The Roku Channel's fantasy series The Spiderwick Chronicles and former late night host Conan O'Brien's return to the small screen leads the list of original shows premiering this week.

The Spiderwick Chronicles, based on the children's book series of the same name by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, debuts April 19 and follows the Grace Family, whose move into their family's ancestral home unveils hidden mysteries as well as a secret, fantastical world around them, according to Roku. The eight-part series stars Christian Slater, Joy Bryant, Noah Cottrell, Lyon Daniels and Mychala Lee. 

Max's Conan O'Brien Must Go reality series stars the former Conan late-night show as he travels to remote places to visit people who have appeared on his based on his Conan Without Borders travel specials and his Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast. All four episodes of the series debut on April 18.  

Here are video trailers and premiere dates for several shows debuting during the week of April 15-21. For some videos, viewer discretion is advised.

April 15, The Stranger (movie), Hulu

April 16, An American Bombing: The Road to April 19 (documentary), HBO

April 17, Under the Bridge (drama), Hulu

April 18, Dinner With Parents (comedy), Amazon Freevee

April 18, The Upshaws (returning series), Netflix

April 19, The Barnes Bunch (documentary series), WE tv

April 19, Jane (returning series), Apple TV plus

April 19, The Never Ever Mets (reality series), OWN

April 21, The Jinx-Part Two (documentary series), HBO 

April 21, Secrets of the Octopus (documentary), Nat Geo

Conan O’Brien TV, launched on Samsung TV Plus in May, is now available in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, effective Wednesday.

The 24/7 free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel features content from the award-winning comedy and talk show Conan. 

“Consumers today want premium entertainment content and that is our mission at Samsung TV Plus,” senior director of content and business development Takashi Nakano said. “With the successful launch of the Conan O’Brien TV channel in the U.S., it was instrumental that we expand the reach of our quality entertainment. We are honored to continue working with innovative and creative partners like Conan to provide laughs, fun and entertainment to Samsung TV Plus consumers across the globe.”

Viewers of the channel will be able to watch popular sketches featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Clueless Gamer, interviews with celebrities like Jon Hamm, Tom Hanks, Kevin Hart, Gal Godot, Kate McKinnon and Martha Stewart, and appearances by sidekicks Andy Richter, Jordan Schlansky and Sona Movsesian.

“We are thrilled to expand our exclusive partnership and provide the Conan O’Brien TV FAST channel to Samsung consumers in new markets,” Jeff Ross, executive producer, said in a release. “Samsung TV Plus is a staple in the global FAST marketplace and has demonstrated itself as the ideal partner to deliver some of Conan’s most iconic moments to new and loyal fans.”

Samsung TV Plus offers nearly 2,500 free linear channels, reaching 24 countries around the world.

Conan O’Brien will return to the small screen in a new travel series set for Max, Warner Bros. Discovery announced Wednesday during its upfront presentation. 

The four-part series, Conan O’Brien Must Go, follows O’Brien as he travels around the world to meet people who have called into his popular podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

The series is O’Brien’s first since ending his TBS late night show Conan in 2021 after 11 years on the air. Conan also starred in TBS’ Conan Without Borders travel series.

“Conan is a national treasure…at least that’s what he keeps telling me,” HBO Programming executive VP Nina Rosenstein said in a statement. “It’s been an absolute dream to work with him, Jeff, and the whole Conaco team. They’re everything you’d hope for – insanely smart, ridiculously funny, and nicer than they’d probably want to admit.”

Samsung and long-time late night host Conan O’Brien are launching a free ad-supported streaming channel on Samsung TV Plus.

At its NewFront presentation on Tuesday, Samsung said the new Conan O’Brien FAST channel will run 24 hours a day and feature 30-minute blocks of clips from O’Brien’s archives.

The clips will come from O’Brien’s shows, with sketch comedy and celebrity guests.

Samsung also announced a number of tech and data related initiatives.

A new TV and You Community panel will offer advertisers granular data about consumers’ TV consumption. The panel is based on data from 5,000 households providing automatic content recognition (ACR) data. 

Samsung Ads said that advertisers will be able to receive a de-duplicated view of linear and streaming campaigns by age/sex demos, by network and by app. 

“The TV and You Community places linear and streaming ads on the same playing field, so advertisers can deduplicate their campaigns, and most importantly, activate based on those insights, with data,” said Justin Evans, Head of Analytics and Insights, Samsung Ads. “It’s an invitation for brands to work with Samsung Ads not just as a media partner, but an insights partner to solve one of the industry’s biggest challenges.”

Samsung will also offer outcome driven campaigns tied to key performance indicators (KPIs) including website engagement, console game play, in-app content engagement, website action, new viewer acquisition and TV network tune in.

Through a partnership with KERV, advertisers will be able to employ shoppable creative experiences created by artificial intelligence on the Samsung Ads Platform.  Shoppable TV ads will appear on CTV urging viewers to connect with brands on a mobile device or other second screen so that programming is not interrupted. Later in the year, Samsung said it will launch CTV ads on Samsung TV Plus that will enable users to interact through their remote controls.

“Smart TVs are much more than just an entertainment vehicle. Consumers are now using their Smart TVs in various ways such as from shopping to gaming to socializing in the metaverse and much more. This will provide advertisers with the much-needed ability to enhance ad experiences for more measurable outcomes,” said Cathy Oh, VP, Global Head of Marketing, Samsung Ads. 

Murderville premieres on Netflix February 3. Will Arnett plays Senior Detective Terry Seattle, and each episode features a guest star who has not seen the script, and must improvise. There are six episodes. 

