TVSquad

There's a lot of speculation in the biz about what will Oprah do next. The daytime talk show giant supposedly made up her mind recently and decided that her syndicated show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, would end its run in syndication and move to OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network (formerly Discovery Health). An official announcement is anticipated before the end of the year, but is that really was Oprah has decided? Nobody knows for certain.

There are pros and cons on either side. The companies that syndicated her talk show stand to lose a significant asset if she wraps up the current incarnation and abandons the market. Think of all those afternoon hours around that country that count on Oprah at three or four o'clock, or the morning slots where Oprah leads in to noon newscasts. Companies like CBS Distribution and the Tribune Company have feasted on the robust ratings Oprah has consistently delivered.

Did the USA Network decide not to buy the Simon Baker series The Mentalist for syndication because it would conflict with their own psychic detective show Psych?

You have to wonder, because The Mentalist has been snatched up by TNT in a lush syndication deal. How lush? About $2 million per episode, a broadcast series record. (The overall record is HBO's The Sopranos going to A&E for $2.5 per episode.)

Yesterday there was a story on Deadline Hollywood that Oprah Winfrey would be ending her syndicated talk show in 2011 in order to move over to her OWN cable network. She'd still have a talk show, one based on Los Angeles, but it would not be syndicated. It would be on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), formerly Discovery Health.

Well, after the news was reported all over the place, Oprah's company Harpo, Inc. issued a statement that there would be no announcement until the end of the year. They didn't deny it; they just said the announcement about the switch would be later in the year.

To the average fan, if Oprah stopped her syndicated show, it probably wouldn't matter too much. Most people have basic cable and OWN would probably be a major addition to most cable systems, as well as DirecTV and Dish. Longtime fans would be able to watch Oprah on cable or satellite. No biggie.

AMC is bringing a serous, post-apocalyptic zombie suspense series to television, but it's not the first time that idea got kicked around.

As we reported, The Walking Dead is on its way to TV, with Frank Darabont writing and directing to get the series off to a good start.

But, two years earlier, a team of writer/producers planned Alive, a syndicated series featuring a small pocket of human survivors fighting to find a cure for a global viral pandemic that transformed humans into zombies.

In a move that should bring some veteran dragon slayers out of their parents' basements long enough to turn on the TV, Legend of the Seeker is headed back for a second season.

According to producing partners Disney and ABC, the syndicated fantasy adventure show will return this fall. A descendant of the Hercules and Xena food family, Seeker tells the story of a woodsman whose life "gets turned upside down after discovering that he has a profound destiny to fulfill as the Seeker."

It's a burdensome duty that thrusts him into an unfamiliar world of magic, sorcery, evil and heaving wenches. The Seeker fights to protect innocent lives by confronting dangerous and evil forces because that's generally what heroes do in these sword and sorcery tales.

Comedy talk shows are a vastly underrated wasteland of quality programming, but they're shorter on female eye-candy than the floor of the Consumer Electronics Show.

ABC is hoping to change that by giving comic babe and former Talk Soup slinger Aisha Tyler her own piece of programming.

The network is letting her develop a pilot for a "hybrid" style talk show that incorporates sketch, stand-up and other variety comedy into a fully "wired" show that will communicate with their audience over the Internet's series of complex tubes.

Long before he was host of The Daily Show (well, about five or six years before), Jon Stewart hosted a late-night talk show, titled The Jon Stewart Show. It was a good show (first on MTV then syndicated), very casual and rock and roll and young, and probably should have lasted longer, though I guess he wouldn't have gone on to do The Daily Show.

After the jump is footage from the last episode, where David Letterman was the guest. Letterman doesn't do many talk shows, so Stewart probably immensely appreciated the fact that he'd take the time to do his last one (probably one of the reasons why Stewart looks up to Letterman to this day). Letterman talks about Paul Newman, why getting canceled doesn't mean you're a failure, and hosting the Oscars (which is funny, considering Stewart would do the same thing years later).

It's amazing how many bad talk shows there are on the air. I'm not talking about The Late Show with David Letterman or Late Night with Conan O'Brien or Jimmy Kimmel Live. Those are good shows, and if you clicked on this list expecting to find any of them, you're going to be disappointed. The shows I picked are the talk shows that deal in exploitation, human degradation, and feature terrible, terrible people. In short, daytime talk shows!

Well, OK, I did include one late night talk show, but you'll have to click after the jump to see which one it is.

