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While still knee-deep in Christmas special season, one holiday tradition remains: year-end concerts and New Year’s Eve marathons. Unless you’re bold enough to run an actual marathon, many families will be spending the New Year firmly planted on the couch, squeezing every ounce out of their vacation days, providing networks ample incentive for robust programming blocks.
New Year’s Eve was a time for bingeing pop culture content even before bingeing became the cultural norm. The tradition remains, with near limitless TV and movie choices across the dial. New Year’s programming is split between TV/movie marathons, and branded concerts celebrating the New Year. Like Halloween and Christmas, networks rely on annual traditions for the New Year as a springboard to market the new shows of 2015.
ABC, NBC and FOX each offer a concert-party-countdown to the New Year. 40 years since it moved to ABC, Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest “is an institution… [that has] become synonymous with the holiday,” according to Marla Provencio, ABC Entertainment Group’s CMO and EVP of marketing.
Kicking off at 8 p.m. ET/PT on New Year’s Eve, Taylor Swift headlines the 5 1/2 hour music event in Times Square, joined by Idina Menzel (performing you know what), Billy Joel and Elton John. The broadcast will be split between three cities, with Gavin DeGraw and Lady Antebellum representing Nashville, and Fergie hosting the Billboard Hollywood Party, with performances by One Direction and Charli XCX. ABC will be live-tweeting all night long (#RockinEve).
NYRE is the oldest running and biggest New Year’s Eve event. And it’s still growing: last year NYRE was up 3 percent from the prior year, drawing its biggest audience since 2000. Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve – Part 1 outdelivered the combined audiences of NBC’s New Year’s Eve with Carson Daly and Fox’s New Year’s Eve Live by 64 percent in total viewers and 45 percent in adults 18-49.
ABC uses NYRE “to celebrate our favorite stars and series by previewing what’s coming up in the New Year. NYRE is traditionally a place where we roll out new or specialty creative in front of this massive audience and strategically serves as a launch pad for our upcoming programming.”
NBC counters with the 11th annual New Year’s Eve with Carson Daly. Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett are the headliners, joined by The Voice stars Blake Shelton, Pharrell Williams and Gwen Stefani. Fox hopes to start its own tradition by utilizing the talents of Mr. 305 in his hometown city of Miami with Pitbull’s New Year’s Revolution (#PitbullNYE), beginning at 8 p.m. ET/PT. Pitbull will be joined by Enrique Iglesias, Fall Out Boy and many of Pitbull’s frequent collaborators. MTV, BBC and ET Canada are also in on the fun.
On cable, the focus switches to TV and movie marathons. Selections vary year to year (most have yet to be announced), but whether you’re watching USA, VH1 or IFC: there will be marathons.
Perhaps none match Syfy’s longstanding tradition. 2014-2015 marks the 20th annual marathon of Rod Serling’s classic The Twilight Zone on Syfy. The event begins Dec. 31, running from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., continuing on Jan 1 from 6 a.m. to 6 a.m. the next day. AMC is fast cementing a tradition of their own, banking on its two biggest franchises: The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad. Starting Dec. 28 at 10 a.m. ET/PT, the first three seasons of Breaking Bad will air, continuing Dec. 29 at 9 a.m. ET/PT. The marathon offers new viewers another chance to get addicted and fans the opportunity to fend off withdrawal in advance of the Bad spin-off prequel Better Call Saul, premiering Feb. 8. Rest will be hard to come by during the holiday, but zombies don’t sleep: the first three seasons of The Walking Dead will be screened Dec. 30 and Dec. 31 from 9 a.m. to 6 a.m.
New Year’s is a time for resolutions, college football, and the promise of change, but television is a needed constant, comfort food as the calendar turns over. Though the spectacle is larger, the formula for Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve has remained the same since 1973, while others watch the same shows over and over again, re-entering… The Twilight Zone.
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