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I had originally planned on writing about the latest twists and turns in the Paramount merger battle and I have a piece on Netflix’s love of dumb action movies that I am now pushing until tomorrow.
I wanted to update all of you on some changes that are coming for TooMuchTV, although I promise, these are positive ones.
Changes Are Coming To TooMuchTV
I don’t have to tell you that original journalism - both legacy media and digital reporting - is currently undergoing a multi-year bloodbath. And those changes have impacted my work enough to push me into some fairly radical changes in how I do business.
As you might know, all of this began with the web site AllYourScreens.com. That web site has been around for around 15 years, and its predecessor AllYourTV.com had been around for more than a decade before that. My first digital journalism job was at Compuserve, back in the days when internet access cost $6.99 an hour. So I have lived through some changes.
Until several years ago, AllYourScreens was the primary source of my income. At its height, it was garnering more than 2.5 million unique visitors a year, which was pretty good for a one-man-band operation. This newsletter originally began as a once-a-week roundup of what I was writing on the web site, but it grew into its own unique thing.
Which turned out to be a challenge, because I found myself not only trying to fill two different editorial holes, but trying to explain to people why I had outlets with sometimes overlapping missions but entirely different names.
In the past several years, AllYourScreens has battled the same challenges as news web sites of all sizes. Google Zero has decimated organic search traffic, which has collapsed ad revenue. At the same time, AI bots are pounding the site, using it to power answers for people asking their favorite AI platform for the info they used to find on someone’s web site.
Over the past few months, it has become obvious that is unsustainable. And I am making changes that I hope will simplify my mission, be more helpful for my readers and allow me to grow my audience and revenue.
There is a place for a news site that lives somewhere between traditional mostly Penske-owned trade outlets and new digital outlets like The Ankler and Puck which are focusing on the professional class of Hollywood and the live events that power their bottom lines.
After a bit of wrangling, I have acquired the TooMuchTV.com domain and will be moving this newsletter over there (still powered by BeeHiiv). At the same time, I will be sunsetting AllYourScreens.com, moving those archives to Too Much TV and pointing that domain to the new one. This will all take a few weeks to accomplish, but all of the chaos will be taking place behind the scenes.
The new TooMuchTV.com domain will still be newsletter-centric, but there will also be a healthy amount of non-newsletter content. Including some which will be only available to paid subscribers. I’ve tried a few different options in the past, and the one thing paid subscribers found valuable was additional content.
Being able to focus on one business will allow me to get back to some of the writing I have been struggling to do, such as reviewing more shows and devoting more time to reporting.
Nothing will change for the newsletter. This Monday-Friday TooMuchTV newsletter will continue to be free and unlike the chaos of the move from Subtack, you will barely notice the change in domain.
I wanted to take this chance to encourage you to pass along the newsletter to anyone you think you might find it useful. I don’t have a marketing budget, and word of mouth is my best weapon.
And a special thank you all of you who have invested in this newsletter. There are a lot of outlets asking for your money, and I deeply appreciate your support. If you haven’t upgraded yet, let me just say that at $40 a year, the cost is much less than some other entertainment and media publications that provide a lot less info and independent reporting. And you can always provide a bit of financial support for my efforts by clicking on the ad in every newsletter, or by buying me a cup of coffee.
Thank you for your support.
The Backpack Everyone Notices
Your backpack says a lot before you even say a word. Find the newest Sprayground collection and start the school year your way.
This Is Why More Legacy Personalities Are Moving To Digital Careers
While she isn’t well-known in the United States, Holly Willoughby was one of the highest paid TV presenters in the UK, commanding a reported £1m a year from ITV for presenting the daytime TV show This Morning.
She stepped down in 2023 and has been doing one-off things since, but last week she made news with her new YouTube channel, Holly Willoughby Together.
Chris Stone at Podcast Strategy Weekly has a really informative rundown of the various ways Willoughby can monetize her new YouTube channel and its related offshoots. And those details explain why so many well-known TV personalities are building out their own digital empires:
It’s no surprise, then, that Together is already a podcast – a fact most commentators seem to have missed. Although almost every review I can find discusses only the YouTube property, a quick search reveals full episodes are also available in video on Spotify and audio-only on Apple Podcasts.
