Sports fans of a certain age can readily recall NBC‘s coverage of the Major League Baseball playoffs regularly pre-empting the network’s “Must-See TV” primetime lineup in the 1990s.

While today’s ratings and programming landscape has changed dramatically in the intervening decades, this year’s playoffs (starting Tuesday) are shaping up as a back-to-the-future milestone for NBC Sports. Its exclusive coverage of the wild card round (which aired on ESPN and ABC from 2022 to ’25) will deliver boosts to the broadcast network and streaming flagship Peacock.

Four games a day, starting at 2 p.m., 5 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET, will be carried on Tuesday and Wednesday. Depending on the status of each best-of-three series, Thursday will see between one and four games before later playoff rounds shift to Turner and Fox. Viewership of MLB has been on the rise, with all rights holders seeing improvement over 2025 levels through the second half of the season. Last year’s World Series comeback by the L.A. Dodgers against the Toronto Blue Jays benefited from going the maximum seven games, but its average of 15.71 million viewers a game was the best for any Series since 2017, demonstrating the sport’s recent momentum.

Two of the Tuesday and Wednesday games (at 2 and 8) will air on NBC, with the other two airing on cable TV’s NBC Sports Network. If series move to a deciding third game on Thursday, NBC will air between one and three games, depending on where things stand. It’s a step up for broadcast TV compared with recent years, when only one game per day aired on ABC and extends a pendulum swing back to broadcast for the sport, whose entire pre-World series playoffs in 2019 aired on cable TV except for one game.

Peacock will stream every inning of the wild card round, between eight and 12 games. It will be the latest injection of live sports in a year that has already seen the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, NBA and NHL playoff games, and Spanish-language World Cup coverage. The streaming service ended June with 48 million subscribers after adding 2 million in the second quarter, which included Love Island USA and the start of the World Cup. It also increased prices in August during the runup to college football and NFL season, with MLB playoffs and the NBA not much farther down the line.

Six years after launch, Peacock finally turned a profit in the second quarter. NBCU Media Chairman Matt Strauss said live sports has been a key part of the company “playing to our strengths” in streaming.

NBCU reached a 3-year rights deal with MLB worth a reported $600 million in November 2025. “We are excited to reignite NBC Sports’ storied Major League Baseball history through this comprehensive and innovative partnership that will honor the past and create new traditions,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella said at the time.

All wild card series have used the best-of-three format since 2022, replacing the prior set-up that pitted select lower-seeded teams against each other in a single-elimination game.

NBCU not only has more wild card games to work with; it also got lucky this year with the markets and teams represented in the kickoff to the postseason. Two longtime rivalries will be renewed, with the Boston Red Sox taking on the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies playing the Atlanta Braves. The other series also feature major markets and marquee teams, as the Chicago White Sox face the Houston Astros and the Chicago Cubs battle the San Diego Padres.

The presence of both the Cubs and the White Sox is just the fourth time that both Chicago teams have made the playoffs in the same year. The last time was in the Covid-altered 2020 season. Before that, the teams both made it in 2008 and when they dueled in the 1906 World Series (which was won by the White Sox).

The Astros are also the first team in MLB history to finish a full 162-game regular season without a winning record and still make the playoffs. Houston had 81 wins and 81 losses.

During a media conference call on Monday, play-by-play announcer Jason Benetti, analysts Anthony Rizzo and Joey Votto, and senior producer Matt Borzello talked about their approach to the wild card games. One feature similar to those incorporated into NBA and NHL telecasts is “Inside the Pitch,” in which players and former players positioned next to the field break down the action.

The combination of physical proximity and playing experience allows the broadcasters to “pick up on things like the conversations players are having that don’t reach the broadcast booth,” Rizzo said. Vatto said he and Rizzo pick up on the “little nuances” and the “tendencies and mannerisms” in a way they hope can benefit the viewer.

Tokyo International Film Festival has announced that Japanese-Korean filmmaker Mipo O and Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof will be presented with the Kurosawa Akira Award at this year’s edition of the festival.

The award is designed to recognize the legacy and ongoing influence of renowned auteurs and is presented to filmmakers who have “made waves in cinema and are expected to help guide the industry’s future”. Last year’s recipients were Kokuho director Lee Sang-il and Chloé Zhao.

This year’s recipients were selected by a committee comprising Lee, veteran filmmaker Yoji Yamada, cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa and TIFF Programming Director Shozo Ichiyama.

After making her feature directorial debut in 2006 with The Sakai’s Happiness, Mipo O won Best Director at the Montreal World Film Festival with her 2014 film, The Light Shines Only There, which went on to win 60 awards in Japan and internationally. Following a hiatus for childbirth and childcare, she returned to feature filmmaking in 2024 with box-office hit Living In Two Worlds followed by How Dare You? last year.

