Live television ratings have long been treated as the definitive scorecard in the entertainment business, but the latest numbers out of ABC suggest that story is increasingly incomplete. New multi-platform data shows that both “Dancing with the Stars” and freshman-turned-sophomore drama “R.J. Decker” are pulling in significant audiences well after their initial broadcasts, a trend that is reshaping how networks judge success — and, in at least one case, may have helped save a show from the chopping block.

“R.J. Decker,” the crime series starring Scott Speedman, entered its second season on shaky ground. The show had been considered a renewal bubble candidate after its freshman run last spring failed to make much noise in traditional same-day ratings. But its Season 2 premiere, freshly slotted behind “Dancing with the Stars” on Tuesday nights, has found new life in delayed viewing. According to seven-day cross-platform figures spanning Hulu, Hulu on Disney+ and a single ABC encore airing, the premiere drew a total audience of 9.61 million — the show’s best streaming showing since the second episode of its debut season back in March. The halo effect didn’t stop there: curiosity generated by the new season also drove a surge in viewership of the original pilot episode, which posted its biggest streaming week in nearly five months.

That kind of ripple effect is exactly what networks hope for when they pair a struggling scripted series with a ratings workhorse. By placing “R.J. Decker” directly after “Dancing with the Stars,” ABC effectively handed the drama a built-in audience of viewers who might never have sampled it otherwise. The strategy appears to be paying off, at least in the early going, giving the series a second chance to prove its staying power with a broader base of streaming-first viewers.

Meanwhile, “Dancing with the Stars” itself continues to defy expectations for a show now well into its third decade on the air. The Season 35 premiere faced a difficult comparison point: last year’s Season 34 debut was a standout hit for the long-running reality competition. Yet the new season still managed to climb 17% above that benchmark, pulling in 9.98 million viewers over seven days across Hulu, Hulu on Disney+ and other digital platforms, compared to 8.50 million for the prior season’s opener. Measured against the show’s initial same-day broadcast audience of 6.77 million, the multi-platform total represents a 47% jump — a reminder of just how much of the show’s real audience now lives outside the traditional Tuesday-night broadcast window.

Perhaps more notable is the broader trajectory: since “Dancing with the Stars” returned to ABC in 2023 after a stint on Disney+, the series has grown its audience every single season, whether measured in live same-day numbers or the fuller seven-day multi-platform tally. That kind of consistent growth is a rarity for any series in its 35th installment, let alone one built around a format — celebrities paired with professional dancers competing week to week — that has been a staple of American television for two decades.

Industry watchers say the numbers underscore a broader shift in how success is defined in the streaming era. Same-day linear ratings, once the only currency that mattered for advertisers and network executives alike, are increasingly viewed as a partial snapshot rather than the full picture. Shows that might look soft on paper the morning after they air can reveal themselves to be far more resilient once delayed streaming and on-demand viewing are factored in over a full week — a dynamic that clearly worked in favor of both “R.J. Decker” and its higher-profile lead-in.

For ABC, the pairing of a proven reality staple with an unproven scripted drama looks, for now, like a smart bit of scheduling chess. Whether “R.J. Decker” can sustain its newfound momentum once the novelty of its premiere fades remains to be seen, but for a show that was reportedly fighting for its survival just months ago, a nearly 10-million-viewer multi-platform debut is about as strong a lifeline as network television can offer.

Hollywood’s game of musical chairs continues, with rising actor Daniel Zolghadri tapped to replace Charles Melton in Elijah Bynum’s upcoming crime thriller “My Darling California,” according to a report from Variety. The shuffle adds another name to what has already shaped up to be one of the more intriguingly cast independent productions on the 2026 calendar.

Zolghadri, who broke through with a starring turn in Prime Video’s “Tales from the Loop” and has since built a résumé of sharp supporting work, will take on the role of Kent — described in the film’s official logline as a young man “caught in an escalating conflict that quickly spirals beyond his control” after a figure from his past resurfaces and forces him to confront “long-buried questions.” It’s the kind of morally tangled, slow-burn role that has become something of a specialty for the actor, whose recent credits include “Y2K,” “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Lurker.”

No explanation has been given for Melton’s departure from the project, and representatives for the “Riverdale” and “May December” star did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Cast exits of this kind are common in the lead-up to production, often tied to scheduling conflicts rather than any dispute over the material, but the timing — with the film reportedly gearing up to shoot entirely in California — suggests the production was eager to lock in a replacement quickly rather than delay.

