MARCH 5, 2026

Welcome back to Buffering, where it is once again our duty to remind you that Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend (much to the chagrin of network TV programmers everywhere, since ratings always go down when people are given an extra hour of daylight). For most everyone else in Hollywood, however, the biggest topic of conversation remains David Ellison’s winning bid for Warner Bros. He’s started selling the deal, including talking up the big plans he has for integrating HBO Max and Paramount+. But as our big story this week outlines, that won’t be so easy.

— Joe Adalian, West Coast editor

The Olympics are over, which means the broadcast networks are starting to roll out some of their big midseason guns — and so far, it looks like viewers like what they’re seeing. On March 1, CBS snagged a massive 9.5 million viewers for the debut of Marshals, the new Yellowstone-adjacent procedural from the Taylor Sheridan universe. If you don’t count shows artificially boosted by an NFL lead-in, it was the biggest audience for a scripted premiere since fall 2018, and once streaming and DVR data gets tallied, the multi-platform reach of the show figures to be significantly higher. 

Also getting good news this week was ABC’s reboot of Scrubs (don’t miss Roxana Hadadi’s read on that show below), which managed to accumulate nearly 11.4 million viewers within its first five days, thanks to both strong streaming numbers and two on-network encore showings. ABC also has to be happy with how well American Idol is doing in its new Monday slot opposite NBC’s The Voice: The Alphabet singing competition has crushed NBC’s contender the past two weeks in both total audience and viewers, this week outdrawing its rival by a largest-ever margin of 56 percent in viewers. The network’s new Scott Speedman drama R.J. Decker also got off to a nice start on Tuesday, notching a solid 3.7 million viewers at 10 p.m., on par with what the long-running The Rookie had been doing in the hour in January. Meanwhile over on Fox, cozy drama Best Medicine, a remake of Brit classic Doc Martin that bowed in January, is averaging over 6 million viewers across linear and streaming. Unsurprisingly, Fox this week ordered a second season of the show. —Joe Adalian 

The changes keep on coming at CBS News. Variety’s Brian Steinberg today reports that CBS Mornings exec producer Shawna Thomas is leaving the third-place morning show after five years amid reports division chiefs Bari Weiss and Tom Cibrowski are looking to give the program (another) makeover. Instead of differentiating the broadcast from its ABC and NBC rivals by focusing a bit more on hard news, Steinberg says the network is looking to dumb things down in the hopes of attracting more viewers. One thing that won’t be changing, at least in the short term: Gayle King is staying with the show. The Wall Street Journal broke the news Wednesday that she had signed a new deal to stay with the newly MAGA-friendly network, despite reports for months that she was on the way out. The network is still on the hunt for a replacement for Tony Dokoupil, however, with reports that the show plans to give a handful of potential new hires tryouts in the coming months. I’m just hoping they just leave Jane Pauley and Sunday Morning alone. —J.A.

Looks like a movie is coming. The Game of Thrones television universe has a feature film currently in development — this is for all of us who truly needed a big screen to see the Battle of Winterfell. “Page Six Hollywood” reported that Andor and House of Cards writer Beau Willimon will tackle the Game of Thrones film with an initial script already turned in to Warner Bros. Read on. —Savannah Salazar

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By Josef Adalian

Integrating Paramount’s new “crown jewel” into the merged Paramount Warner Bros. could prove difficult. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty

With a signed deal to take over Warner Bros. finally in hand, Paramount CEO David Ellison this week began the process of trying to sell Wall Street and Hollywood on the value of his mega-merger. Some of what he told investors during a Monday conference call and CNBC on Thursday fell into the category of eye-rolling spin, but Ellison also offered up one nugget of news designed to send a message that this acquisition wouldn’t be all about layoffs and budget cuts. “HBO is a crown jewel in this business,” he said, singling out HBO/HBO Max CEO Casey Bloys for praise and vowing that under Paramount ownership, the storied brand “will continue to have the resources and independence to do what it does best.” Nice words — but it’s doubtful anyone at HBO or HBO Max is breathing any easier as a result.

That’s because of something else Ellison revealed on the call, namely that he plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single offering. It’s not that this was a surprise or even necessarily a bad idea: We’ve known for a while that consolidation of streaming apps was inevitable, and we’ve already seen that happen at Disney (where Hulu and Disney+ are in the process of merging) and Amazon (which folded its Freevee service into Prime Video). But HBO hasn’t meant just HBO for years now, and merging it with Paramount+ isn’t as simple as what Disney did when it redefined FX, transforming it from linear channel to streaming brand, and giving it a tile on Hulu. HBO — and by extension Bloys — is now intrinsically linked to the broader HBO Max.

