Rams defensive end Kobie Turner, a 294-pound man strong enough to carry a piano on his back, can also tap out a tune.
The country saw that Sunday night when, on two occasions, NBC aired video footage of Turner expertly playing a complex version of the “Sunday Night Football” theme song. He learned it by ear, then set up his phone to capture the clip.
The song was written by legendary composer John Williams and originally was called “Wide Receiver,” although NBC never adopted that name.
“He listened to it a couple of times and was able to play it and add his own flair,” NBC coordinating producer Rob Hyland said of Turner, who majored in music theory and composition at University of Richmond.
“I was completely blown away. Kobie has so much talent on the football field and just as much with musical instruments. His nickname, `The Conductor,’ is very fitting.”
Turner had two sacks in the 34-7 trouncing of Tampa Bay. He was instrumental in the Rams assembling their best defensive performance of the year, giving up 70 yards passing and 193 total.
The idea to show Turner’s musical talents was hatched earlier this year, and for “Thursday Night Football” on Amazon Prime. There’s a lot of crossover between those two production crews.
Reid Esocoff, whose father, Drew, directs the Sunday night show, pitched the idea to Prime to have Turner play that song for the Oct. 2 game against San Francisco. The segment got the green light, and Amazon sent the Rams star the sheet music.
“It was like five minutes long,” Turner recalled. “I was like, OK, I’m going to have to rearrange this. There’s like trumpets and strings, and I’m like, ‘I’m only doing piano.’”
Turner did his part, but the video wound up on the cutting-room floor.
Enter NBC, which made the same ask and ensured the Rams it would air the video. This time, Turner didn’t want the sheet music, just a recording of the familiar theme song.
“I picked it up by ear and I rearranged it too,” he said, “Because it was another three-minute-long song.’ I was like, how can I emulate this with just the keys and me in a solo take? It was a lot of fun.”
He nailed it, and the video ran twice, when NBC was going to a commercial and after Turner made a big play.
“Anytime I can learn something new, and anytime I can flex the music muscle it’s a lot of fun,” he said.
After playing the song — on his first take, mind you — Turner paused, then popped up and did a strongman flex in triumph.
Subscribers of sports streaming service Fubo TV have lost access to channels owned by NBCUniversal in the latest TV distribution dust-up.
Fubo blasted NBCUniversal for its stance during collapsed contract negotiations, resulting in a blackout of NBCUniversal channels just days before Thanksgiving when scores of viewers hunker down for turkey and football. NBC is set to broadcast the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the National Dog Show and Thursday night’s NFL game featuring the Cincinnati Bengals battling the Baltimore Ravens. The events also will stream on Peacock.
The blackout, which also includes Bravo, CNBC and Spanish-language Telemundo, affects Fubo’s nearly 1.6 million customers.
The dispute comes a month after NBCUniversal’s rival, Walt Disney Co., acquired the controlling stake of Fubo and folded the smaller sports-centric offering into Disney’s Hulu + Live TV. (Hulu + subscribers still have NBCUniversal channels available because they are covered by a separate distribution contract.)
Fubo customers could also miss NBC’s broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
(Eduardo Munoz Avarez / Associated Press)
In its Tuesday statement, Fubo alleged that NBCUniversal had refused to give Fubo leeway to offer just a few of its channels — rather than its entire portfolio. Fubo is looking to control costs and designed its product to be a slimmed-down version of a bulky bundle — but one with a heavy complement of sports networks.
Fubo also took issue with NBCUniversal negotiating on behalf of the cable channels that NBCUniversal plans to cast off in January as part of a corporate split.
Legacy cable channels including MS Now (formerly MSNBC), Syfy, CNBC, USA Network and Golf Channel will be form the new publicly traded company, Versant.
“Fubo offered to distribute Versant channels for one year,” Fubo said in its statement, adding that it views most of those networks as “not being worth the cost.”
“NBCU wants Fubo to sign a multi-year deal – well past the time the Versant channels will be owned by a separate company,” Fubo said. “NBCU wants Fubo subscribers to subsidize these channels.”
NBCUniversal, owned by cable and broadband giant Comcast, countered that it had offered Fubo similar terms to those contained in deals struck with other pay-TV distributors — but Fubo balked.
“Unfortunately, this is par for the course for Fubo,” NBCUniversal said. “They’ve dropped numerous networks in recent years at the expense of their customers, who continue to lose content.”
