John Krasinski has put a bunch of smiles on people’s faces recently with “Some Good News,” a feel-good YouTube series he created during the pandemic which basically sees him in his house in front of a webcam in an effort to cheer up people in quarantine.
Following a massive bidding war, the series has been licensed to ViacomCBS in a rich deal which will see it moving to CBS All Access for its first window. Krasinski will continue to be involved as an executive producer, but he will not host the new episodes. Other shortform content that will live within the ViacomCBS fold will also be produced.
Krasinski self-financed and self-produced the eight weekly SGN episodes and “initially resisted” the urge to sell the series and continue his original plan to make SGN for the free and wide audience that YouTube provided. In two months, the Some Good News YouTube channel has collected 2.56 million subscribers, with episodes ranging in views of as many as 17 million.
With the ViacomCBS deal, the second window across linear networks will still allow a wide audience. Understandably though, there’s been a social media backlash against Krasinski and CBS – turning what appeared to be a charitable gesture into a purely capitalist endeavour, shoving it behind a paywall and pulling away its one real point of difference – Krasinski as host.
Source: The Live Feed