“Since making her directorial debut in 2006 with The Sakai’s Happiness, director O Mipo has consistently created works that offer a multifaceted perspective on individuals living on the margins of society, refraining from viewing them through a simple lens of good vs. evil,” said the selection committee.

The TIFF selection committee also noted that Rasoulof has faced censorship, prison sentences and filmmaking bans from the Iranian government, yet has relentlessly pursued his unique method of filmmaking often relying on guerilla-style shooting. He won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2020 for There Is No Evil, and the Special Jury Prize at Cannes for The Seed Of The Sacred Fig in 2024.

The committee said: “Director Mohammad Rasoulof has consistently produced profound works centered on the theme of human rights oppression under state regimes. Notably, his recent films There Is No Evil and The Seed Of The Sacred Fig have gained international acclaim for their humanist perspective, which portrays even those who perpetrate oppression as ordinary citizens.”

TIFF is also presenting a selection of Akira Kurosawa’s favorite films including Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928) and Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987), along with 4K restorations of two of Kurosawa’s own titles – Sanshiro Sugata (1943) and Ikiru (1952).

TIFF also announced that actor Hayato Isomura (Alice In Borderland, What Did You Eat Yesterday?) will head the Ethical Film Award Jury. Three titles from this year’s TIFF selection met the criteria for the Ethical Film Award: Brenda Lígia’s Amadeo And The Hypothetical New World (Brazil), Isabelle Stever’s I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming (Germany, Ukraine) and Vee Shi’s Time And Tide (Australia).

We’ve got first glimpse at Matthew Macfadyen descending into the John le Carré universe to play iconic spymaster George Smiley.

The BBC and MGM+‘s Legacy of Spies has dropped first-look images including the Succession star donning those trademark glasses and Charlie Hunnam as Alec Leamas, which can be seen below.

The eight-part drama marks Smiley’s long-anticipated return to television, a first in four decades, when he was played by Alec Guinness, although he was portrayed in the 2011 movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Gary Oldman.

Legacy of Spies is adapted from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and draws on additional material from 2017’s A Legacy of Spies.

When Leamas, a highly experienced Circus field operative, recruits Doris Quinz, a young and dynamic East German woman, to smuggle high-value Stasi documents into the West, it sets in motion a series of events that threaten to explode in the crucible of Cold War Berlin. Pursuing Leamas and Doris are Josef Fiedler and Hans-Dieter Mundt, two Stasi operatives whose ferocious desire to shut down the intelligence leak is matched only by their internal rivalry and an iron will to outmatch each other. Pulled into the action is Liz Gold, an idealistic young woman whose courage and conviction force Leamas to navigate a world where loyalties fracture and betrayal is inevitable.

The images have been released to coincide with the end of production in the Czech Republic.

The show is one of the most highly-anticipated UK-U.S. co-pros of the upcoming year and also stars Daniel Brühl as Josef Fiedler, Devrim Lingnau Islamoğlu as Doris Quinz, Agnes O’Casey as Liz Gold, Felix Kammerer as Hans-Dieter Mundt, Dan Stevens as Bill Haydon, Jake Dunn as Peter Guillam, Anjana Vasan as Connie Sachs, Charlotte Ritchie as Ann Smiley, Joe Alwyn as Jim Prideaux.

Back in June, we revealed that Hugh Laurie would also star in Legacy of Spies. He is playing Control, the fiendish and commanding head of The Circus and Smiley’s morally fickle superior.

Legacy of Spies is set to launch on BBC iPlayer and BBC One in the UK, and on MGM+ in the U.S., Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil and Spanish-speaking Latin America. The series will also air on SBS in Australia, Sky New Zealand and Sky Switzerland, and CANAL+ across France & French-speaking territories, Central & Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Legacy of Spies was commissioned by Lindsay Salt, Director of BBC Drama. The series is produced by The Ink Factory (The Pigeon Tunnel, The Night Manager), in co-production with Amusement Park Film (All Quiet on the Western Front) and in association with 127 Wall Productions and Paramount Television Studios, for the BBC and MGM+. The series is written by Stephen Cornwell (Message from the King, A Most Wanted Man) and Clarissa Ingram, Michael Lennox (Say Nothing, Crystal Lake) will serve as an executive producer and is lead director, with Claudia Llosa (The Vampire Lestat, The Milk of Sorrow) serving as second director and co-executive producer. The executive producers are Stephen Cornwell, who is also showrunner, Graham Yost (Justified, Silo), Simon Cornwell (The Pigeon Tunnel, The Night Manager), Michele Wolkoff, Malte Grunert (All Quiet on the Western Front), Chris Rice, Macfadyen, Hunnam, Clarissa Ingram, and Joe Tsai. Susanne Bier and Mike Lesslie are also executive producers. The executive producers for the BBC are Gaynor Holmes and Nick Lambon. Nick Cornwell is executive producer for the John le Carré estate. Sam Costin and Llosa, are co-executive producers and Nancy Bray is producer for The Ink Factory. Fifth Season is handling global sales.