The two companies also tussled over YouTube TV’s desire to offer the ESPN streaming app to its customers at no extra cost.
They reached a compromise, and YouTube came away with authorization to provide some ESPN streaming content.
In September, YouTube TV avoided a similar blackout of NBC channels by making a deal just hours before the deadline.
Disney acquired 70% of Fubo TV in October 2025.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Fubo pointed to NBCUniversal’s recent deals with YouTube TV and Amazon Prime Video, which allows those companies to offer NBC’s streaming app Peacock as part of their channel stores. Fubo alleged that NBC refused to give Fubo the same rights.
“Fubo is committed to bringing its subscribers a premium, competitively-priced live TV streaming experience with the content they love,” Fubo said. “That includes multiple content options, including a sports-focused service, that can be accessed directly from the Fubo app. We hope NBCU reconsiders their stance, or we’ll be forced to move forward without them.”
The deal announced Wednesday by the league will also return baseball to NBC and bring three MLB events — an opening night game, the Home Run Derby and the Field of Dreams game — to Netflix for the first time.
As part of the deal, ESPN will integrate the league’s streaming platform MLB.TV into its recently launched direct-to-consumer service that provides the sports channels to consumers with or without a cable subscription.
MLB.TV provides local telecasts of out-of-market games to consumers. In the 2026 season, new customers will now be able to purchase the service as part of an ESPN subscription. Pricing has not yet been set for the combined services.
ESPN Unlimited subscribers will get an additional 150 out-of-market games over the course of the season at no additional cost. ESPN will offer local games in the six MLB markets that no longer have regional sports networks — San Diego, Cleveland, Seattle, Minnesota, Arizona and Colorado. The games, which are produced by MLB, will be available to purchase for streaming in those markets through ESPN.
ESPN will no longer carry “Sunday Night Baseball,” a staple of the network for decades, but will have a package of 30 weeknight games. It will also retain its coverage of the MLB Little League Classic and carry a game on Memorial Day.
ESPN is paying $550 million for the new three-year package, the same as the last contract, according to people familiar with talks who were not authorized to comment publicly.
While ESPN and MLB exchanged harsh words when their longtime arrangement broke up earlier this year, both sides praised the eventual outcome, which puts a greater emphasis on streaming.
“Bringing MLB.TV to ESPN’s new app while maintaining a presence on linear television reflects a balanced approach to the shifts taking place in the way that fans watch baseball and gives MLB a meaningful presence on an important destination for fans of all sports,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement.
ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro called the deal “a fan-friendly agreement” that prioritizes the Walt Disney Co. unit’s “streaming future.”
“Sunday Night Baseball” will move to NBC, with 25 prime-time games on the broadcast network or NBCUniversal’s streaming platform Peacock. Already the home of “Sunday Night Football,” and “Sunday Night Basketball,” the addition of the MLB — at $200 million a season — means NBC will have live sports in prime time on every Sunday throughout the year.
The network is also picking up the wild card round of the MLB postseason that had been carried on ESPN.
In 2027 and 2028, NBC will carry the most consequential game played on the final Sunday of the season.
NBC Sports also gains the rights to the late Sunday morning game, which will be carried on Peacock and followed by a “whip-around” show presenting action from contests around the league that day. Peacock carried the morning game in 2023 and 2024 before it went to Roku this past season.
MLB games exclusive to Peacock will also be shown on the newly launched NBC Sports Network, which is being offered to cable and satellite TV providers.
Netflix is paying around $50 million per year to carry the 2026 opening night game between the San Francisco Giants and the New York Yankees on March 25. The annual Home Run Derby, previously on ESPN, also moves to the streamer, as does the Field of Dreams game, which will be played in Dyersville, Iowa, where the set for “Field of Dreams” is located.
The deal continues Netflix’s approach of offering appointment sporting events to its subscribers rather than investing in a full season package.
The new MLB deals only run for three years. The league wants them to align with its major TV rights package that includes the playoffs, the World Series and the All-Star Game. Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TBS carry those packages until 2028.
NBC’s new primetime comedy “Stumble” is a love letter to cheer. Or should that be “Cheer,” the hit Netflix docuseries that catapulted a sport with high-flying stunts, squad drama, bedazzled uniforms and lots of makeup, into the cultural zeitgeist?
