It’s the top of an E-ra. After greater than three many years, E! is ending its flagship present, E! Information. Plus, the community has lengthy since stopped Retaining Up With the Kardashians. So what’s subsequent for cable TV’s pop-culture vacation spot?
Followers discovered final week that E! Information, launched in 1991, will finish on September 25, although the information operation will proceed as a digital model on platforms just like the E! On-line web site.
E! beforehand referred to as a halt to the nightly entertainment-news program in 2020 amid Covid-19 lockdowns. The present returned in 2022 and shifted from daytime to late evening. However upon the present’s cancellation final week, its workers was knowledgeable that audiences most well-liked to devour leisure information all through the day on social media — the place E! has 87 million followers — as an alternative of at evening on tv — the place Keltie Knight and Justin Sylvester, pictured under, host the present’s present iteration — in line with the Los Angeles Occasions.
E! Information’ cancellation comes amid a company breakup, as NBCUniversal spins off E! and different cable channels — together with USA Community, Syfy, and MSNBC — into a brand new firm referred to as Versant. NBC, Bravo, and Peacock, in the meantime, will stay with NBCUniversal. And whereas about 20 folks will probably be out of a job at E! Information, in line with the Occasions, some correspondents are anticipated to get new roles at Versant, Selection studies.
Brandon Hickman/E! Leisure
However the finish of E! Information isn’t essentially the top of E! The channel nonetheless boasts unique programming like Botched Presents: Plastic Surgical procedure Rewind and Actually Cavallari: The Headline Tour, and the upcoming reveals Kimora: Again within the Fab Lane and E!’s Soiled Rotten Scandals. E! will proceed to air Reside From E! crimson carpet protection, and the thirty first Critics Alternative Awards are slated to air on E! on January 4, 2026. The Folks’s Alternative Awards has aired on E! recently, and it’s attainable Botched will return with new episodes quickly.
E! additionally ended 2024 because the sixtieth most-watched community, with 158K complete viewers, forward of channels like Nickelodeon, CNBC, Disney Channel, and OWN, as Selection reported. Within the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, the channel ranked forty first, with 54K viewers. These numbers are down from 2014, when E! was getting 550k complete viewers and 320k complete viewers. However different linear TV channels have suffered comparable viewers declines with the rise of streaming. In the identical time-frame — 2014 to 2024 — FX misplaced 71 p.c of its attain, USA misplaced 63 p.c, and TBS misplaced 58 p.c, in line with Nielsen and MoffettNathanson information cited in TripleLift’s 100 Years of Tv report.
Plus, E! has had success with its Reside red-carpet programming just lately. In 2024, Reside From E! averaged 735K viewers throughout its Oscars, Grammys, Emmys, and Folks’s Alternative Awards protection, up 30 p.c over the 12 months prior, in line with Deadline. Plus, Reside From E! ’s 2024 Grammys Award telecast was its most-watched Grammys present in seven years and the most-watched E! telecast in almost 4 years, and each the pre-show and the post-show protection grew for the third consecutive 12 months. That excellent news got here after Reside From E! loved its most-watched Oscar programming within the 18-to-49 demo since 2020 and a tripling of its Folks’s Alternative Award viewers.
So there’s no want to write down E!’s obituary simply but: For now, the community will nonetheless air actuality reveals, docuseries, and its fashionable crimson carpet protection. However possibly former E! Information host Lilliana Vazquez is correct to say the community simply wants extra of that reside, hot-take vitality.