Steinberg Joins Sony TV as Talent Veep
Dawn Steinberg has been named senior vice president of talent and casting at Sony Pictures Television, according to President of Programming and Production Russ Krasnoff. Steinberg was formerly with NBC Studios, where she was a casting consultant on such shows as the upcoming Las Vegas and Happy Family as well as Boomtown, which is entering its second season.
Kaufman Now Has Street Smarts
Carla Kaufman has been promoted to executive producer on Warner Bros.' Street Smarts, which is going into its fourth season in syndication. She started as the show's supervising producer and became co-executive producer in its second season. Prior to her work on Street Smarts, Kaufman wrote for Comedy Central's Win Ben Stein's Money. She has also been a writer and producer on A Current Affair, The Newlywed Game
and The Dating Game.
Slow Start for Two Slow Rollouts
Syndication's two newest entries, Twentieth Television's Classmates
and Ambush Makeover, kicked off the first two days of their slow rollouts last week with less than impressive numbers, according to Nielsen weighted metered-market averages.
Classmates
earned a 2.2 rating/5 share on 25 Fox owned-and-operated stations. Based on a Web site that helps old chums reunite, it is cleared mostly in daytime but also in some early-fringe, pre-access and late-fringe slots. It was down 27% from its lead-in average and off 12% from its year-ago time-period average. Ambush Makeover, in which folks are plucked off the street and agree to an immediate re-do, also underperformed both its lead-in and July '02 time-period average, with a 1.7/5 for the two days on 19 Fox O&Os, with primarily daytime clearances. That represented a 23% decline from the show's average lead-in and a 29% drop from year-ago time periods.
Twentieth is happy with Classmates' performance in Austin, Texas; Milwaukee; and St. Louis, where it won its time periods. Ambush Makeover
was No. 1 in only one market, Cleveland, but No. 2 in five other: Phoenix; St. Louis; Birmingham, Ala.; Greensboro, N.C.; and Austin, Texas.