For “Stumble” showrunners Liz and Jeff Astrof, it’s both. Like much of America, the siblings say they became obsessed with the champion cheerleaders of Navarro College and their no-nonsense coach Monica Aldama, whose exploits were captured in Greg Whiteley’s two-season series that premiered in 2020. The show broke the notion that cheerleading was simply made up of pony-tailed girls waving pompoms on the sidelines, showcasing the athleticism of the sport, its competitiveness and its diversity — the cheerleaders, male and female, came from varying social, economic and racial backgrounds.
Jeff watched the documentary at the insistence of his sister and was quickly hooked.
“I said, ‘You know what we should do? We should do a show where Monica goes down to the worst college in America. We’ll call it ‘Stumble,’” he recalls during a recent video call with Liz.
The idea tumbled in their heads for a time, but it took a while for it to lift off the ground. Both siblings were busy working on different TV projects — Liz on her Fox sitcom “Pivoting,” and Jeff on his Starz horror comedy “Shining Vale” — when the 2023 Hollywood strikes hit. But the timing allowed them to think about “Stumble” again.
“That’s when I really dug in,” Liz says.
“And we got to call Monica,” Jeff adds. “She’s our best friend. We even put that in the pitch, that she’s our best friend now.”
When I relay the sentiment to Aldama over a separate video call from New York, where the show is being filmed, she smiles and laughs. “Oh my goodness, they are the absolute best,” she says in her soft Texan twang.
The former Navarro coach serves as an executive producer on “Stumble” and also as its cheer consultant, bringing her decades of experience as one of America’s top collegiate cheer coaches. And while the show, premiering Friday and streaming next day on Peacock, takes some elements from the docuseries — it’s a mockumentary — it’s important to note that “Stumble” isn’t a one-to-one adaptation of “Cheer.”
The series follows Courteney Potter, played by Jenn Lyon (“Justified,” “Dead Boy Detectives”), a champion cheer coach at the fictional Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College, who is fired after a problematic video surfaces. Tammy Istiny, played by Kristin Chenoweth, takes over as interim coach — though she’s not as heartbroken about Courteney’s departure as she initially lets on. Courteney isn’t deterred, however, and she finds another coaching job at Headltston State Junior College in Oklahoma (the team mascot is a candy button, the town’s main industry), where she works to build a squad from the ground up. The character is very loosely based on Aldama, sporting the same flowy blouses, skinny jeans, heeled boots and all-business attitude.
Courteney Potter, center, played by Jenn Lyon, is very loosely based on Monica Aldama.
(Matt Miller / NBC)
“She is incredible,” said Aldama about Lyon. “I can tell she has put so much time into studying me [and] cheerleading coaches. She asks very thoughtful questions when it comes to how to deliver a line, or if the wording is correct. We never actually sat down and spent a long time with questions. And it’s fascinating to me because it’s body language, it’s delivery, it’s everything — she really did a great job.”
Meanwhile, the squad is composed of misfits, hotheads, third-year “seniors” and even a narcoleptic tumbler with a solid split. Some of the characters feel familiar — they’re an amalgamation of personalities from “Cheer.” Krystal (Anissa Borrego) might remind you of Gabi Butler, the cheer influencer, and Dimarcus (Jarrett Austin Brown) has a fiery spirit similar to La’Darius Marshall, whose combative relationship with Aldama came to a head in Season 2 of “Cheer.” But otherwise, the similarities are fleeting.
For Aldama, working on the series marks yet another shift in her life and career, much of it spent in Corsicana, Texas, where Navarro is located and where she still calls home. After serving as head cheer coach for nearly three decades, she retired in 2023.
“You know, it’s scary to have change,” she said. “What I have learned about being in the spotlight is that there are going to be a lot of things said about you. … I view things a lot differently now.”
Her retirement came after a series of events: First, Jerry Harris, one of the breakout stars of “Cheer,” was charged with sex crimes involving minors in 2020. Season 2 showed how the team grappled with his arrest; Harris pleaded guilty in 2022 and is currently serving a 12-year sentence. Then in early 2023, a civil lawsuit was filed by a former Navarro cheerleader, who accused Aldama of attempting to keep a sexual assault claim quiet. Aldama steadfastly denied the accusations, and her name was later dropped from the suit.
