JANUARY 29, 2026

Welcome back to Buffering, where we’ve just finished gobbling up all six episodes of Riot Women, the new BritBox/BBC series from UK television icon Sally Wainwright. (It’s amazing.) This week we’ve got some thoughts on Bari Weiss’s latest maneuverings at CBS News, the latest Looney goings-on at Warner Bros., and a dispatch from the launch of UFC on Paramount+. Plus, we have an interview with Netflix unscripted VP Jeff Gaspin, who is no doubt breathing a sigh of relief now that Skyscraper Live is over. Thanks for reading, and here’s hoping our friend Phil doesn’t see his shadow Monday.

— Joe Adalian, West Coast editor

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By Eric Vilas-Boas

And we are tracking the acquisition receipts. As of this morning, Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial effort The Invite, the Mia Wasikowska–starring Leviticus, and Babel star Rinko Kikuchi’s Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! have all sold at Sundance. Follow along with Jennifer Zhan’s updated list and the rest of our on-the-ground coverage.

Zero surprise here: KPop Demon Hunters topped the Nielsen movie-streaming charts with a whopping 20.5 billion minutes viewed. The math equates to ~207 million full movie views.

The Warner Bros. library’s classic Looney Tunes shorts are returning to the air in style. As THR reported, TCM is licensing the shorts for broadcast. While they currently air on MeTV Toons as part of the anthologized Bugs Bunny and Friends, this new broadcast license will come with a touch more curation: TCM will pair individual shorts to run ahead of its feature films, just as they did in the old days. It’s an inspired programming choice and will re-contextualize the shorts for anyone used to seeing them in isolation or repackaged blocks like Bugs Bunny and Friends. One more thing: For those who love watching them for free on Tubi, the TCM deal doesn’t affect the streamer’s license for over 800 of the shorts; they’ll remain there for the foreseeable future as well.

By Josef Adalian

Photo: Noam Galai/Getty Images

During a much-publicized town hall Tuesday, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was asked what she would say to critics who argue the division has become “a right-wing network” under her leadership. “Look at the coverage that CBS News has put out since I started,” she said, insisting that she wants only to be “a mouthpiece for fairness and pursuit of the truth.” If he were still alive, Roger Ailes — who sold Fox News with the slogan “fair and balanced”— would surely have smiled at her gall.

Even if the Weiss-led CBS News has not been anywhere near as craven as Fox News in attempting to sell right-wing propaganda as objective journalism, the division’s sudden and sharp turn toward the right since she arrived has been unmistakable to anyone paying attention. As Status’s Oliver Darcy correctly observed, writing about the CBS Evening News this month, “One could indeed look at the coverage — of the January 6 anniversary, the softball Pete Hegseth interview, or the bizarre salute to Marco Rubio, among other recent notable moments — and reasonably conclude the network has, in fact, shifted rightward.” There’s also the way Weiss abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment about the Trump administration’s relationship with El Salvador’s CECOT prison camp over bogus concerns about “fairness,” only to just as abruptly — and with virtually no advance notice — reschedule the same segment, barely changed, so that it would air opposite NBC’s most-watched NFL divisional playoff game ever, all but guaranteeing low ratings. Or the list of new contributors Weiss revealed this week that, despite the presence of a few non-partisan journalists and personalities, is dominated by right-coded intellectuals and academics, including a Brexit-embracing Black journalist who worked for the UK equivalent of Fox News; three medical voices often aligned with RFK, Jr.’s MAHA movement (Peter Attia, Andrew Huberman, Mark Hyman); and the president of the right-wing Manhattan Institute. (Helping fund these new paid talking heads: offering veteran journalists buyouts ahead of another round of layoffs.)

