The following is a list of events affecting American television in 2007. Events listed include television show debuts, finales, cancellations, and new channel launches.
i: Independent Television debuts the national Qubo channel.
29
i: Independent Television was relaunched as ION Television.
February[]
Date
Event
1
NBC affiliate WNKY in Bowling Green, Kentucky signs-on WNKY-DT2 as a CBS affiliate, giving the Bowling Green market its first locally based CBS affiliate.[1]
13
Singer Julie Roberts appeared in the game show Wheel of Fortune and along with contestant Peter Buccellato, raising $124,250 cash & prizes (including the standard $100,000 grand prize) to her charity for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.[2]
23
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.
Tiny Hippos Daycare Adventures appears on Nickelodeon for the first time.
17
Cartoon Network's Toonami commemorates its 10th anniversary.
31
Playhouse Disney rebrands with a new look; monkeys Ooh and Ahh become the official hosts of the block.
April[]
Date
Event
1
NBC Nightly News weekend anchor John Seigenthaler was retire for 6 Years.
11
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.
20
Fox airs the 18th-season finale of The Simpsons, "You Kent Always Say What You Want". With this episode, The Simpsons reaches the landmark 400 episode milestone.
23
On Fox, Jordin Sparks wins the 6th season of the popular singing competition American Idol; Blake Lewis is the runner up.
27
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.
June[]
Date
Event
14
Trace Gallagher resigns as anchorman of Fox Report Weekend on the Fox News Channel and is replaced by Laurie Dhue. Studio B Weekend, which was also anchored by Gallagher, has already been pulled from the schedule.
15
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 share honors for Outstanding Drama Series (Guiding Light and The Young and the Restless)).
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.
23
Drew Carey is announced as the new host of The Price Is Right; his first episode as host aired on October 15.
August[]
Date
Event
7
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.
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.
September[]
Date
Event
1
In one of the first football games to air on the Big Ten Network, Appalachian State University upsets the University of Michigan, 34–32, at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor, the first time an NCAA Division I FCS school defeats an AP-ranked school from the Bowl subdivision.
7
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.
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.
15
CBS' Saturday morning cartoon block, KOL Secret Slumber Party, is renamed KEWLopolis.
16
The 59th Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony airs on Fox.
21
Former CBS Evening News anchor. Dan Rather, files for bankruptcy.
October[]
Date
Event
1
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).
Trinity Broadcasting Network begins airing the long-awaited God Rocks state of the art cartoon series.
KQET/Watsonville (the satellite of KTEH) switched programming sources from KTEH to KQED.
Cartoon Network celebrates its 15th anniversary.
12
Wizards of Waverly Place debuts on Disney Channel.
15
Fox Business Network launches.
Drew Carey replaces Bob Barker as the new host on The Price Is Right and airs his first show.
22
The new studio and new format of NBC Nightly News and joined MSNBC.
28
Game 4 of the World Series is broadcast on Fox. The Boston Red Sox sweep the Colorado Rockies, winning their second title since the historic 2004 series and seventh in franchise history.
29
Hulusubscription video on demand service launches.
November[]
Date
Event
5
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.
Kathleen Herles leaves as the voice of Dora the Explorer for 7 years since 2000.
12
Nickelodeon airs its very first SpongeBob SquarePants TV movie, Atlantis SquarePantis, attracting 8.8 million viewers.
15
Jorja Fox appears for the last time as a regular cast member as investigator Sara Sidle on the CBS drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
19
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.