The Astrofs’ goal was to lean into the good things that “Cheer” showcased, emphasizing how much “Stumble” is a loose adaptation. “There’s darkness in everything, and we don’t go there,” said Jeff in reference to Harris. “For me and for Liz, the music is fun, the underdog nature of these kids and … seeing these actors do cheer and some of them … hadn’t even been in TV shows before. It’s like that excitement — it’s contagious. That’s what we’re looking at.”
Ultimately, the events of the past haven’t deterred Aldama from trying new pursuits. After all, her path was already curving toward Hollywood. After “Cheer” became a hit in 2020, she was cast in Season 29 of ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars,” giving her a taste of the limelight outside of her world. She also released a memoir in 2022. Now, she’s trying her hand at scripted television with “Stumble.”
“It’s obviously very different because I am learning a lot. I ask a lot of questions,” she said. “They [Liz and Jeff] asked me many times, ‘How deep do you want to go?’ I want to be in every meeting. I want to learn. I want to hear every conversation … but I do a lot more listening than anything at this moment.”
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1.Showrunners Jeff and Liz Astrof on the set of “Stumble.”(Matt Miller / NBC)2.The cast on set with Monica Aldama, who is the show’s cheer consultant.(Danielle Mathias / NBC)3.Aldama on set.(Matt Miller / NBC)
The Astrofs have been in the industry as writers and producers for more than two decades, each creating their own projects for television. Though they’ve worked together before — Liz on Jeff’s series “Trial & Error” and on Season 2 of “Shining Vale” — it’s the first time the pair have joined forces as showrunners.
Working on “Stumble” and coming up with a pilot together was easy for the siblings (Jeff: “We wrote the whole thing on Post-it notes”). It’s evident they are close, often completing each other’s sentences in the course of the interview. And they agreed that having Aldama was essential to making the series, particularly when it came to depicting the cheer routines and getting the nomenclature right.
“We needed to have authenticity to cheer, because we didn’t know anything about [the] cheer world,” Jeff said.
“We had to have Monica,” Liz said. “I really just wanted to meet her. I wanted her to be involved in every single thing, just so I could see her every day.”
Her expertise was important to them as was getting the world of cheerleading right. To help with that, Aldama enlisted Dahlston Delgado, who was featured on “Cheer,” to work as a choreographer on the show. Together they recruited extras with cheer experience via social media and through their many contacts in the cheer world. The cast did many of the routines, but stunt doubles were used in some instances, and real cheerleaders were used as part of the Buttons, Headltston’s squad.
Aldama and Delgado were given freedom to decide what routines would look like, while the Astrofs would focus on writing the dialogue for the show. “In a script, we’ll just write, ‘The team does an incredible cheer,’” Jeff says. “We’ll be in a production meeting, and Monica and Dahlston will be like, can you explain what you mean by ‘incredible cheer’?”
They ran with the limited guidance, however, putting together routines quickly, rehearsing in a couple of hours and taping them. “I think everybody not in our world just could not believe how quickly they learned a routine, with most of them not knowing each other and not ever working together,” Aldama said of the cheer squad. “They were just talented.”
“She’s magical,” Liz said.
“Monica is, even from the pilot, she’s so good at what she does, I would let her do toe surgery on me,” Jeff said.
Kristin Chenoweth as Tammy Istiny, left, and Monica Aldama as herself in the “Stumble” pilot.
(Matt Miller / NBC)
Aldama even makes a cameo in the first episode, comforting Chenoweth’s Tammy when the Sammy Davis squad learns Courteney has been let go. While she may be used to being in front of the camera nowadays, Aldama considers what more she’d like to do behind the scenes.
“I think everybody has their strengths,” she said. “And writing … I like where I’m at right now, where I can read the script and say, ‘Well, maybe this,’ and add a little bit to it. I would definitely be open to producing other shows in the future.”
For the showrunners, the compressed timeline between when the show was picked up by NBC in July to production to air meant that they had to make some compromises, including where the show was filmed. The pilot was shot in Georgia, but they wanted to shoot the series in L.A., where the writers’ room is based, but it eventually landed in New York because of the financial incentives and it’s where much of the cast is located. (The Astrofs wouldn’t mind if it ended up in L.A. at some point.)
Nonetheless, they’re optimistic about how the show will be received and having Aldama on board to add credibility from a cheer perspective was the ultimate goal for them because they love the sport.
“We just want to be funny with heart and, like, just people root for it,” Jeff said.
