The Screen Actors Guild Awards Have Parted Ways With Their TV Network
Vanity Fair has confirmed that the Screen Actors Guild Awards have parted ways with TNT and TBS as their broadcasting partner, after airing between the networks over the last 25 years.
The news comes at pivotal moments for both Warner Bros. Discovery, the newly formed parent company of those cable networks, and Hollywood’s winter awards season calendar, which was thrown into disarray after NBC declined to air this year’s Golden Globes due to controversies surrounding the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
New leadership has instituted swift, seismic changes within WarnerDiscover properties, most notably the abrupt suspension of new streaming service CNN+, as part of new CEO David Zaslav’s promise to find $3 billion in cost savings across the company. News broke recently that scripted programming would be cut at TBS and TNT, which have aired series including Chad and Claws, though it’s unclear whether losing the SAG Awards—among the networks’ buzziest live events—mark an extension to that plan.
The Golden Globes’ struggles to recapture cache in the wake of the HFPA’s years-long PR nightmare opened the door for a new starry awards-season kickoff. Those behind the Critics Choice Awards, which air on the CW, have openly discussed aspirations to fill that gap, though COVID-19-induced delays allowed SAG to start things off with an A-list event in 2022. The show rose in the ratings, after a prerecorded 2021 special drew less than 1 million viewers live, and correctly forecast the eventual Oscar winners for best picture and all four acting categories. On the TV side, Emmy champs Succession and Ted Lasso prevailed, along with stars from incoming contenders like Squid Game and Dopesick.
This past year marked the final SAG Awards for longtime executive producer Kathy Connell, who helped launched the show almost three decades ago. Voted on by members of the SAG and AFTRA unions, the SAG Awards have long been considered an important Oscars bellwether due to their membership’s overlap with Academy members, and their track record in predicting eventual winners. No news yet on where the show will go next, but if it can find a bigger network, it might just give the Globes—set to return next year on NBC—a real run for their money.
The Wall Street Journal first reported news of the split between SAG and TNT/TBS.
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