TMZ.com to start TV show

10 September, 2007:

The popular online entertainment website TMZ.com is starting a television show titled TMZ from September 10, 2007.

In doing so, TMZ.com will join the crowded field of entertainment news magazines and will also test the limits of television audience’s fascination with celebrity.

The new venture by TMZ.com may well be considered as an attempt to turn its huge success online into a gainful television commodity.

TMZ.com essentially provides an inside look at the latest celebrity scandals. It was TMZ.com that broke the news of the arrest of Mel Gibson for driving under the influence (DUI) as well as a lot of other celebrity tidbits.

According to Harvey Levin, managing editor of TMZ.com and host and executive producer of the syndicated series, he is just preoccupied with getting TMZ going. "We’ve been running test shows for a month now and I just want to put the show on the air," he says.

TMZ, which will be carried on stations owned by Fox as well as on a mix of other network outlets, is to air as a half-hour show on weekdays (mostly within the 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. window) and in an hour-long version on the weekend.

When TMZ.com was launched in November 2005 as a joint venture of Telepictures Productions and AOL of Time Warner Incorporated, it was with the intent of eventually translating it to TV, according to Hilary Estey McLoughlin, president of Telepictures.

According to comScore Media Metrix, TMZ.com is the leading celebrity-news website, with 120 million-plus monthly page views and over 9 million visitors.

The competition for TMZ includes Entertainment Tonight (now running for 26 years), along with The Insider, Access Hollywood and, Extra, from Telepictures.

Celebrity Expose, an hour-long weekly program profiling one star at a time, starting with Lindsay Lohan, will debut on October 1, 2007, on MyNetworkTV.

Humor will be part of the mix of TMZ because TMZ.com has demonstrated that people enjoy seeing Hollywood covered with irreverence, Harvey Levin said.