Fox

NEWS ROUNDUP

police dogAh, a new year is upon us, giving me a chance to catch up on all the news stories I’ve neglected over the past few weeks before they get too old to post.

  • The administrator of the now-defunct pirate streaming site WatchTheSimpsonsOnline, which was shut down in October, has been ordered to pay $10.5 million in damages. Now that’s a lot of “D’oh”!!!!! [TorrentFreak]
  • Fox is getting back in the theme park game! Twelve years after the miserable failure of their first park, Fox is bringing “Twentieth Century Fox World” to Malaysia, with plans for more. They won’t be allowed to feature any Simpsons attractions since the franchise is licensed to Universal, which is kinda like Comedy Central making a theme park without South Park. But they will have a recreation of the Titanic!!! [Variety]
  • Mrs. Krabappel and the late Simpsons writer Don Payne were depicted as angels for a split-second in a recent Christmas episode. That’s heartwarming and all, but why are there angels at the North Pole? [E! Online]
  • The Simpsons has teamed up with BAPE for a line of streetwear where they all look dead. [BAPE]
FOX NEWS

simpsons rich

Scrappy cable underdog FXX landed a major deal with its fellow 21st Century Fox subsidiaries 20th Century Fox Television and Twentieth Television (which are different companies, somehow…?) for the exclusive cable and streaming rights to The Simpsons for ten years, and now a bunch of rich people are going to get richer, hooray! The deal is valued at $750 million, making it the largest off-network sale ever.

FXX is a terribly-named spinoff of FX that launched two months ago. It airs comedy shows like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, reruns of Parks & Recreation, and who knows what else. Next August, they’ll have every episode of The Simpsons. So many, they don’t quite know what to do with them:

FXX is expected to stack six to eight episodes on one or two nights, probably in thematic packages, rather than air them across the week as in traditional syndication.

Hey, I already made things easy for them! Imagine a whole night of those dumb trilogy episodes where historical/fictional figures are replaced with Simpsons characters.

Additionally, every episode will be available streaming on demand:

Deal also calls for the vast archive of “Simpsons” segs to be available on VOD via the soon-to-launch authenticated FXNow mobile viewing app — which is sure to be a draw for the service as “Simpsons” segs have never been widely distributed online and have never been on any SVOD platform.

Well, not legally – in a weird coincidence, the internet’s most popular Simpsons streaming site shut down just a few weeks ago. Naturally, to use FXNow you’ll have to prove you’re a cable subscriber and not one of those freeloading hippie cord-cutter types. Meanwhile, local stations have run out of good seasons to air:

Most local stations have used up all of their allotted runs of older seasons of the show, even as they get access to the most recent episodes after the conclusion of each season on the Fox network.

Haw haw, nobody wants the newer episodes.

Harry Shearer is bitter because the official press release about the deal names eleven executives – John Landgraf, Chuck Saftler, Gary Newman, Dana Walden, Greg Meidel, Steve MacDonald, James L. Brooks, Matt Groening, Al Jean, Chris Antola, and Lori Bernstein – and zero cast members. Shearer and the rest of the cast won’t get to share in the profits, and neither will the animators, who continue to deal with pay reductions, shortened production schedules, and longer layoffs.

[Variety]

TOON BEAT

Bordertown

With The Cleveland Show cancelled and American Dad heading for TBS, it was looking like Fox might be down to just three Seth MacFarlane-produced shows on their schedule: Family Guy, Dads, and the upcoming Cosmos reboot. Luckily, Fox immediately sprang into action and greenlit his latest cartoon (his fourth for the network), thus maintaining their quota:

Fox has given a 13-episode order to Bordertown, from MacFarlane and Family Guy‘s Mark Hentemann. Set in a fictitious desert town near the U.S.-Mexico border, Bordertown centers on the intertwining daily lives of neighbors Bud Buckwald and Ernesto Gonzales. Bud, a married father of three, is a Border Patrol agent who feels threatened by the cultural changes that have transformed his neighborhood. Living next door is Ernesto, an industrious Mexican immigrant and father of four, who is proud to be making it in America. As Bud and Ernesto’s paths begin to cross, their families become bound by friendship, romance and conflict.

Continue Reading →

D'OH REPORT

doh

Late last week, Fox announced plans to honor the passing of Simpsons voice actress Marcia Wallace by airing the classic Season 3 episode “Bart the Lover,” for which she’d won an Emmy.

However, viewers on Sunday were instead presented with the Season 22 travesty “The Nedliest Catch,” the stunt episode where viewers got to decide the fate of Mrs. Krabappel and Ned Flander’s relationship, also known as “Nedna.”

Entertainment Weekly, which had announced the news, updated their story to explain the switcheroo:

The network originally announced plans to re-air Wallace’s Emmy-winning episode from the show’s third season, “Bart the Lover,” but “technical issues” clearing the 20-year-old episode prevented the last-minute switch and a newer episode featuring her character had to be chosen instead.

Apparently, Fox is now literally incapable of broadcasting quality Simpsons episodes.

