Too Much TV: CBS Announces Its New Fall Primetime Schedule

Here’s everything you need to know about the world of television for Wednesday, April 15th, 2026:

A CONVERSATION WITH REELGOOD CEO DAVID SANDERSON
If you are familiar with Reelgood, it's likely because of its app and web site which allows consumers to enter all of the streaming services they subscribe to and then navigate a catalog of combined titles. Which allows you to search for a title and know precisely where you can watch it.

As you might imagine, it requires a lot of data to make a service like that work, and as a result Reelgood also has a growing streaming metadata offering that it licences to nearly all of the major (and minor) streaming services. The live TV streaming service Philo just announced a metadata deal with Reelgood and that was the impetus for my conversation Tuesday with CEO David Sanderson. 

But the conversation touched on a number of related topics, including a history of the company, the challenges of putting together an accurate set of metadata and how even deals such as Tubi's ChatGPT integration relies on data provided by ReelGood. It was a fascinating look at how metadata impacts everything from content discovery to decisions by streamers on what titles to license and when.

Here is a bit of the conversation and you can read the full-length interview here:

I spoke with someone recently at Fox, and their ad-supported streamer Tubi is the first streamer to have an app inside ChatGPT that allows viewers to find movies or shows to watch by using conversational phrases. Is that competition for you or do you see that as a complimentary offering?

David Sanderson: Fox and Tubi have been some of our oldest customers. And I think they're awesome flagship customers for us, because what they do with our data is very cool.

So that feature is coming out of the chat experience. But the base layer you need for that to work is again, accurate data. You need to have rich taxonomy for that data, things that describe, "is it about a coming-of-age story?"

It is about having detailed descriptions for that piece of data, accurate data about the synopsis, accurate cast and crew information, all of that stuff. That is the foundational layer to these type of experiences.

I guess if someone had unlimited money to throw at you, you could put together data for them that would allow their subscribers to parse the content however they wanted to parse it, or within reason, anyway.

David Sanderson: Yeah, that's exactly how it works. We give them the raw ingredients of the whole full data set, every show and movie and all the metadata you could ever need about it in a very clean package. And then you can go and build these types of experiences.

And we'll also be working for some of the big name AI companies. We'll be announcing one coming up in a bit. But they rely on this data because even those companies can't get this type of data.

There was one example we always talk about internally. It was some movie about Las Vegas. And when you asked one of the LLMs what the film was about, you were told something like "Oh, everyone is going to have a wild time in Las Vegas."

But actually, the movie was about the shooting that happened in Las Vegas. So that's a good example. You need accurate data behind it.

And the other thing is, with AI or chat experiences, if you want to know where a piece of content is available, a lot of their data is compiled from crawling the web. And they'll crawl a bunch of articles that say "Hey, this film is on Hulu."

But sites don't write a follow-up article that says "This film is now off Hulu.," And that can create incorrect data that the LLMs are presenting. We just did a study on this topic and found that when you use a standard issue LLM for questions like this, about half the time they're presenting incorrect data. 

MORE CYNICAL BULLSHIT FROM DAVE CHAPPELLE
I have written a lot about Dave Chappelle in recent years, most recently about my unhappiness with the imaginary history that underlied his last Netflix special.

I was going to write about Chappelle's new interview with NPR, which is a flaming pile of hypocritic rationalization. But Seth Simons does a much better job of it in his Humorism newsletter, which is a must-read for comedy fans:

NPR: Interesting. So in a way, you’re saying, “I’m a comedian, everybody knows that I’m a comedian, so if you don’t like my humor, don’t buy a ticket.”

Chappelle: Reading a joke is a lot different than sitting in a room and hearing it. And part of the sitting in the room part, part of the reason comedy works is because everyone that bought a ticket, clearly they want it to work. They want to have a good time, they want to have fun. But if you’re a person that is very angry or passionate about something and you’re afraid that you’re gonna be misrepresented or misconstrued, and you feel like you have to police comedy to get your point across, you should assess your point. 

For any of this to make sense, one would have to believe that Dave Chappelle does not know his comedy specials are available on the global streaming platform he releases them on, for the express purpose of making them available to people who cannot attend his live shows. And for any of his complaints about the GOP weaponizing his jokes to make sense, one would have to believe he sees comedy as a means of telling brave, important truths about the world that simply don’t matter enough for people to internalize or act on them.

This is a strange attitude coming from someone who doesn't allow phones in his live performances and who has threatened to sue reporters who quote parts of his live act because it's copyrighted. He essentially wants his comedy to not have any meaning outside the stage. Except when he allows it to be used for his purposes. And despite billing himself as "Unstoppable," he certainly seems concerned with being stopped.

ODDS AND SODS
* Hollywood is embracing content creators in a shaky bid to win back Gen Z viewership. This is one reason why you are seeing events with no TV critics but plenty of "tastemakers" in attendance.

* If you are a music fan, you might have heard about an incredible 10,000 live concert archive of performances from the Chicago-area in the mid-1980s through the 1990s. The newsletter The Wax Museum has a look at ten concerts to start with, which include early Nirvana, Tracy Chapman, Sonic Youth, Guided By Voices and much more. I lived in Chicago back then and went to tons of shows at these small clubs like Schubas and Lounge Ax. It brings back a lot of memories and it's a reminder than I wish my proposal to put together a "Nuggets" like record series based on the Chicago scene hadn't fallen apart back in the day.

* NBC will air the pilot of the Peacock drama series M.I.A. for a special telecast on Thursday, May 14th, a week before the show receives its streaming premiere.


CBS UNVEILED ITS 2026-2027 PRIMETIME SCHEDULE
Earlier today, unveiled its 2026-2027 fall primetime programming lineup. 

Here is the new schedule:

• Mondays – FBI and CIA moves up an hour to 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, respectively, followed by season two of Harlan Coben's Final Twist at 10:00 PM.

• Tuesdays – It's an all-NCIS night with NCIS, the new NCIS: New York and NCIS: Origins.

• Wednesdays – It's 90-minute episodes of Survivor at 8:00 PM followed by The Amazing Race at 9:30 PM.

• Thursdays – Two new shows join the night. Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage airs at 8:00 PM followed by new comedy Eternally Yours at 8:30 PM, then Elsbeth at 9:00 PM in a new time period and new series Cupertino at 10:00 PM.

• Fridays – It's Jerry Bruckheimer Television‑produced dramas night with Sheriff Country at 8:00 PM, Fire Country at 9:00 PM and Boston Blue at 10:00 PM.

• Sundays – It's whatever 60 Minutes will look like at 7:00 PM, Marshals at 8:00 PM, Tracker at 9:00 PM and drama encores at 10:00 PM during the fall.

New seasons of Ghost, NCIS Sydney and Matlock will be premiering midseason, along with the new series Einstein. This new series features the great-grandson of Albert Einstein teaming up with a detective solve crimes. Which is certainly quite a premise.

WHAT'S COMING TONIGHT AND TOMORROW