But there are more subtle signs that this is no longer the CBS News of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, or even Scott Pelley. The most glaring came this last week as events in Minnesota unfolded. Much of the world was rocked by what no less than Chuck “Both Sides” Todd termed the “cold-blooded assassination of an American citizen by” the U.S. government. But from Saturday through Monday, the CBS Weekend News and CBS Evening News downplayed this drama and instead emphasized coverage of … a snowstorm. Granted, it was a very big storm, and on Sunday, ABC’s World News also led with the weather system’s aftermath. Still, after giving the Minnesota story less than three minutes’ airtime Saturday (even as NBC Nightly News spent eight minutes on it; ABC’s World News didn’t air nationally because of NBA coverage) CBS was the only one of the big three broadcast networks which kept the killing of Alex Pretti out of the lead spot on both Sunday and Monday nights; it also devoted notably fewer minutes to the situation than its rivals. Only when the news changed from outrage over the killing to the Trump White House (allegedly) shifting tactics did CBS and its new chief anchor Tony Dokoupil decide this story was the most important one of the day. By Wednesday, CBS was back to leading with weather, while also spending two minutes on the official rollout of “Trump Accounts,” with Dokoupil unironically quoting Trump’s description of the initiative as “one of the most transformative policies of all time.” ABC and NBC found it so transformative, they didn’t cover the event at all on their nightly newscasts.

Obviously, if you believe, as Weiss seems to, that CBS News was hopelessly left-wing before she arrived, perhaps the changes she’s now touting might seem rational and even overdue. And to be clear, CBS hasn’t suddenly morphed into Fox News: Dokoupil was the only big three anchor who reported from Minnesota after the killing of Renée Good earlier this month, and some critiques of Trump policies can still be heard on the network. But during her town hall Tuesday Weiss also argued that she was blowing up CBS News because it needed to “meet audiences where they are,” while accusing her predecessors of “clinging” to the broadcast news model. “If we stick to that strategy, we’re toast,” she said.

And yet the thing is, CBS News has absolutely not been burying its head in the sand the last few years when it comes to the very real declines in broadcast viewership. It was the first network to launch its own streaming news service, all the way back in 2014, and has invested millions into reshaping operations to prioritize local and streaming. CBS News has also pushed aggressively into podcasts and into aggregating its content across platforms, which is why 48 Hours is regularly among the biggest podcasts on YouTube, even as its library can be seen on FAST channels, cable channels, and just about anywhere you can find video. 

Obviously there’s still plenty of room for growth, but nothing Weiss said this week about rethinking news hasn’t been said a million times before by other execs at CBS News and its linear rivals. She may bring youthful energy and fresh eyes to the network, but since she arrived at CBS in October, the only actual new ideas Weiss has brought to the network are that “woke” is bad — and that she knows best. To paraphrase a CBS News employee with far more gravitas than Weiss, or myself: Good night, and good luck with that. 

By Josef Adalian

Members Only: Palm Beach. Photo: Netflix

After a 24-hour weather delay, Netflix’s Skyscraper Live event on Netflix went off without a hitch Saturday and ended up a ratings success. The show landed at No. 3 on the streamer’s weekly top ten, outperforming the debut of another big unscripted priority for the service — the reboot of Star Search. Jeff Gaspin, Netflix’s VP of unscripted for the U.S. and Canada, outlined his strategy for the new talent competition show for me in a story last week, but we also spent another half-hour discussing the rest of his. We talked about everything from why he agreed to pick up Pop Culture Jeopardy! after Amazon walked away and what to expect from that new Willy Wonka–themed reality show to perhaps the most important question facing any unscripted exec in 2026: Are you planning any new shows featuring Mormons?

Bela Bajaria, your boss’s boss, famously said in a New Yorker profile that she wanted Netflix’s scripted-programming team to make “gourmet cheeseburgers.” What’s your version of gourmet cheeseburgers? What do you want your slate of shows to accomplish?

I've always aspired to influence pop culture. I love when shows just hit the Zeitgeist and people are talking about them and SNL is parodying them. That's what I always aspire for our shows to do. It means they’re relevant. 

What title on your 2026 calendar do you think has the best chance of doing that? 

I don't know that I would single out any one particular show, but I will use this as an example: Age of Attraction. I think it has the potential of entering the pop culture. It feels a lot like Love Is Blind in some ways.