2005 in television

Events

• January 1 - The U.S. channel package "PT East", originally created by the New York, New York, company PrimeTime 24, and used by satellite TV viewers where over-the-air TV is unavailable, changes its ABC station from WKRN-TV (Nashville, Tennessee) to WABC-TV (New York, New York). - DirecTV drops the Trio channel from its lineup. The network loses two-thirds of its 20 million viewers, putting in doubt the future of the NBC Universal channel.
• January 5 - The 35th anniversary episode of All My Children airs on ABC. The special episode, which brought back former characters Mark Dalton (Mark LaMura) and Nick Davis (Larry Keith), was also unique in that it was the last appearance of ailing actress Ruth Warrick. She died less than two weeks after the episode aired.
• January 8 - CBS airs the first episode of The Will, a reality series. Ratings for the show are so low, it becomes one of only a handful of series in American TV history to be cancelled after only one episode. Later in 2005, FOX also cancels Who's Your Daddy, another realty series, after a single episode.
• February 2 - Paramount Television and UPN announce the cancellation of '. Soon after, fan efforts begin in order to save the show, climaxing in a campaign that raises more than $3 million (US) towards funding further production, an offer Paramount ultimately rejects.
• February 6 - American Dad! pilot episode aired on FOX.
• February 8 - Teachers' TV, run by the Department for Education and Skills, launched on Sky Digital (channel 686) and Freeview.
• February 19 - EastEnders celebrates its twentieth anniversary on the air, airing a special episode in which Dirty Den Watts is killed by his new wife Chrissie.
• February 23 - UKTV Style Gardens, a channel dedicated to gardening programmes, launched.
• February 26 - Sound TV, previously known as The Great British Television Channel, launched on Sky Digital (588).
• March 7 - ABC Australia launches its second TV station, available only to digital viewers, ABC2.
• March 9 - Dan Rather retires as head anchor of the CBS Evening News and is succeeded by Bob Schieffer.
• March 26 - Nine years after its last new episode and sixteen years since its last regular run, Doctor Who returns to BBC1 for a new season, the twenty-seventh in total since 1963. Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper star. An average 10.81 million viewers, over 40% of the watching audience, tune in, winning its timeslot and making it No. 3 BBC show and No. 7 across all channels for the week. Despite the show's rave reviews and additional ratings success in Canada, the BBC is unable to secure an American broadcaster for the series, with the Sci Fi Channel rejecting it.
• April 2 - Digital channel BBC Four broadcasts a live re-make of the famous 1953 science-fiction drama The Quatermass Experiment. The production is the first live drama broadcast by the BBC for over twenty years, and draws BBC Four's second highest audience to date, with an average of 482,000 viewers.
• April 5 - The North American premiere of the new Doctor Who series occurs on the CBC in Canada, the first channel outside of BBC One in the UK to air the new show.
• April 8 - 12.9 million viewers watched Ken Barlow tie the knot with Deirdre Rachid on Coronation Street, one day before Prince Charles's wedding to Camilla Parker Bowles (8.7 million viewers watched). The scheduling move echoed Ken and Deirdre's first marriage, which occurred two days before Charles's nuptials to Diana, Princess of Wales, and which also beat the Royal wedding in the television ratings (see 1981 in television).
• April 12 - Canadian LGBT channel PrideVision is rebranded as OUTtv.
• April 8 - Live broadcast of the funeral of Pope John Paul II.
• May 1 - Family Guy returns on FOX after three years off the schedule.
• May 2 - Hunter Tylo returns to The Bold and the Beautiful (arguably the most-watched television series in the world) after her character, Dr. Taylor Forrester, was "killed off" three years ago. The revelation that she was alive shocked many viewers and publications as it had not been hinted by any other sources, print or online.
• May 13 - The controversial final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise airs in the United States, bringing to a close an 18-year, uninterrupted run of four consecutive or concurrent Star Trek series dating back to 1987.
• June 25 - The Girl in the Café, a comedy-drama by Richard Curtis made as part of the global Make Poverty History campaign, is shown by both BBC One in the United Kingdom and HBO in the United States on the same day.
• June 30:
• LOGO, a TV channel aimed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults, is launched in the United States.
• MTV Canada and MTV2 cease to broadcast in Canada; owner CHUM Limited rebrands them as Razer and PunchMuch.
• July 1 - The PAX network rebrands itself as i.
• July 17 - After forty-one years broadcasting on BBC One, music show Top of the Pops is switched to the less mainstream BBC Two channel due to declining audiences.
• August 1 - Current TV, a 24-hour youth-oriented news channel owned by the former U.S. vice president Al Gore, is launched.
• August 7 - Peter Jennings of ABC's World News Tonight dies, ending the era of the three U.S. network head anchors since the mid-1980s.
• August 29 and after - Hurricane Katrina strikes the Greater New Orleans area, causing major disruption of the region's television broadcasts. Local television news programs relocate to other cities in order to cover the story, though most are knocked off the air by the storm; some continue to broadcast reports over the Internet.
• September 2 - While presenting on the NBC Concert for Hurricane Relief, music producer and rapper Kanye West strayed from his script and addressed what he perceived as the racism of both the government and of the media, stating: "George Bush doesn't care about black people", and called for the media to stop labelling African-American families as "looters" while white families were depicted as "looking for food".
• September 8 - Faze TV, a British digital channel aimed at gay men, cancels its launch after failing to secure sufficient funding to deliver "sufficient quality." http://www.media247.co.uk/skydigital/news.php
• September 18 - The 57th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards were handed out at the Shrine Auditorium on CBS.
• September 26 & 27 - No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's documentary on Bob Dylan, receives its broadcast premiere on BBC Two in the UK, under the Arena banner.
• September - ITV celebrates its 50th anniversary with a collection of special programmmes, under the name ITV50.