, bluntly. Other pay TV operators have debuted skinny bundles of sports, such as DirecTV. Its MySports offering costs $69.99 per month, but it includes more than Venu would have. Comcast followed this year with a $70-per-month version of its own. The future of cable TV may slowly morph into something that resembles these skinny sports bundles. Sources tell me that once Skydance formally merges with Paramount Global next month, incoming CEO David Ellison plans to heavily invest in sports because pay TV economics still justify the spending. If video subscription losses are flattening, broadcast networks can continue to raise retransmission fees as long as they have premium programming — and sports are the most premium programming. How will he balance spending on sports when he's already promised more than $2 billion in cuts when the merger closes? What's likely to go is spending on anything that isn't sports or hit primetime (between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET) programming. See: 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' as Exhibit A, which fits the strategy even if Skydance wasn't involved in that decision. Maybe we should all stop thinking about cable TV as doomed to death and start viewing it in a new way — the next-generation aggregation service for sports. In this lens, it's not surprising NBCUniversal is thinking about developing a new cable sports network even while it plans to spin off almost all of its other cable networks (including CNBC). The battle may be between the cable companies, YouTube TV and ESPN's direct-to-consumer app as the go-to destination to access all sports. To quote esteemed cable analyst Craig Moffett from his note to clients last month, 'Maybe, just maybe, we're finding the long-imagined bottom for traditional pay TV, where sports and news fans are all that's left.'
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
Rose Leiman Goldemberg, 97, dies; her ‘Burning Bed' was a TV benchmark
Ms. Goldemberg was working as a playwright in the mid-1970s when she sent a few story outlines to an unusually receptive television producer. One of them, a drama about immigrants set on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910, caught his interest. It became a television movie, 'The Land of Hope' (a title Ms. Goldemberg hated), which aired on CBS in 1976. It centered on a Jewish family and their Irish and Italian neighbors. There were labor organizers, gangsters, and musicians, and a rich uncle who wanted to adopt a child to say Kaddish for him when the time came. Such an ethnic stew was a stretch for the network, and critics loved it. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'A thoroughly charming surprise,' John O'Connor wrote in his review for The New York Times. Advertisement As a pilot for a series, 'The Land of Hope' went nowhere, but it made Ms. Goldemberg's reputation, and she began receiving stories to be turned into scripts. 'Where did you spring from?' one network executive asked her, she recalled in a 2011 interview for the nonprofit organization New York Women in Film & Television. 'As though I were a mushroom.' It was Arnold Shapiro, the veteran producer, writer and director behind 'Scared Straight!,' a well-received TV documentary about teenage delinquents being brought into contact with prison inmates, who sent Ms. Goldemberg 'The Burning Bed,' a 1980 book by The New Yorker writer Faith McNulty about the case of Francine Hughes. Advertisement Hughes's story was horrific. For 13 years, she had been terrorized by her alcoholic husband. One day in March 1977, after a brutal beating, she called the police in their Michigan town. Two officers responded and then left, saying there was nothing they could do because they hadn't witnessed the attacks. That night, the beating resumed, and Hughes's husband raped her. When he fell asleep, she doused the bed with gasoline, lit a match, and set the bed on fire. Then she put her children in the car and drove to the county jail to report what she had done. Her husband died that night, and Francine Hughes was charged with first-degree murder. Nine months later, a jury pronounced her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. The verdict made national headlines. Fawcett, the pinup star of 'Charlie's Angels,' the frothy crime series, was already attached to the project; she had shown her dramatic chops in 'Extremities,' an off-Broadway production about a woman who exacts revenge on her rapist, and wanted to continue working in that vein. Yet the project was initially turned down by all three networks. When it was resurrected, by NBC, in one of those complicated scenarios particular to Hollywood, Shapiro was somehow left out of the production. The movie aired in October 1984, to mostly critical acclaim. (Paul Le Mat played the husband.) It was seen by tens of millions of viewers, and NBC's ratings soared, pulling the network out of third place and putting it on top for the first time in a decade. Fawcett, Ms. Goldemberg, the producers, and even the makeup artist were nominated for Emmy Awards, and the movie set off a national conversation about domestic abuse. Women's shelters, a rarity in those days, began opening all over the country; the film was shown in men's prisons; and Ms. Goldemberg was often asked to speak to women's groups. Advertisement Inevitably, as she recalled in 2011, 'someone would say, 'I couldn't talk about my own abuse until I saw the film.'' She added: 'It wasn't because of me. It was a wonderful performance by Farrah, and the timing was right. It was just a remarkable confluence of the right things happening at the right time.' Still, Ms. Goldemberg began fielding entreaties from other actresses who wanted her to write star vehicles for them, projects akin to 'The Burning Bed.' She did so for one of Fawcett's fellow angels, Jaclyn Smith, cowriting the TV movie 'Florence Nightingale' for her. Broadcast in April 1985, it did not have the same impact as 'The Burning Bed'; most critics found it soapy and forgettable. A Lucille Ball vehicle fared much better. Ball wanted a script about homelessness, and when she and Ms. Goldemberg met at her Beverly Hills house, Ball laid out her terms: She wanted to play a character with some of the personality traits of her grandmother, and named for her. Ms. Goldemberg came up with 'Stone Pillow,' a television film about a homeless woman named Florabelle. In his Times review, under the headline 'Lucille Ball Plays a Bag Lady on CBS,' O'Connor called the movie 'a carefully contrived concoction' but praised Ball 'as wily and irresistible as ever.' Advertisement Rose Marion Leiman was born on May 17, 1928, on Staten Island, N.Y. Her mother, Esther (Friedman) Leiman, oversaw the home until World War II, when she became an executive secretary at Bank of America; her father, Louis Leiman, owned a chain of dry-cleaning stores in New Jersey. Rose earned a bachelor's degree in 1949 from Brooklyn College, where she had enrolled at 16, and a Master of Arts in English from Ohio State University. She married Raymond Schiller, a composer who followed her from Brooklyn College to Ohio State, in 1949; he later became a computer systems designer. They divorced in 1968. Her marriage, in 1969, to Robert Goldemberg, a cosmetic chemist, ended in divorce in 1989. Her first television-related job was at TV Guide in the 1950s, writing reviews of shows airing on what was then a new medium. She eventually began writing plays. Ms. Goldemberg is survived by a son, Leiman Schiller, and three stepchildren, David Goldemberg, Kathy Holmes, and Sharanne Goldemberg. This article originally appeared in
