The following is a list of events affecting American television in 2022. Events listed include television show debuts, finales and cancellations; channel launches, closures, and re-brandings; stations changing or adding their network affiliations; and information about controversies and carriage disputes.
Future events
January
Date
Event
Source
9
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) plans to hold the 79th Golden Globe Awards, despite a boycott by various media organizations, actors, and other creatives over the HFPA's inadequate efforts to address the membership diversity of the organization. In support of the boycott, NBC, which owns its broadcast rights, has declined to televise the ceremony.
The 2022 Winter Olympics will take place in Beijing, China, airing on NBC and its cable networks in the United States. The event will mark the first time that NBC has broadcast the Olympics in back-to-back years, having aired the 2020 Summer Olympics less than seven months prior due to the COVID-19 pandemic delaying the event from its original July 2020 start date. (The Summer and Winter Olympics—for which NBC assumed exclusive broadcast rights in 1988 and 2002, respectively—have typically alternated every two years within each four-year interval since 1994, and occurred in the same calendar year during each interval from 1924 to 1992, outside of World War II-prompted cancellations.)
Super Bowl LVI will be played at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California and will air on NBC. The game—which will be the first Super Bowl to take place on a calendar date falling within the scheduled date range of an ongoing Olympics event—was originally going to be aired on CBS, but it was traded to NBC (under an agreement reached in March 2019) so that it could be paired with the Winter Olympics to avoid potential dilution of viewership and advertising revenue for the two events. The switch also affects the NFL Honors, which will take place on February 10 and broadcast on ABC and ESPN.
The 27th Critics' Choice Awards will air simultaneously on both TBS and The CW (the latter network is a joint venture between ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia, thus the ability to simulcast with TBS, which was announced on October 26, 2021). It was postponed from its intended January 9 date on December 22, 2021.
Trinity Broadcasting Network will change the name of their joint venture network with Hillsong Church at the beginning of the year, a change announced in mid-November 2021, as the American Hillsong Church and Australian mother church have come under controversies involving their personnel, past and present, including the issues of former American church leader Carl Lentz's infidelity and allegations of founder Frank Houston's sexual abuse of children coming to light. Hillsong will remain a part of the network and its main programmer.
Chip and Joanna Gaines of Fixer Upper fame announced in an interview on the November 9, 2018 edition of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon they were returning to the fold of the former Scripps Networks Interactive networks now owned by Discovery, Inc. to launch a new full-time network based on their Magnolia lifestyle brand after taking a year's hiatus to consider other offers outside of HGTV. The Gaines will have the minority stake in the network. The launch has since been oft-moved; Discovery announced on January 16, 2020, it would launch October 4 in the same year, but coronavirus-caused filming restrictions that would affect the network's debut lineup forced Discovery to delay the network's launch date indefinitely on April 21, 2020, with some programming launched as a part of Discovery+ starting on January 4, 2021, instead to build word-of-mouth for the linear network launch. More Magnolia Network content was placed on Discovery+ in mid-July of that year, with the transition of the wireline DIY Network to Magnolia Network occurring on January 5, 2022.
Paramount Network is expected to switch from a mix of movies, original unscripted programs, and off-network shows to an all-film channel (consisting of both new original productions and content from the Paramount Pictures library). The renamed Paramount Movie Network will continue to carry at least one scripted series or miniseries each quarter (among them, existing drama series Yellowstone, which will modify its episode format to meet the network's new focus). Along with discontinuing unscripted programming, certain Paramount Network original programs (such as Bar Rescue and Lip Sync Battle) will move to other ViacomCBS-owned cable channels. Expected to occur in 2021, there were no updates regarding the conversion, pushing the rebrand into 2022 by default.
On August 31, 2021, The Walt Disney Company (which acquired the streaming service through its 2019 acquisition of certain assets owned by 21st Century Fox) announced that the U.S. version of Hotstar—targeted domestically at mainly American-born and overseas Indians—would cease operations as a standalone platform by around late 2022. On the date of the announcement, Bollywood and South Asian films, television series and original specials featured in Hotstar's U.S. catalog (which will be rotated on and off at regular intervals) were added to Hulu, while the service's rights to Indian Premier League, ICC Men's T20 World Cup and BCCI-sanctioned cricket competitions were incorporated into ESPN+. Hotstar (alternately branded as Disney+ Hotstar in Asia) will continue to operate in parts of South Asia (specifically India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore), Canada and the United Kingdom.
On September 22, 2021, Gray Television announced it would convert Jewelry Television affiliate WLFM-LD (which operated as an LPFM maintaining alternative rock/AAA and, later, Latin music formats from September 2012 until it ceased analog transmissions in June 2020) into a Telemundo affiliate, adopting the callsign WTCL-LD, effective January 1, 2022. (Cleveland—which has two existing Spanish-language major network stations, Univision/UniMás O&O WQHS-DT and Azteca América affiliate WQDI-LD—had been one of the largest U.S. markets with a significant Hispanic/Latino population that did not have a local Telemundo station.) On the date of the Telemundo conversion, CBS-affiliated sister WOIO will also produce twice-nightly Monday–Friday newscasts for WTCL, becoming the first Spanish-language local news offering in the Cleveland market (WQHS and WQDI, respectively, have never offered in-house or outsourced local news programming since converting into Spanish stations).
