AUGUST 14, 2025

Howdy! Welcome back to Buffering, where we’re still figuring out what we think about the name of Roku’s new budget-minded subscription service … Howdy. On the one hand, it’s really tough to come up with a clever moniker for a streaming service these days (hence the proliferation of plus signs in recent years), and Howdy is no weirder than Stan or Hayu. That said, the first thing we thought when we saw the name Howdy was, Ah, this must be a streamer for westerns and other country-fried content. Name aside, the idea behind it isn’t bad: For $3 a month, you can watch a ton of older, B- and C-level TV shows and movies with zero ads. I signed up over the weekend to check things out, and while the roster is nowhere near as impressive as the deep libraries you’ll find on Tubi or even Roku’s own free, ad-supported Roku Channel, there are a few gems, most from Warner Bros. TV: Every episode of The Drew Carey Show, Knot’s Landing, Falcon Crest, and, for the first time ever on a U.S. streamer, the critically adored ABC Vietnam War drama China Beach. That last title alone is worth splurging on a one- or two-month subscription.

Speaking of splurging, new Paramount owner David Ellison celebrated his first week as a media mogul by spending big bucks to lure the UFC. I’ve got thoughts on the deal, including what it says about the continued power of broadcast TV. Plus, we’ve got a look at HBO’s latest foray into anime and a mini-rant from me about the insanity of calling Greg Gutfeld a late-night host. As always, thanks for reading.

—Joe Adalian, Vulture's West Coast editor

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC

Back in 2008, CBS struck a small-but-historic deal to bring a handful of MMA fights to primetime — the first time the then-upstart sport, still struggling for respect in some circles, had broken through the big-four broadcast-network barrier. Two decades later, the Eye network’s early investment is poised to pay off thanks to this week’s nearly $8 billion deal between TKO Sports and Paramount, the respective parent companies of MMA giant UFC and CBS.

The seven-year agreement announced Monday will give the Skydance-owned Paramount exclusive access to all UFC events in the United States starting early next year, including 13 annual, numbered “marquee” events plus 30 so-called Fight Night bouts. All of the nearly four dozen bouts will stream live on Paramount+ at no additional charge. But while a huge swath of viewers will watch these UFC fights via streaming, per TKO execs, it was actually the decades-old Eye network which was critical to making the pact work. “It was important for us to have CBS play a big component in this,” TKO president and chief operating officer Mark Shapiro told CNBC Monday. He said the broadcaster will “simulcast many of the fights and likely all of the numbered events,” and implied airing the bouts on CBS would also elevate the UFC brand. “We’re going old school here — Jimmy the Greek, Brent Musburger, CBS Sports, all that great history. We like that,” he said, perhaps temporarily forgetting why Mr. Greek (real name Jimmy Snyder) left CBS. Ari Emanuel, TKO’s CEO, also played up the Eye’s value: “We wanted the reach of CBS and the Tiffany aspect of CBS,” he told CNBC.

That’s a massive shift from the UFC’s TV model with its current partner, Disney’s ESPN, which has been in place since 2019. While a few smaller UFC-branded events air on ABC (often during the daytime hours), the vast majority of content is paywalled on bundled cable network ESPN or, in most cases, subscription streamer ESPN+. And while ESPN+ streams the Fight Night events as part of a standard subscription, UFC diehards who want to see those 13 big numbered events currently need to plunk down a whopping $80 to watch each telecast, in addition to whatever they pay for ESPN+ (or the Disney bundle). While that certainly brings in revenue for Disney and UFC, it also limits how many eyeballs will be on each event to those who have the coin to pay for it. That changes with the new deal. “If you take … Paramount+ with ads, it’s $8. It’s $8 — and you get all of the UFC included,” Shapiro said.

Plus, if Shapiro’s prediction that most of the numbered events will air on CBS comes to pass, that could bring several million more mostly casual MMA fans into the ring for UFC every month or so. The pay-per-view scheme currently used by ESPN for UFC is “just an antiquated model,” Shapiro argued. “It’s a wall. It’s a barrier.” Being on CBS and the much more affordable (for now) Paramount+ will help “our fans to get our product,” he said. It’s the same logic cited when the NBA announced its decision to bring its biggest package of games to NBCUniversal: In addition to putting games on Peacock, the company will also bring basketball to primetime two nights a week for several months each year, expanding its reach in a way cable-based Turner Sports never could. This is a big swing from just a few years ago, when legacy companies seemed to be in a race to see who could abandon their broadcast properties as quickly as possible. Indeed, the 2018 press release for Disney’s UFC deal didn’t even mention ABC.