Whatever the reason for the shakeup, Zolghadri is stepping into a genuinely stacked ensemble. “My Darling California” boasts Jessica Chastain, Chris Pine, Chris Evans, Mikey Madison and Don Cheadle, a lineup that reads more like an awards-season drama than a typical crime picture. The story is set in 1980s Los Angeles and follows a televangelist and his newscaster wife as they scramble to contain a spiraling, multi-faceted scandal threatening to unravel their public lives — a premise that seems tailor-made for the kind of moral rot and media spectacle that has become a recurring theme in prestige period pieces set in that era.

Director Elijah Bynum, best known for the A24 coming-of-age drama “Hot Summer Nights” (which helped launch Timothée Chalamet’s film career) and the more polarizing 2023 drama “Magazine Dreams” starring Jonathan Majors, seems to be continuing his interest in stories of ambition curdling into desperation. Pairing that sensibility with a cast of this caliber signals a production aiming squarely at the kind of adult-oriented, character-driven filmmaking that has become increasingly rare in an industry dominated by franchise tentpoles.

For Zolghadri, the casting represents another significant step up the ladder. After cutting his teeth in smaller roles in Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” and HBO’s “Fahrenheit 451,” he’s spent the past few years quietly accumulating credits in acclaimed indies, including his latest, Alexandrea Pechman’s “Magazine,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. He’s also lined up to star in “The Temple” from directors Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas, as well as Annie Baker’s “Ancient History” for A24 — a run of projects that positions him as one of the more sought-after young actors working in the independent film space right now.

“My Darling California” is being produced by David Hinojosa, Alex Coco and Sébastien Raybaud, alongside Scott Budnick and Ameet Shukla of 1Community and Emily Blavatnik and Danny Cohen of Access Entertainment, with Len Blavatnik and Zach Nutman serving as executive producers. The project was developed, financed and sold by Anton, which is handling international sales alongside CAA Media Finance for U.S. and global rights.

With a starry cast, a filmmaker known for stories of ambition and downfall, and now a fresh lead in Zolghadri, “My Darling California” is shaping up to be one of the more closely watched crime dramas heading into production — a reminder that even amid last-minute cast changes, the pedigree behind a project can keep anticipation high.

Big Brother is one day away from the BB28 finale and there’s still good stuff happening to talk about. We’ve got outrage from the fans over Dee Valladares entry into the jury house. Julie Chen Moonves said who she wants to win this season. And the latest on the AFP polls. Plus, outrage of the day.

Big Brother: Julie’s Pick is…

Let’s start with Julie’s preference for the winner of BB28. Last year she said she thought Morgan Pope would win but didn’t say she should. In other seasons, Julie stated a clear preference.

In BB18 she wanted Paul Abrahamian to win. And in BB13 Julie said she wanted Rachel Reilly to win. Julie said she wants Taylor Brown to win for a lot of reasons. Julie brought up the Taylor not leaving her pod thing.

But Julie said in every diary room session, Taylor knew every beat of what was happening. Julie said that Taylor’s smart and won competitions when she had to. Julie said Taylor started winning comps at the end that were not easy.

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She also said she wants Taylor to win because they both love Jesus. And Julie said she thinks Taylor has mercy and grace. And we know Julie never wanted a Survivor to win.

Big Brother 28: Dodging Drama and a Helpful Hand

Speaking of finale night. Rick Devens and Drew Campbell were talking about how to answer juror questions if they are in the chairs. Devens joked about referring questions over to Drew that he did not want to answer.

And then they both joked about refusing to answer idiot questions. Meanwhile, Taylor worked on her hair. It took hours to take out her extensions. She wound up with a trash bag full and said “this is so heavy—can’t believe I had this on my head.”

Taylor said that’s why her head hurt. Taylor got a perm kit to straighten it so looks like she might do a sleek look. And Drew offered to help Taylor take out her extensions. Drew said he’s really bored and could help. Taylor said no.

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Big Brother: Rules or Suggestions?

Cory Wurtenberger from BB25 said on a podcast that it’s a rule you can’t talk game in jury but said production can’t and doesn’t enforce it. Cory said when a new juror comes in, lots of crew are there to film so you cannot talk game.

But they leave and Cory said there’s only about two handlers to five jurors. Cory said the handlers do not care if you talk game just not in front of cameras. He said everybody talks game if they want.

Cory also said you get to keep your DVD you bring into jury with your eviction and all the goodbye messages. Cory said the goodbye messages impacted his vote and said some of them showed each other their goodbye messages.

BB28: Outrage of the Day

Here’s latest outrage. People are upset that Dee might have gone into the jury house rather than doing just the jury round table and being sent directly off to hotel sequester.

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They usually pull the jurors out of the jury house a couple of days before the finale and stick them into a hotel where they can’t talk to each other or see any news. That’s standard.

There was an interview that said, “We caught Dee on her way to the jury house.” And people started screeching. First, the jury roundtable films at the jury house and Dee was participating in it, so of course she’d be there.