I’d also expect to see Holly launch a Together newsletter in fairly short order because, as we know, building a mailing list is the best way to collect first-party data, learn about your audience and build a direct relationship with individual users.
By promising even more exclusive content and direct communication with her community in her video calls to action she’ll get her users to share their email addresses, creating a direct line of communication with a user base she can segment and market to directly.
With all of these elements working together, Holly will be the face of a powerful content machine with a clear user journey, which will become an extremely valuable asset to drive even more premium brand partnerships.
Remembering Jean Muir And The Red Scare
In August 1950, NBC announced that the actress Jean Muir would have a lead role in a new TV show, The Aldrich Family. An accomplished performer on stage, Muir was set to become one of America’s first television stars. Then, a few days later, NBC fired her.
I’m a bit late to this story, but Politico recently had a fascinating piece on Hollywood’s 1950s-era Red Scare, written by Clay Risen, author of the book Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism And The Making Of Modern America.
The McCarthy era seems like ancient history, but given the rise of Americans being described as “Socialists” or “Communists,” and the growing pushback against Hollywood’s creatives who speak out against the Administration, it also resonates a bit too closely to what is happening in America in 2026.
At most networks, if a producer wanted to hire an actor or a writer, he would have to submit the names to an executive tasked with checking out their background; sometimes multiple executives had to weigh in. CBS made every employee sign a loyalty oath swearing that they had never joined an allegedly subversive group.
Unlike in Hollywood, where movie executives colluded in the blacklist against actors and writers, there was no coordination when it came to TV. One network might decide an actor was acceptable, while another, or a sponsor, might disagree. The result was a confusing patchwork of permissions and exiles, more gray list than blacklist.
There was an additional problem. Networks soon realized that Red Channels had cast such a wide net that a large percentage of potential talent was, in effect, unhireable. And so a cottage industry emerged of self-appointed clearance agents who would coach actors and artists on how to expunge their records. It might mean simply writing a letter declaring their hatred of communism; for others it might mean talking to the FBI or even testifying before Congress.
Like the rest of the Red Scare, TV’s blacklist era eventually came to an end as the fear of communism receded. By the late 1950s, some actors managed to return to work, though not all — Jean Muir ended up teaching acting at a small college in Missouri.
Odds & Sods
Stephen Fallows has a great deep dive into what percentage of Hollywood film professionals are nepo babies?
Season five of the Israeli drama Fauda will premiere Tuesday, September 8th on Netflix. In the meantime, you can see series star Lior Raz in the delightful six-episode unscripted series Off Road, which is on Netflix. In the series, he and longtime friend and Israeli TV personality
Employees say the five-person editorial staff of Restart, a games site funded by Walmart and managed by marketing agency Moonrock, has been laid off.
Ben Jones, who played mechanic Cooter Davenport on all seven seasons of the 1979-1985 CBS action comedy series The Dukes of Hazzard before serving two terms as a Democratic member of Congress representing Georgia, died Sunday of a massive heart attack.
I am honestly surprised that it has taken this long, but Roku - which now owns the mini-live TV service Frndly TV - has begun sharing some of its Roku originals with the service. First up is Summer Sparks, a Roku Original starring Jesse Metcalfe and Kathryn Davis, which is now streaming on Frndly TV.
If you wondered why Netflix partnered with Rockstar Games to show an early "extended look" at GTA VI, this quote from the press release by Netflix's VP of nonfiction series Brandon Riegg provides a pretty good answer: "it’s a reflection of what we hope Netflix is becoming: a place where the most ambitious storytelling, from any medium, can find the biggest possible audience."
Recreating The Old School Video Store
Bingemaster.net does something very interesting. If you enter the SVOD’s you subscribe to, it will take titles from those services and use them to create a virtual video store.
What’s Coming Tonight And Tomorrow
MONDAY, AUGUST 10TH:
Dr. Seuss's Red Fish, Blue Fish (Netflix)
History's Greatest Mysteries Season Premiere (History)
TUESDAY, AUGUST 11TH:
Mourinho (Netflix)
Rory Scovel: Show Must Go On (Netflix)
Signs Of A Psychopath Season Eleven Premiere (Investigation Discovery)
The Proof Is Out There Season Premiere (History)
Top Chef VIP Season Five Premiere (Telemundo)