Married couple Rebecca Romijn and Jerry O’Connell will host The Real Love Boat, which debuts on CBS October 5. The series brings singles together to sail the Mediterranean on a luxury cruise ship while looking for love. Destination dates, challenges and surprise singles will test the couples’ compatibility and chemistry. 

Like The Love Boat, crew members, including the captain and cruise director, play key roles in matchmaking.

“After years of consuming, arguing about and dissecting unscripted television, hosting a reality series where a group of singles look for love while aboard a Princess Cruise ship, seemed like a dream come true,” said Romijn and O’Connell. “When we heard it was aboard The Real Love Boat, that dream got an iconic theme song — ‘we promise something for everyone.’ ”

Romijn played Mystique in the X-Men film franchise and stars in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, reprising a role she played in Star Trek: Discovery. 

O’Connell hosts daytime show The Talk. He voices a commander in Star Trek: Lower Decks. As a boy, he played Vern in film Stand By Me.

The Real Love Boat is produced by Eureka Productions in association with Buster Productions. Chris Culvenor, Paul Franklin, Wes Dening and Jay Bienstock serve as executive producers for Eureka. ■

TNT has renewed its fantasy-adventure series The Librarians for a fourth season, network officials said Tuesday.

The series, which stars Rebecca Romijn, Christian Kane and John Harlan Kim, drew 5.4 million viewers per episode in its third season across multiple platforms.

Based on TNT’s movie franchise of the same name, The Librarians will return for a fourth season later this year, according to the network. The series is produced by Electric Entertainment, with Dean Devlin, Marc Roskin and Noah Wyle serving as executive producers.

Actress/producer Rebecca Romijn will return for a third season as host of GSN’s body-painting competition series Skin Wars, which premieres Wednesday, April 20. Romijn spoke with Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the show’s popularity and what viewers should expect from the new season. Here’s an edited excerpt.

MCN:Heading into season three, are you surprised at the successSkin Warshas had?

Rebecca Romijn: I am … I wasn’t sure how much of an audience would be driven to the idea of a show about body painting. What I’ve been most surprised about is the demographic and how we’ve actually started reaching families. I wasn’t sure how families would feel about letting their kids watch our show, but I keep on meeting 10-year-old kids who are obsessed with it and special effects makeup and body painting. There are lot of families watching the show together, which I never saw coming.

MCN:What should we expect to see from the new season of the show?

RR: We have some great challenges this season including an underwater challenge which kind of blew my mind — I didn’t even know that it was possible. They are allowed to use a certain amount of appliances, including foam, and some of the painters were adding too much foam to the models and found out that the models weren’t able to dive down into the tank. We kept coming up against things like that that made for great television.

MCN:What drew you toSkin Warsand body painting in the first place?

RR: Well, I did play [body-painted character] Mystique in the first three X-Men movies, and I was also the very first model painted for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, so I have a lot of personal experience in the world of body painting. (Laughs.) I know a lot about what goes into it and what the models are going through because its not easy — it’s hard on the artists and the models. It’s intense and the hours on the show are very long; sometimes we have 14-hour days because it’s really watching paint dry. There’s a lot of downtime but the masterpieces that come out of it are so gorgeous.

Last week’s tipoff of March Madness brought on a mad rush of new apps and services from pay TV providers, ad-tech vendors and programmers that are tailored for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.

On the streaming front, NCAA March Madness Live, an app for the tourney developed in partnership by the NCAA, Turner Sports and CBS Sports, is available across what they say is a record 12 platforms.

Those lending support this year include the Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, Roku players and Roku TVs, Amazon Fire tablets, iOS and Android mobile devices, Windows handsets, Web browsers, and even the Apple Watch. Additionally, viewers can access all games broadcast on CBS “with no registration required” on desktops as well as smartphones and tablets. Live streams will also be offered on digital platforms from TBS, TNT, truTV and CBS, as well as via participating TV provider websites and apps.

The NCAA March Madness Live app for the Apple TV offers a split-screen feature that lets users stream two live games at the same time.

Dish Network is literally doubling that with last week’s debut of “Sports Bar Mode,” a feature for its new 4K-capable Hopper 3 DVR that divides the TV screen into quadrants, with each displaying a different live TV program. That feature, also called “multiview” and offered on any Hopper 3 that’s connected to a 4K or HD set, decodes four streams, stitches them together and displays them simultaneously. The feature takes advantage of the tuner-rich Hopper 3, which sports 16 of them.

Comcast is also focusing on the big screen with the debut of a basketball “Extras” for its X1 Sports app that syncs up stats with live programming and relies on tech from OneTwoSee, the Philadelphia-based startup that Comcast acquired earlier this month.

The interactive app provides in-game, team-by-team stats such as steals, rebounds and foul counts, as well as a view of the updated tournament bracket. Post-game, the app feeds a recap of the matchup, including by-quarter scores and the “Xfinity Player of the Game.”

For the tourney’s Final Four round, the app will also let users pull up full-team rosters and detailed individual player stats, including shooting percentages by court location.

The tourney also created an opening for media data specialist 4C to take the wraps off Sports Sync, a platform that enables brands and other partners to deliver ads on social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in concert with a specific live sports moment, such as a slam dunk or a game-changing three-point shot.