The cast includes Haneefah Wood, Lilan Bowden and Phillip Smithey. 

The celeb guests include Annie Murphy, Conan O’Brien, Ken Jeong, Kumail Nanjiani, Marshawn Lynch and Sharon Stone. 

Murderville is based on the BBC3 series Murder in Successville. 

Will Arnett, Marc Forman, Jonathan Stern, Peter Principato and Brian Steinberg are the executive producers, and Krister Johnson is showrunner and executive producer. 

The show is produced by Electric Ave, Abominable Pictures, Artists First and Sony Pictures Television. ■

Conan O’Brien’s late night run is set to end June 24, when the final episode of Conan will appear on TBS, WarnerMedia announced Monday.

The decision to end Conan was announced last year.

O’Brien will focus on his development deal with WarnerMedia and work on his new show for HBO Max, which the company said will be a departure from the traditional talk show format.

The final weeks of Conan will feature special guests and the last show will be expanded from 30 minutes to a full hour to reminisce about his 11 years on TBS.

O’Brien started his late night career when NBC hired him to replace David Letterman on Late Night in 1993. O’Brien also replaced Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show in 2009, but NBC brought Leno back seven months later amid falling ratings and behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

Previously, O’Brien had been a writer for Saturday Night Live and a writer and producer for The Simpsons.

O’Brien has a production company, Conaco, and a digital brand, Team Coco, that does branded content, live events, merchandise, comedy specials and podcasts including Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.

Change within the WarnerMedia empire is coming fast and quick these days. Today’s news: Conan O’Brien will end his TBS late night show after a 10-year run and will shift over to producing and hosting a weekly variety show for HBO Max.

“In 1993 Johnny Carson gave me the best advice of my career: ‘As soon as possible, get to a streaming platform,'” O’Brien said in statement, tongue firmly implanted in cheek. “I’m thrilled that I get to continue doing whatever the hell it is I do on HBO Max, and I look forward to a free subscription.”

O’Brien’s recurring travel specials for TBS, Conan Without Borders, will continue. But as of the end of its 10th season in June, Conan will cease production. 

WarnerMedia didn't announce a title for O'Brien's new weekly show or any other details. 

“Conan’s unique brand of energetic, relatable, and at times, absurdist, comedy has charmed late-night audiences for nearly three decades. We can’t wait to see what he and the rest of Team Coco will dream up for this brand new, variety format each week,” said Casey Bloys, chief content officer of HBO and HBO Max.

O'Brien arrived at the erstwhile Turner Networks back in 2010 in a huff, following a well-publicized fallout with NBC over late-night primacy. After hosting Late Night with Conan O'Brien at 12:30 a.m. for 15 years, O'Brien had been given the keys to the venerable Tonight Show. 

Also read: WarnerMedia Begins Laying Off U.S. Staffers

One problem: Jay Leno decided shortly after that he wanted the choice 11:30 p.m. slot back. Rather than concede to what he described as the "destruction" of The Tonight Show with a move to 12:05 a.m., O'Brien bolted to basic cable. 

That little late-night history lesson aside, the move is consequential for WarnerMedia, which like its media-giant peers, is quickly shifting its corporate distribution priorities to video streaming. 

One way to improve advertising is by reducing clutter and integrating brand messages into content. Long-running late night host Conan O’Brien has collaborated with advertisers for years and was asked by Kevin Reilly, president of TBS, TNT and truTV and chief content officer for HBO Max, what works and what doesn’t.

O’Brien warns that when brands try to be too controlling bad things happen.

“If my fans, or people who consume whatever it is I’m making, feel I’ve been co-opted by the brand, I say you’re spending money but they’re going to resent you because they’re going to feel that you forced Conan to do something that isn’t in his wheelhouse,” O’Brien, host of TBS’s Conan, said at Xandr’s Relevance conference. “So they’re going to resent you. It’s going to be bad for me. It’s going to be bad for you. It’s not going to help people enjoy your brand more.”

O’Brien said that brands like Snickers give him a lot of latitude. “They let us write how we’re going to incorporate Snickers,” he said. “We can do it in a way that’s funny the way I like to be funny. Snickers is the punchline to it and it really works.”

O’Brien has a podcast that now has more than 1 million listeners. He said fans consider one of the best parts of the podcast is when O’Brien tries to read his sponsors’ ad copy and totally butchers it.

“We have not had one person say, ‘We’re not paying for that ad,’ ” he said. “They love it. They know that a lot of times people fast-forward through the ads. They don’t do that on our podcast because they want to hear what I do with this ad. They can hear me lose control and be unable to read the copy. It becomes its own happening.”

TBS talk show host Conan O’Brien, a pioneer in social media and online video, surpassed 2 billion views on his Team Coco You Tube channel, with fans clocking in more than 6.2 billion minutes of viewing time.

The channel features clips from current and past episodes of TBS’ CONAN, in addition to online-exclusive music and comedy. The You Tube channel has about 3.5 million subscribers.

Among that content is "Ice Cube, Kevin Hart and Conan Help a Student Driver" a segment that has generated about 26 million video views on YouTube and the Team Coco website since debuting Jan. 5, making it the most watched clip in the history of CONAN on TBS. The remote features the stars of Universal Pictures' Ride Along 2, Ice Cube and Kevin Hart.

CONAN airs Monday-Thursday at 11 p.m. (ET/PT) on TBS. The show is produced by Conaco LLC, with Jeff Ross serving as executive producer.