None of this is to underplay the value of this agreement to Paramount’s streaming business. While P+ is actually doing pretty well already with 77 million global subscribers and has a strong sports component already — from CBS’s telecasts of the NFL to the Masters to UEFA Champions League soccer — being the exclusive streaming home of UFC’s biggest events will almost surely bring in new subscribers and, more importantly, cut down on churn since UFC events take place year-round. Disney saw UFC’s impact on ESPN+ almost immediately, adding over 500,000 new subs the weekend Fight Night debuted on the platform (though, it’s worth noting, the service was barely a year old at the time and had more room to grow than P+ does in the U.S. right now). And Peacock had a big growth spurt in 2021 not long after it made a costly content deal with WWE (a deal that will soon be on the move to Disney’s ESPN). Making the numbered fights part of the core P+ package should similarly up that platform’s appeal and add to consumer perception of its value. By contrast, under its old ownership, Paramount and P+ de-invested in MMA, selling the company’s ownership stake in UFC rival Bellator and shutting down its Showtime Sports division two years ago.

While Shapiro talked up the great “value” for consumers in this new agreement, there’s a good chance all P+ subscribers — including the millions who don’t care about sports — will end up subsidizing the decision to put a much less expensive paywall around UFC’s most premium content. That’s what has happened over at Peacock, where parent company NBCUniversal’s decision to spend billions on the NBA is a key reason that streamer just hiked prices by $3 per month. 

It’s too soon to say how much P+ will increase its monthly fee once the UFC lands, but some sort of hike seems all but guaranteed. And as with the NBA on Peacock and NBC, it’s also possible Skydance-owned Paramount will be forced to cut spending in other areas in order to fund this new investment in sports. Realigning financial priorities was a key reason CBS gave for its decision to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert; spending billions on UFC is one such move.

And yet, CBS also stands to benefit from the UFC deal — for many of the same reasons former CBS programming chief Kelly Kahl cited when he pioneered the Eye’s first move into MMA 17 years ago with the much-smaller ProElite. While CBS has no problem, even today, attracting big audiences — it’s been the No. 1 TV platform for close to 20 years now — reaching younger viewers, especially men, has never been more challenging for linear networks. UFC fights on CBS won’t magically bring young dudes back to broadcast TV in droves, but it will almost surely give a dramatic lift to the Eye’s Nielsen numbers in key demos and, just as importantly, expose them to promos for the Eye’s many male-skewing entertainment shows like Tracker and Fire Country. We’ll also likely see a slew of branding crossovers between CBS and UFC talent, or possibly even UFC-branded content on the network (you know Jeff Probst is already dreaming up potential collabs). CBS isn’t going to make itself over into the UFC Channel; its brand, and audience base, is much broader than that. But it’s not hard to see this agreement giving the Eye a major boost in a way Disney’s pact with UFC never did for ABC.

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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: John Lamparski/Getty Images

Last week, Fox News Channel talking head and self-styled “comedian” Greg Gutfeld was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Think what you will of Fallon welcoming a far-right ideologue on to his program — and then not challenging him on even one of his many past contemptible remarks. What actually irks me more is the way in which so many media outlets (even my own) continue to accept the Fox News framing of Gutfeld as a very successful combatant in what’s left of the late-night wars. He absolutely is not. 

Don’t misunderstand: There is a late-night vibe to Gutfeld’s self-titled Fox News talk show, especially if your reference point is Politically Incorrect. Like Bill Maher’s old ABC program, Gutfeld cracks jokes every night (or, at least, says a lot of things he thinks are funny), welcomes an ever-changing panel of talking heads from the worlds of media and politics, and does all this in front of a studio audience. It’s nowhere near the same format as Stephen Colbert or the Jimmys, but neither was Later With Bob Costas or, for that matter, The Daily Show. Late-night TV contains multitudes, and has for decades.

But when covering the business of late night — things like how much ad revenue a show generates, what kind of guest bookings it gets, and, most fundamentally, its ratings — there’s something else that matters: When a show actually airs. In the TV business, late night begins when ratings giant Nielsen says prime time ends — i.e., at 11 p.m. in the Eastern and Pacific time zones, 10 p.m. Central/Mountain. And by that very important, definitional metric, Gutfeld! simply cannot be considered a rival to actual late-night shows like Tonight or Stephen Colbert’s soon-to-be-late Late Show: Since July 2023, Fox News has aired Gutfeld! every weeknight at 10 p.m. ET; 7 p.m. for viewers on the West Coast. 