WEB-WATCH

WTSOThe internet’s most notorious site for illegally watching The Simpsons online, WatchTheSimpsonsOnline, has unexpectedly shut down after at least four years of operation.

Here’s an outdated Wikisimpsons article about the site. Currently, visitors are greeted with this vague goodbye message:

Hello, The website you’re trying to reach has been permenantly shut down.

If you wish to watch new episodes of the simpsons online please visit hulu.com or fox.com.

Thanks for your understanding.

Continue Reading →

NEWS ROUNDUP

police dog

  • The sleuths at Bleeding Cool, hot off the heels of their Bapper discovery, noticed that Matt Groening recently bought the domain lifeinhell.tv, which could only mean one thing: Groening is moving to the islands of Tuvalu, which owns and operates the .tv domain. [Bleeding Cool]
  • The Awl has a good piece about the Simpsons-themed area at Universal Orlando (does it have a name?) and the “Experience Economy” that reflects my ambivalence to the whole thing. [The Awl]
  • Nick Offerman, who plays Ron Swanson in Parks & Recreation, casually mentioned that he recorded a part for The Simpsons, a show he’d been “ape-shit” about for a couple decades. [A.V. Club]

    • Continue Reading →

    KANCELLATION KOUNTDOWN

    groan

    The Simpsons currently has a weird syndication deal where reruns can only be sold to local broadcast networks, because cable wasn’t very profitable when the deal was made twenty years ago. Nowadays, cable is a pretty big deal, and Fox stands to earn an estimated $1-2 million per episode from a cable syndication deal – and since there will be at least 559 episodes, that deal could be worth more than $1 billion.

    This was a sticking point during the contract renegotiations in 2011, when the voice actors demanded a share in the profits (and didn’t get it). It was widely assumed a cable deal could not be negotiated until after the show is cancelled: an analyst quoted in Forbes said “the cancellation of the show would allow [Fox] to finally sell off-network syndication rights into cable channels,” and an Adult Swim bumper seemed to echo this (“Now put that thing to bed, FOX / so we can buy it”).

    Well, apparently that’s no longer the case: TV Guide says Fox is getting ready to sell The Simpsons to cable within the next year.

    Continue Reading →

    SPRINGFIELD SHOPPER

    duffAs reported here last September, Fox tried to stop a German brewer from producing an unauthorized version of Duff Beer, but were unsuccessful because their trademarks on Duff Beer “weren’t registered for an actual beverage.” So now that a Fox-approved Duff Beer actually exists (despite creator Matt Groening being publicly against it as recently as a year ago), their legal department should have no problem winning future trademark disputes, right?

    NEWS CORP. NEWS

    staticSo there’s this service called Aereo that streams broadcast television (you know, the stuff that you can get for free on your TV) on the web for a monthly fee. The “Fab Four” networks (Fox, CBS, UPN, and the DuMont Network) aren’t too happy about it, since none of that monthly fee is going to them. It also undermines the princely retransmission fees they get from cable & satellite providers, because then a cable company could say to them “hey, that internet service gets your content for free, why can’t we?” and they don’t really have a good answer to that. Naturally, they tried to sue Aereo out of existence, except it didn’t work out because the courts say Aereo is a-okay-o.

    Well, Fox isn’t having any of that. A guy from their parent company News Corp. is straight up threatening to take the Fox network off the air and have it become a cable company if Aereo is allowed to continue operating:

    “We need to be able to be fairly compensated for our content,” Carey said. “This is not an ideal path we look to pursue, but we can’t sit idly by and let an entity steal our signal. We will move to a subscription model if that’s our only recourse.”

    …he said, twirling his whimsical mustache evilly. Does News Corp. train its executives to sound like supervillians or does it come naturally to them?

    This move would leave millions of viewers who watch via antenna (many of them economically disadvantaged) deprived of their favorite Fox shows like The Cleveland Show and The Following. If the other networks follow Fox’s lead, this could mean The End of Television As We Know It.

    In a weird twist, Aereo is backed by Barry Diller, the founder of the Fox network who the evil corporate plutocrat Mr. Burns is partially based on. Is he a bad enough dude to bring down the very network he created??? Only time will tell…. [Bloomberg]

    TOON BEAT

    adult swim logoFox hired a guy from Adult Swim to find out how to better compete with Adult Swim and his solution was for Fox to make their own Adult Swim. Brilliant! The two hour programming block will air on Saturdays at 11pm starting next year.

    Basically, they’re grabbing up all the “edgy” cartoons they don’t have room for on Sunday nights (which I will henceforth refer to as “Animation Domination Prime”) and dumping them on Saturday nights, formerly the home of MADtv, Wanda Sykes’s late-night talk show, and the remaining episodes of Sit Down, Shut Up they were contractually obligated to air. Nobody knows what’s on there now. The audience for this thing will primarily consist of Adult Swim viewers who forgot Saturdays are when Adult Swim airs The Animes.

    Continue Reading →