And because all content for both HBO and HBO Max report into Bloys, the exec long ago stopped being the guy in charge of just making a curated collection of “not TV” HBO Emmy bait titles. His purview, and that of his team, extends to producing more network-y style shows such as The Pitt; an expanding portfolio of international productions (such as the series version of Like Water for Chocolate); managing HBO’s library of current and classic movies; and overseeing acquisitions of both classic and new TV shows from outside providers (think Heated Rivalry). So when Ellison says Bloys and HBO will be given the “resources and independence to do what it does best,” the obvious next questions are: How does he define the “what they do” part? And will it be enough to keep the current HBO brain trust in place?

This question is a thorny one. Ellison already has a chairman-level exec whose job description overlaps more than a little with Bloys’s portfolio: former Netflix content chief Cindy Holland. She’s CEO of all streaming at Paramount, overseeing not just content but also the nut-and-bolts of the platform business. Her job combines everything Bloys does with many of the functions of Bloys’s colleague JB Perrette, the CEO of streaming and games at Warner Bros. Discovery. But as broad as her mandate is, Holland is primarily known as a creative executive, one who landed her current gig because she works well with producers and actors, and whose mere presence at Paramount was intended to woo top name talent to the company …

By Josef Adalian

Photo: ABC

Over its eight-year run, ABC’s The Rookie has never been afraid to color outside the lines of the network-TV cop-show format. Last April, for example, Shane Madej and Ryan Bergara of Watcher Entertainment’s Ghost Files popped up, and the entire hour was presented as a documentary. But for this week’s episode, the show’s producers enlisted their most unlikely collaborators yet: Dropout CEO Sam Reich and four of his fellow Game Changer cast members.

Normally when we get a crossover on a network-TV show, it’s in the interest of some sort of synergy. NBC will look to service fans of its Chicago procedurals by having cast members from all three shows tackle a common catastrophe, or characters on CBS’s The Young and the Restless might suddenly show up on its rookie soap, Beyond the Gates. It would be natural for fans of either The Rookie or Dropout to suspect similar corporate shenanigans were behind this week’s stunt, but Rookie creator and showrunner Alexi Hawley says the genesis of this episode is far simpler: He just really wanted to work with the Dropout team. “I became a huge fan last year and started watching a lot of their stuff,” he says. “So I reached out to Sam because I thought it would be a fun idea: ‘Hey, you don’t know me, but is there any world in which you might be interested in doing this out-of-the-box crossover?’”

Reich “responded right away and thought it was intriguing,” Hawley says. He obviously couldn’t speak for any of the talent, but he thought they might be interested. “So we just kicked it around, and I told them what we were thinking.” Specifically, Hawley wanted to see what sort of chaotic energy might be released when improv comics like those on Dropout collided with the sober cops of The Rookie …

By Roxana Hadadi

The new revival season is surprisingly, satisfyingly competent at doing what this show always did best. Photo: Sergei Bachlakov/Disney

In the past few years, Zach Braff and Donald Faison’s post-Scrubs ubiquity has tip-toed so close to thirstiness — a rewatch podcast, a series of T-Mobile ads — that you’d be forgiven for forgetting that they’re very good at actually being on Scrubs. All these years out from the end of the series, their whole schtick had become exhausting: Braff’s hyperactive neuroses, Faison’s zany cool-guy-being-cool antics. Did you get that they’re best friends? How could we miss it?

In the Scrubs revival, though, all that look-at-me energy is finally restored to its rightful purpose, and the effect is delightful. These two are meant to be swaggily walking down hospital hallways together. They’re meant to be breaking the fourth wall and embarrassing themselves for the sake of sitcom sincerity, not “This podcast is brought to you by” interjections. They’re meant for very special voice-overs about the importance of trying to be honest and empathetic, no matter the situation, and then trying a little bit more because that, too, is something you can do. Before Bill Lawrence characters came to represent the perils of extreme self-indulgence, J.D. and Turk were perfect Bill Lawrence characters — daffy, candid, heartfelt — and they make Scrubs satisfying. The times have changed, but J.D. and Turk haven’t. They’ve grown, and that’s a distinct and important difference.

At a time when The Pitt has set a new standard for what medical TV shows look, sound, and feel like, Scrubs is a reassurance rather than a reimagining. In fact, February 25’s season premiere, “My Return,” begins with a fake out to that very effect …