Second, if Dee did wind up in the jury house for a couple of days because of the weird lag this season with extra days before finale, so what? The outrage is the assumption she’s vote rigging for Devens or Drew.

Even if Dee went straight into sequester, when they’re in the green room finale night, I expect her to whisper in people’s ears. I would not be shocked if Devens came out at F3 and whispered in Angela Murray and Dee’s ears before he sat down.

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Devens and Dee are Survivors and tribal council whispering is standard. Speaking of Survivor, Devens was specifically told before he came into Big Brother that he could not lie about advantages or create fake advantages—something Devens was known for on Survivor.

Big Brother: Roundtable Roulette

Julie said that Dan Gheesling was not hosting round table this year and it was going to be somebody who’s played the game before but was not a winner. People are thinking it might be Morgan Pope from BB27.

Dee was evicted on September 24th. And then on September 26th, Morgan posted that she was filming something really cool today and said, “Stay tuned.” I’ve seen people saying Morgan denied filming round table on her Patreon, but didn’t personally see it.

Finale night is ninety minutes that should be jam packed. Julie said Rome Seymour and Lyric Medeiros will do an update at the finale. But Julie said it’s not what you think. People think Rome and Lyric are going to announce they’re engaged. But that seems too obvious. Maybe they’re already married…

AFP Considerations for BB28

In the most recent AFP polls, Drew’s in the lead with Devens a close second and Yash Patel in a distant third. Everybody after them are in single digits. Voting ends Thursday at noon EST, 11:00 am Central, 9:00 am Pacific.

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Taylor thinks that Mallory Aurichio or LaTrice “Lala” Verrett will win America’s Favorite Player. Drew thinks it might be Yash.

And Julie said in a recent interview she’d like to see Jason De Puy, Yash and Kamuela “Kamu” Kirk back to play Big Brother again but then said she’s on the fence about Kamu, maybe Haley Thogmartin instead.

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This prequel series is now as old as the boy genius was when it premiered.

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For five years, two vintage Polaroid cameras stood permanently rigged inside a rambling, dilapidated apartment in Germantown, Philadelphia. They were not props or set dressing. They were witnesses. Behind them was artist Katherine Hubbard, and in front of them, again and again, was her mother, Antonette Berger — a woman whose mind was slowly slipping away from her, and whose defiant, theatrical spirit refused to go quietly.

The result, a body of work titled The Great Room and collected in the book One Fifty One, is now on view as part of Hubbard’s solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London. It is, by any measure, an unusual entry in the entertainment and art world’s autumn calendar — not a celebrity memoir or a splashy biopic, but an intimate, unflinching record of illness, intimacy and the strange intrusions of caregiving, told through a family’s most private rooms.

Hubbard’s story begins, as so many pandemic-era stories do, with a nagging unease that took time to name. In 2020, visiting her mother in Philadelphia after Covid restrictions eased, Hubbard began to sense that something in Berger’s behaviour had shifted. “It was impossible at the time to say what I was noticing, but something was off,” she has said. The eventual diagnosis was LATE — limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, a condition that mimics Alzheimer’s but progresses more slowly, eroding memory and daily function over a longer, more agonising arc.

What followed was, in Hubbard’s words, a “painful, drawn-out and confusing process,” followed by grief. Thrust into the role of what she calls “a caretaker under duress,” she responded not by looking away but by looking harder — setting up her cameras in her mother’s apartment and refusing to take them down.

The apartment itself is no ordinary backdrop. Berger owned and rented out the sprawling, maze-like building for four decades, and it functioned for years as something like a neighbourhood hub — tenants dropping by, complaints about broken pipes, a constant hum of people. It stood in sharp contrast to the “more modest” house where Hubbard actually grew up, and its grandiose, crumbling scale gives The Great Room — a title borrowed from Berger’s own name for the apartment’s main living space — its startling visual drama.

Some of the images verge on the theatrical in the most literal sense. At one point, Hubbard built her mother a makeshift stage out of a set of rotting 1960s mirrored doors she found abandoned in the garage, mounting them on stands so Berger could wheel them around the room. Mirrors recur throughout the series, and Hubbard describes them as a deliberate strategy: a way to insert herself into the frame alongside her mother rather than observe from a safe distance. “It’s a way of never leaving my mum alone in the image, to project myself into the image,” she explains. “If I’m in the image there with her, it changes some of the authority and power dynamics of the camera.”

That refusal to simply document from outside — to instead share the frame, the vulnerability, even at one point posing nude and covered in Vaseline to make body prints with her mother — gives the work an emotional charge rarely seen in photography about illness. These are not clinical or pitying images. Berger, described by her daughter as “incredibly headstrong, eccentric, and difficult,” often commands the frame with an unexpected authority, bathed in the kind of majestic light more commonly associated with portraiture of the powerful than the ailing.