This isn’t about semantics, or, as I’m sure Gutfeld might argue, some sort of liberal rage aimed at a right-wing personality drawing more viewers than Trump-bashing Colbert and Kimmel. It’s about fundamental Nielsen logic and fairness. Advertisers, network executives, and the reporters who cover television would never judge the ratings for Fallon or Seth Meyers’s Late Night against the audience for the 10 p.m. Friday hour of Dateline because they all understand that there are far more people watching TV in prime time than when those other shows air. For that matter, nobody judges the audience for the network morning news shows against their evening news counterparts because, even though they both cover news, they’re different formats and very different time slots. 

Even within late night, 11:35 p.m. shows like Colbert and Fallon are held to a different standard than 12:37 a.m. programs, which end in the wee hours of the morning. Ditto the numbers for the handful of weekly shows over the year that have aired in prime time, such as Samantha Bee’s old 10:30 p.m. TBS half-hour or Maher’s long-running 10 p.m. Friday HBO show. Gutfeld is able to post bigger numbers than the more traditional late-night shows because there’s a much bigger available audience — particularly on the West Coast, where his show airs during one of the most heavily viewed hours of the day. (There are many reasons Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! still get big ratings, but one is because they air from 7 to 8 p.m. in much of the country.) 

So why have some of my media colleagues accepted the Fox News framing about Gutfeld, the would-be late-night king? Well, I suspect one reason is because earlier in his career, Gutfeld was a late-night host. His first Fox News show, Red Eye, debuted in 2007 and aired at 3 a.m. ET/midnight PT — firmly in the space. Even when he left Red Eye in 2015 to launch his weekly Saturday-night program, The Greg Gutfeld Show (which morphed into the more enthusiastically-titled, Monday-Friday Gutfeld! in 2021), his shtick was still seen at 11 p.m. ET, which at least on the East Coast qualified it as late night (even if comparisons to the network shows became suspect at this point since such a big chunk of the live audience, i.e., everyone west of the Rockies, was watching at 8 p.m.). But once Fox opted to schedule Gutfeld’s show in the 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT slot in 2023, the argument was officially settled: It was no longer a participant in the battle for late-night eyeballs. It was now a primetime player.

The thing is, Gutfeld and Fox News really ought to be celebrating the show’s day-part shift because Gutfeld! actually is a massive hit. In the second quarter of 2025, his show managed to improve upon its 9 p.m. lead-in, Hannity, and while it was by just a few thousand viewers, that’s still rare in the Fox News universe. Gutfeld!’s overall audience last quarter of 3 million viewers also doubled or tripled that of everything on MSNBC other than The Rachel Maddow Show, earned six times the audience of CNN fare, and regularly beat the same-day Nielsen numbers for many entertainment shows on Fox’s broadcast network.

Despite this success story, it’s not hard to figure out why Fox News prefers to keep calling Gutfeld! a late-night show. Doing so lets it push the notion that its renegade right-wing bad boy is whupping the butt of the left-leaning network old guard in late night. It’s another way to own the libs and grab a win in the culture wars, something Fox News leadership prizes nearly as much as ratings and ad dollars. And it’s a rhetorical flourish that allows the network to maximize its universe of “No. 1” shows (something all networks are guilty of). But while Gutfeld himself is free to identify however he wants, the fact remains: Gutfeld! is a prime-time show in late-night drag. 

By Eric Vilas-Boas

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: John Lamparski/Getty Images

Like a certain skyscraper-sized radioactive monster, HBO Max is always going through changes — be they existential or in name only. The latest shift? Warner Bros. Discovery’s streaming service is adding 20 acclaimed Japanese films to its library starting September 1, a mix of idiosyncratic anime and live-action titles which will be exclusive to the platform in the United States. Many of the movies, which are licensed by GKIDS, either haven’t been released on streaming in North America before or, in some cases, have had their licenses lapse for years. Notable entries in the lineup include Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name., Ghost Cat Anzu, Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, and Angel’s Egg, a 1985 art film directed by Ghost in the Shell’s Mamoru Oshii. 

HBO Max beefing up its library with GKIDS titles comes as no surprise. The respected licensor now owned by Japanese conglomerate Toho is already the North American steward of the streaming service’s beloved Studio Ghibili library. And like every other major streamer in 2025, HBO Max has an anime strategy — in its case, one that blends releasing original titles co-produced by its corporate cousins at Warner Bros. Animation, like The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, with buzzy licensing plays like this one. And this slate of titles from the so-called “A24 of animation” is prestige-coded and mostly geared toward mature viewers; it tracks with WBD CEO David Zaslav’s retreat from children’s entertainment. The streamer’s licensing relationship with GKIDS (the name notwithstanding) is safe, at least until the company splits up again in mid-2026.

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