As part of its three-hour presentation on Wednesday afternoon to promote next week’s Paramount+ launch, executives from ViacomCBS touted some ambitious TV plans for their re-branded CBS All Access service.
Around 30,000 episodes of television are expected to be included at launch with 36 original series to air within the first year. Those include new seasons of existing CBS All Access series like “The Good Fight,” “Star Trek: Picard” and “Star Trek: Discovery,” but also a bunch of new titles – some of which we covered in articles earlier today.
Along with confirming the already reported on “Frasier” revival will be going to series, they announced a Liev Schreiber-led revival of Showtime’s “Ray Donovan” is on the way. Specifically, it will be a one-off movie that will bring proper closure to the drama following the show’s surprise and abrupt cancellation last year after seven seasons.
Revivals are all the rage with the service with sketch comedy series “Inside Amy Schumer” combing back, while the original “The Real World” cast will reunite for a multi-episode docu-series, and the original cast of “Rugrats” will reprise their roles for a CG-animated revival of that show (trailer below).
Classic MTV and VH1 reality competition and docuseries including “Road Rules,” “Unplugged,” “Behind the Music,” “Yo! MTV Raps,” “The Challenge,” “Dating Naked” and “Ink Master” are also all scoring revivals for the streamer.
Paramount+ is also developing live-action series versions of “Dora the Explorer” and “The Fairly OddParents” as part of its kids and family programming. The ‘Dora’ series will be “in the vein of” the 2019 live-action film.
“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” will move from VH1 to Paramount+ for its upcoming sixth season, while another drag competition series focused on singing will be produced and titled “Queen of the Universe”.
For Dave Grohl fans, the streamer has ordered a new series from the Foo Fighters frontman titled “From Cradle to Stage”. There’s also a new weekly show from “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, a streaming version of “60 Minutes,” the seventh and final season of “Younger”.
One show that won’t quite make the jump is the Jordan Peele-produced “The Twilight Zone” reboot which has been officially cancelled after two seasons. Those two seasons will remain on the platform though.
ViacomCBS will offer Paramount+ at two different price points with the cheaper coming in June. The $5 ad-supported tier will boast live NFL games, CBSN and thousands of on-demand original and library titles. The $10 ad-free tier also includes more live sports, live local news and live CBS network programming.
Paramount+ launches on March 4th in the U.S., Canada and Latin America followed by a March 25th launch across the Scandinavia region. Later in the year, it will hit Australia and replace the existing ’10 All Access’ app. Unlike with HBO Max, the service is expected to be available on all platforms including Apple, Amazon, Google and Roku devices at launch.
Source: Paramount+
