The George R. R. Martin–edited series “Wild Cards” is getting a TV adaptation. The show is being developed by Universal Cable Productions, responsible for Mr. Robot and 12 Monkeys. Martin will not be involved due to fealty to HBO’s Game of Thrones and the pressure he’s under to finish Winds of Winter, the final installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. Martin writes that assistant editor Melinda Snodgrass and producer Gregory Noveck, who will be working on the TV version, “know and love the Wild Cards universe almost as well as I do.”
At Recode, Edmund Lee writes that NBC’s decision to “stream more than 4,500 hours of competition” isn’t as great as it sounds. Lee calls sports like women’s fencing “mystifying” without Bob Costas’s on-air commentary: “It was a single-camera longshot of two people in masks pointing and screaming. . . . bizarre to watch and unsatisfying.”
The Chicago Tribune congratulated Olympian Corey Cogdell on her bronze medal in women’s trap shooting with the headline “Corey Cogdell, wife of Bears lineman Mitch Unrein, wins bronze in Rio.”
At The Daily Beast, television news producer Shelley Ross recounts a story of sexual harassment at the hands of former Fox News president Roger Ailes. While a producer at NBC’s The Tomorrow Show, Ailes invited Ross to lunch. “Roger was very persistent as he continued to explain how much he believed in loyalty and how much he believed the best expression of that loyalty comes in the form of a ‘sexual alliance.’” At The XX, Nora Caplan-Bricker attempts to explain why lawyer Susan Estrich, “who helped make the case, in the early 1990s, that sexual harassment was a serious problem,” has joined Ailes’s defense team: “No one gets a fair trial in the court of public opinion, and even the guilty deserve a good attorney.”
The New York Times has released the test version of “Watching,” a site for film and television recommendations. “For instance,” NiemanLab explains, “if you choose “Joke-Heavy” and then genre “Comedy,” skipping out on subgenres, you get 68 recommendations … (If you want a joke-heavy drama, Watching recommends only The Bob Newhart Show, which one presumes is a bug.)” Although the beta version is closed to the general public, select subscribers have early access, and there’s a waitlist for those who want in.