1. Maury (syndicated). Really, was there any question that this would be number one? It shouldn't even be called Maury anymore, they should just go ahead and call it Paternity Tests!, since that is what it's most known for. Doesn't Povich have enough money? Can't he do something else in his life besides this show? What does Connie think of this? Who knows, considering she co-hosted one of the worst shows from a few years ago. If aliens watch our TV broadcasts and happen upon this show every single morning, we're all doomed.

You think the recession hasn't hit the TV industry yet? Here's some proof it has: the stars of How I Met Your Mother received pay raises...but not the kind of big money you've heard about in years gone by. The ensemble of five, Josh Radnor, Jason Segel, Cobie Smulders, Neil Patrick Harris and Alyson Hannigan renegotiated with the producers (20th Century Fox TV) to boost their salaries to $90,000-$120,000 per episode. That's still a lot of money in today's economic strife, but compared to Two and a Half Men's Charlie Sheen's $825,000 per ep, it's downright modest.

I think you can place this under the 'Well, duh!' category of programming decisions. Though, I'm not too sure it's the right choice. That's where you come in: I need you to give me some sense as to if the following move is a good idea or not.

See, Tyra Banks, who is the host of the CW's America's Next Top Model, also has a syndicated talk show called The Tyra Banks Show. The daytime talker has been around for four seasons now and has received fairly respectable numbers. Now, in agreement with the talk show's distributor, the program will be taken off of the syndication market after this season and added to the CW daytime lineup starting in 2009. There, it will make double weekday runs at 3:00 and 4:00 pm.

Queen Latifah couldn't make it work. Megan Mullally struck out, too. In fact, if you think about it, more stars fail in their attempts to become talk show hosts than succeed. For every Ellen DeGeneres and Tyra Banks, there's a Caroline Rhea and Magic Johnson.

So, will sitcom star Leah Remini go from the King of Queens to the queen of daytime talk? CBS -- home of King of Queens for a very successful run from 1998-2007 -- is developing a daytime show for Leah Remini that's being called something different than a typical talk show.

If you tune in to The Rachael Ray Show today, you might get an idea of what Leah could bring to daytime -- she's Rach's guest.

This was inevitable, really. Ex-Brady Bunch star and current reality show favorite Christopher Knight is going to host a new syndicated version of the board game Trivial Pursuit.

I have to agree with Rich Heldenfels when he says this press release for the show is rather odd. It's way too long, the type of bio you get when someone is trying to look more important, more well-rounded than they are. Not that Knight hasn't been around a while, but a list of the TV shows he's done would be enough, instead of saying weird things like "once and forever a Brady!" and "Christopher's successful endeavors beyond showbiz exist in peaceful subordination to his portrayal of Peter and his arguably estimable contribution to American pop culture." Wha? And when talking about the show TV Road Trip, why is the word "host" in quotes?

Anyway, maybe they'll have celebrity contestants on at some point. Maybe Peter's mom can be on the show. It bows on September 22.

[via TV Tattle]

The daily Deal or No Deal finally has a start date. Now you'll be able to fantasize about Howie Mandell's glowing dome of flesh five days a week as Deal or No Deal begins it's syndication run September 8th. And whereas Regis Philbin was far too busy during the week being all over our televisions to host the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Howie's schedule isn't nearly as dense. In fact, now he can set up a cot right there in the studio. Get himself a mini-fridge and a germ-free bubble to unwind in and he'll be good to go.

Since syndication isn't worth as much as prime time (why do you think there's no million dollar prizes on the regular The Price is Right), the top prize is being reduced to $500,000. But, they're adding an interactive element so that home viewers can cash in on the fun, too. Now you can get paid for sitting at home in your soiled underbritches screaming "Number 7! Number 7!" just because that model has the nicest cans. But, hey! I agree with your logic on that. I want to see her fumble with the latches, too. I mean ... wait ... what were we talking about?

Here's some cool news for any Star Trek fans who have been enjoying the new digitally remastered Star Trek episodes currently airing in syndication:

CBS will re-air "new" digitally-cleaned-up episodes of the original Star Trek series starting next month. Forty episodes will be shown in total, starting September 15, 2007 and ending August 2, 2008. You'll have to check your listings to see what time they're airing, though it'll be either on a Saturday or Sunday.

It's not too much of an exaggeration to say you could flip on your television at any time, any day, and catch an episode of Law and Order or any other series in the Law and Order franchise. TNT is mostly to thank (or blame) for this, having aired repeats of the series for quite some time.

The problem is, even people who love chocolate cake don't want chocolate cake all the damn time, so the ratings for Law and Order have been slipping. To try and alleviate this, TNT began to syndicate Without a Trace, but despite strong ratings when it first aired as a late night repeat from 2004 to 2006, its current place in primetime hasn't garnered nearly as many viewers.