After 8 years, Cartoon Network ends its Friday night block, Fridays. The block originally began as Cartoon Cartoon Fridays in June 1999, becoming Summer Fridays in May 2003 before being known simply as Fridays in late September of the same year.
March
Date
Event
1
NBC Universal launches Chiller, the first US cable/satellite channel devoted to horror programming.
MSNBC announces its simulcast of radio's Imus in the Morning would be canceled, effective immediately, after public outcry against host Don Imus' derogatory remarks about the Rutgers University women's basketball team. Imus' relationship with his show's radio distributor, CBS Radio, would be terminated later in the spring over the same incident.
May
Date
Event
1
A headend, owned by Comcast, accidentally replaces an episode of Handy Manny on the Disney Channel with footage of graphic pornography for viewers in Lincroft, New Jersey. The incident is reported to Comcast, which investigates, but no findings are announced to the public.
5
For the first time in 5 years, WNBC, NBC's New York flagship station, revives the "We're 4 New York" campaign after they return for a brief time during 2002 Winter Olympics. The song promos was stopped after the 2008 Summer Olympics in 2008 in the wake of the "Lend America" incident.
ABC's New York flagship station, WABC-TV, is knocked off the air due to a newsroom studio fire that happened minutes before its scheduled 11:00 p.m. newscast. The station briefly returned to carry an ABC West Coast flagship feed and a rebroadcast of ABC World News.
83 year-old Bob Barker hosts The Price Is Right for the 6,727th and last time, ending his 35-year tenure on the show and a 50-year run on television. (His last ever Pricing Game was his first: Any Number.) CBS airs Barker's final episode in both its regular daytime slot and in prime time (the latter airing as a lead-in to the 34th Daytime Emmy Awards, at which two of the network's soap operas, Guiding Light and The Young and the Restless, share honors for Outstanding Drama Series).
24
Professional wrestler Chris Benoit murders his wife Nancy and son Daniel before taking his own life by hanging himself. WWE cancels Raw the following night and is replaced with a tribute to Benoit.
25
WWE replaces that day's scheduled Raw episode with a 3-hour tribute to Chris Benoit who murdered his wife and son the night before and hung himself.
In an on-air protest over trivial journalism (specifically MSNBC producers ranking Paris Hilton's release from jail ahead of developments in the Iraq War), newsreader Mika Brzezinski attempts to set fire to a news script, tears up a second, and shreds a third.
During installation of a new satellite receiver in Illinois, the Emergency Alert System is accidentally activated at 7:35 AM CDT. An Emergency Action Notification is issued for the United States, followed by dead air. This was played on almost every television and radio station in the Chicago area and throughout large portions of the state. The signal then switched to WGN radio. Garry Meier, then the announcer for WCKG, comes on the air, not knowing what has happened.
July
Date
Event
6
Cartoon Network announces its new Friday night block, Fried Dynamite.
On the premiere episode of the CBS game show Power of 10, contestant Jamie Sadler wins $1,000,000. This was the first time that a contestant won $1,000,000 or more on the first episode of an American game show.
17
The Disney Channel's premiere showing of High School Musical 2 becomes the most-watched made-for-cable movie ever, drawing in 17.24 million viewers. A preview episode of Phineas and Ferb premieres afterwards.
30
The Big Ten Network formally launches, but its debut is marred by its failure to reach carriage agreements with Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Charter Cable, and several other smaller providers serving the conference's geographical footprint. The dispute goes unsolved for nearly a year, causing millions of fans to miss several games seen in previous years via local syndication, public broadcasting stations connected to universities, and ESPN's family of networks.
The soap opera Passions airs for the final time on NBC, only to resurface on September 17 as an exclusive presentation of DirecTV's 101 Network. The cancellation leaves Days of Our Lives as the last remaining soap opera on NBC.
8
The original Live at Five aired its final news broadcast on WNBC after 25 years it was renamed.
10
Noggin, which was initially co-founded by Sesame Workshop and Nickelodeon, ends its relationship with Sesame Workshop. Play With Me Sesame, its last remaining co-produced original preschool series, already left the channel on September 2 as Nickelodeon lost the rights to air it.
Nick Jr. received yet another rebrand. The block's bumpers encouraged preschoolers to "Play With Us" and featured the Nick Jr. logo in the form of two stuffed animals animated in stop-motion.
TBS becomes exclusively a national cable network after WTBS, the Atlanta, Georgia "superstation" from which it was born, becomes an Atlanta-only TV station as WPCH-TV (Peachtree TV).
The Writers Guild of America commences a strike against television and movie production studios; the strike lasts until February 2008, but not before production on TV shows are halted and networks' schedules are severely disrupted.
Firebrand, a nightly television program broadcast television advertising from around the world, debuts on Ion Television.
December
Date
Event
3
ESPN's Monday Night Football telecast of the unbeaten New England Patriots and the Baltimore Ravens draws 17.52 million viewers, breaking the basic cable viewership record set earlier in the year by sister network Disney Channel's High School Musical 2.
Ashlee Register wins the $1,720,000 jackpot, along with a banked total of $75,000, for a grand total of $1,795,000 on the ABC game show Duel. She becomes the second female contestant to win $1,000,000 or more on a game show and sets the record for the highest amount of money won on a game show by a woman.
29
After weeks of political pressure (and, to a lesser extent, acknowledging the limited reach of the NFL Network), the National Football League allows that network's broadcast of the game between the New England Patriots and New York Giants to be simulcast nationally on league broadcast partners CBS and NBC. The Patriots would win the game to become the first team in NFL history to go undefeated in a 16-game regular season. (The teams would meet again later in Super Bowl XLII, where the Giants won the NFL title and prevented the Pats from going 19–0.)
31
Nick GAS leaves the air (although it stays on Dish Network until April 23, 2009, when it is replaced by the west coast feed of Cartoon Network) and is replaced by a 24-hour version of Noggin's teen-targeted block, "The N."
Created as a merger of KET3 and KET4, KET ED provides instructional television programming tailor-made for schools and libraries, operating with the same duties as the service's predecessors KET Star Channels 703 and 704.
