SitcomsOnline.com News Blog

I think we have the news of the year folks! A new digital broadcast station is coming soon from Tribune Broadcasting and will feature classic TV shows and movies! Tribune Broadcasting has announced the launch of Antenna TV, a classic television and general entertainment movie network to air as a digital multicast on Tribune's broadcast stations beginning January 3, 2011. Tribune markets include New York's WPIX, Los Angeles' KTLA and Chicago's local WGN. The Chicago affiliate for Antenna TV will be WGN-DT 9.2. Antenna TV will also be offered for national distribution to non-Tribune stations. Stay with us in the coming months for an official list of stations.
Antenna TV will offer a combination of movies and classic television shows including: Three's Company, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Good Times, Too Close for Comfort, Benny Hill, Maude, The Partridge Family, The Nanny, and Married...with Children. And even more cool stuff like Three's Company's short-lived spin-offs The Ropers and Three's a Crowd will air within Three's Company itself! That sounds very cool and unique! More to come on this in the coming months. Black & white classic television series will air in the overnight and includes classics like Father Knows Best, Dennis the Menace, The Donna Reed Show, and on weekends The Three Stooges. As you may have noticed, the series are mostly from Sony Pictures Television and a few from Don Taffner's DLT Entertainment. More shows will be announced soon, so stay tuned.
A schedule isn't ready for release yet but there will be movies in the daytime and sitcoms starting at 5pm and going through the overnight hours. NO paid programming will be on this digital multicast at all, as it is 24/7 entertainment! There will be a lot of themed events, including holiday marathons. This is going to be a delight for sitcom and classic TV fans! Many of these series have not aired on local syndication in years, so this will be fun to watch in a new way on digital television! This station comes from the same people who run the cable network WGN America and the digital station THIS TV, so you bet Antenna TV will be good. Stay with us for further updates and we will be the first to let you know the launch schedule when ready! And special thanks as always to Sean Compton, president of programming for Tribune Broadcasting, for his help and information!

Moving back to our look at the fall 2010 cable schedules, today we will give you details on CMT. We normally only cover CMT when they air a television series or sitcom. After three years, The Dukes of Hazzard is returning to CMT! The series returns in style with a 3-day marathon starting Friday, Sept. 10! The marathon airs that Friday from 8pm-3am and that Saturday & Sunday both from 2pm-3am. The series will then join the regular schedule on Monday, Sept. 13 and air weeknights at 7pm & 11pm. In other series updates, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition will air air 2-4pm and 1-3am weeknights with primetime airings on Tuesday nights. Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? airs weeknights at 6:30pm and 12-1am. Trading Spouses usually airs once a week sometime in the daytime. That's about it for CMT, as the rest of the schedule is filled with music, originals and movies.

And finally, we have an update for you to the Hallmark Channel Fall 2010 schedule we relayed the other day. Weeknights at 8pm starting Tuesday, Sept. 7 will now be Little House on the Prairie, rather than Touched by an Angel. This means Touched is off the schedule for now. Little House will now be exclusive to Hallmark as it won't share the series with TV Land anymore, since TV Land's contract expired yesterday. Now Hallmark can air the series anytime and not just 6am-6pm. As a result, Hallmark will air a marathon of Little House on the Prairie on Saturday, Sept. 4 from 6am-4am. The Cheers marathon originally slated for this day is no longer scheduled, but Who's the Boss? and I Love Lucy remain on Sept. 5-6.
View the updated Hallmark Channel Fall 2010 schedule. And stay with us for further updates, as usual.