Hubbard is candid about the limits of the camera in the face of a disease that erases the very thing photography claims to capture. “The camera fails us in so many ways,” she says, “and the absurdity with dementia is that I was constantly making lots of images of things that can’t be shown in an image. But I make images because of how they feel, not how they look.” It’s a striking admission from an artist whose work depends on the visual, and it reframes the entire project: not as an attempt to preserve her mother’s likeness before it’s gone, but as an attempt to hold onto a feeling — presence, tenderness, the strange choreography of care — that resists straightforward depiction.

As the years passed, mother and daughter moved through daily domestic rituals together in the apartment, eventually beginning the slow, sorrowful work of packing it up so Berger could move into a care facility. Hubbard describes a turning point in the process when the camera itself seemed to disappear from their awareness. “Something wonderful happened at some point where we both stopped thinking about the cameras, and we stopped seeing ourselves as an image — the cameras were just present, and the time to make photographs created interruptions into an otherwise brutal, demanding time.”

That sentence perhaps best captures what makes The Great Room resonate beyond the art world into something more universally recognisable: the way ritual — even one as unusual as a standing photo session — can become a lifeline amid the exhausting, disorienting work of caring for a parent whose mind is receding. In an entertainment landscape often dominated by spectacle, Hubbard’s exhibition offers something quieter and more enduring: a daughter’s attempt to keep making pictures of a person who is, in her words, “completely her own person,” for as long as that person remains reachable through a lens.

The Great Room and related installations are on show as part of Katherine Hubbard’s solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London, alongside the publication of her book One Fifty One.

Sky is preparing to hand its buzziest dramas, including “The Day of the Jackal” and “Brassic,” a shot at Britain’s biggest free-to-air stage, as the broadcaster works through the final stages of its £1.6 billion ($2.1 billion) takeover of ITV’s network operations.

Cécile Frot-Coutaz, chief executive of Sky Studios and the company’s content chief, confirmed the strategy at the Royal Television Society London Convention on Tuesday, telling attendees that Sky wants to experiment with “windowing” its premium originals onto ITV in the years ahead. Deadline first reported the broad outlines of the plan back in July; Frot-Coutaz’s remarks now put official flesh on the bones.

The idea, as she described it, is fairly simple: air earlier seasons of a hit show like “The Day of the Jackal” on ITV shortly before a new season debuts on Sky, using the free-to-air platform to build buzz and pull in viewers who might not otherwise encounter the series. “There’s various permutations,” Frot-Coutaz said, suggesting the company is still working out exactly how far it will push the model.

It isn’t a wholly new idea for Sky. Frot-Coutaz pointed to “Brassic,” the gritty Lancashire comedy-drama, as a test case — Sky previously placed its first four seasons on Netflix and found the exposure translated into fresh viewership rather than cannibalizing its own audience. “We saw that we had been able to find some new headroom [in viewing] because we’d exposed the show to an audience that we didn’t have,” she said.

The ambitions don’t stop at scripted drama. Sky, which Frot-Coutaz noted controls roughly 40,000 hours of sports programming, is also eyeing a bigger free-to-air footprint for its live events coverage — including the tantalizing prospect of Premier League football reaching viewers who don’t currently pay for Sky. “There’s also huge opportunities in terms of putting more sports on free-to-air,” she said. “We think everybody wins from that. The viewer wins, but also the leagues win.”

The comments came on a day of broader reflection on the deal’s implications for British broadcasting. ITV chief executive Carolyn McCall, speaking earlier at the same event, said her company had little alternative but to sell its network arm to Sky given the intensity of competition reshaping the industry, describing the landscape bluntly as “ferocious.”

Crucially for ITV loyalists worried about losing familiar staples, McCall stressed that the takeover comes bundled with a £2.1 billion output deal guaranteeing ITV Studios will keep producing shows such as “Love Island” and “Coronation Street” for broadcast on ITV through 2032. Asked whether Sky might try to unwind that commitment down the line, McCall didn’t mince words: “Good luck.” She added that Sky, far from scaling back, is likely to commission even more from ITV Studios — which will continue operating independently and remain listed on the London Stock Exchange despite the change in ownership upstream.

Taken together, the remarks paint a picture of a deal designed less to dismantle ITV’s identity than to fuse it with Sky’s deep bench of prestige content and sports rights. For viewers, that could eventually mean stumbling across a Sky original or a Premier League match without needing a subscription — a shift that, if it plays out as described, would mark one of the more consequential changes to how premium British television reaches its audience in years.