Comedy Central's "Fully Torqued" phallic billboard on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard touting the new season of its Workaholics sitcom is awfully silly. TMZ claiming that its coverage of the sign is an "Exclu-Stiff" is even sillier. The show follows the lives of three recent college grads—and they finished cum laude, judging from that billboard. I'm not entirely sure what I meant by that, but I'm a firm believer that HBO got a bigger bang for its buck using a similar concept to promote Hung two years ago. The TMZ commenters' views on the Workaholics ad are priceless.
Read MoreAs befits its status as the most-watched television network on the dial, CBS is also the most stable. While its rivals scramble to fill holes and put out fires, CBS prefers to leave the drama on the screen. With just four time slots to accommodate this fall, CBS has lined up three new dramas and one comedy. (By comparison, the rest of the Big Three have eight new sitcoms prepped for the fall.) Of the three freshman dramas set to bow in September, CBS has slotted two for the 10 p.m. time slot. Joining CBS’ powerhouse Monday night block is Partners , a workplace/buddy comedy with a weirdly familiar premise: two bros work together in an architecture firm; their friendship is tested when one of them gets engaged. (In 1995, Fox bowed the short-lived Partners , a comedy about two young architects and the woman who comes between them. Jon Cryer and Tate Donovan starred.) Partners moves into the Monday 8:30 p.m. time slot, bumping sophomore comedy 2 Broke Girls up a half-hour. This in turn sends former 9 p.m. occupant Two and a Half Men gliding off to the Thursday 8:30 p.m. slot, where it will be reunited with The Big Bang Theory . While returning drama Person of Interest remains in the 9 p.m. Thursday slot, it will no longer lead into The Mentalist . Simon Baker and Co. are off to Sunday nights, where they will close out the 60 Minutes / Amazing Race / The Good Wife block
Read MoreTelemundo pulled out all the stops on Tuesday evening after a day of Hispanic media pitches from larger rival Univision and cable company Discovery U.S. Hispanic. The presentation took place at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on 45th street, which seemed appropriate given some of the Spanish-only quirks of the show.
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General Motors Co. GM -0.97% plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers' car purchases, according to a GM official. The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion. Executives have spent the last two weeks trying to convince
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The pay TV business continued to expand in the first quarter, but that growth is clearly decelerating. The top 10 publicly traded operators of cable, satellite and telecommunications-based pay TV services added 494,000 video subscribers in the first quarter, according to data compiled by paidContent from Q1 earnings reports. That represents just 54 percent of the quarter-to-quarter growth reported by these companies in Q1 2009, when the U.S. was mired in recession. Earlier in the week, Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett released data indicating the total subscriber gain to be only around 422,000 — in addition to the hard data released by
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