Several brands have signed on for Sports Sync for March Madness, 4C said, but the company wasn’t at liberty yet to name them. 4C also has built a version of its platform that triggers digital ads around political TV spots, as well as shifts in the weather.

Not all ad inventory is created equal, according to Aaron Goldman, 4C’s chief marketing officer. 4C’s approach is about delivering an ad message “when attentions are heightened,” he said.

— Jeff Baumgartner

‘Dirty Charades’ Behind the Scenes of ‘Skin Wars'

 Body-painting competition Skin Wars is GSN’s top original series, and behind the scenes it often takes hours for the painters to create their masterpieces on their nearly naked human canvases.

Host Rebecca Romijn and sejudge RuPaul Charles lamented during the network’s March 8 upfront presentation that episodes could take as long as 14 hours to tape as they literally and painstakingly watched paint dry.

They played games to pass the time, such as “Dirty Charades.” It’s like the traditional pantomime guessing game, but as Charles succinctly described, “It was just dirty.”

Michael Levitt said it was often di_ cult to begin shooting after several rounds of charades, because the host couldn’t stop laughing at the risqué gamesmanship.

Romijn quipped that the game’s content and gestures probably wouldn’t be suitable for air. “I don’t think you’re going to see our game on GSN anytime soon.”

— R. Thomas Umstead

Coming off its best ratings year ever, GSN will look to continue its momentum with the greenlighting of several new series including a spinoff of its most popular franchise Skin Wars, the network announced Tuesday during its upfront presentation in New York.

The network later this year will debut Skin Wars: Fresh Paint, hosted by entertainer RuPaul Charles in which new artists will compete in body painting challenges to win a $10,000 prize, said network officials. The series is a spinoff of the Rebecca Romijn-hosted Skin Wars, which launches its third season later this year.

Other new shows slated for GSN’s lineup include Winsanity, hosted by comedian/actor Donald Faison and features contestants who attempt to rank 10 facts in numerical order, from highest to lowest, to win prizes for both the contestant and the studio audience, and Window Warriors, a competition series which looks at the creativity of storefront window dressing, said network officials.

GSN has also ordered pilots for new shows Breaking App, which follows app inventors to see who can create the next great mobile application, and The Investigation, a one-hour crime-solving game set in a realistic police location with multiple departments.

GSN executive vice president of programming and development Amy Introcaso-Davis told Multichannel News that the new shows, along with returning shows like Idiotest and the newly-renewed Hellevator, have brought in younger viewers and helped evolve the network’s brand into a “fun” place for viewers and families to watch.

GSN said it has picked up a 10-episode third season of Skin Wars, the bodypainting competition series.

The network said the show, hosted by Rebecca Romijn (who will return), remains GSN's top-rated series, attracting more than 12 million viewers to the current season. The recent season finale had more than 1.1 million viewers, per GSN, citing Nielsen. GSN also said the show has more than doubled (+125%) the year-to-date time period average with total viewers and delivered its most-watched episode ever for the franchise in key demos women 18-49, women 25-54 and persons 25-54 on a Live+3 basis. The success of the series has been key in putting GSN on pace for both its best year and summer ever, as it is currently up 24% in prime time (8-11 p.m.) over a year ago and up 30% over last summer in total viewers, the network said. 

Along with Romijn, returning judges for season three include RuPaul Charles and body painting experts Craig Tracy and Robin Slonina. In season three, 12 artists will compete for $100,000 and additional prizes to be announced.

“Skin Wars has been an integral part of introducing GSN to millions of new, younger viewers and has truly become a game changer for us,” Amy Introcaso-Davis, executive vice president of programming at GSN, said in a release. “The success of the show has also provided us a great platform to showcase new series, as evidenced by the strong debut of Steampunk'd last week, which was one of our top-rated new series launches.”

Skin Wars is executive produced by Michael Levitt of Michael Levitt Productions, Jill Goularte, Colleen Sands and Rebecca Romijn. Craig Tracy and Robin Slonina serve as producers.

GSN, after adding millions of new viewers and enjoying its most-watched year in 2014, said it greenlit two more original series and has ordered three new pilots, including an unnamed spinoff of the Rebecca Romijn-hosted bodypainting competition series Skin Wars.

At an upfront breakfast event at the Sony Building in midtown Manhattan, network programming chief Amy Introcaso-Davis said the game-show based outlet's programming had turned in a "younger, cooler, hipper direction," helped by shows like Skin Wars, which she said set record marks as a new series last year in the network's key audience demographics. GSN has finished production on a second season of the show, which also features RuPaul Charles. Five of the network's roster of seven original series are returning in 2015, officials said.

Steampunk'd, one of the two new series GSN has ordered for 2015, is a competition series for artists and designers who work in the Steampunk genre, which blends science fiction and fantasy and technology into art. The other new show on order is Lie Detectors, a game show hosted by Australian comedian Rove McManus in which three comedians tell a story and the audience has to guess which one of the three is telling the truth. Network officials had no more information to provide in terms of when the shows would launch or how many episodes were ordered.

GSN in January said it was ordering a re-take on the old game show Chain Reaction, in which teams of contestants compete to complete chains of words. And at the upfront, the network said it ordered a 65-episode second season of game show Idiotest, hosted by Ben Gleib (pictured), who acted as emcee at the upfront event before invited press, advertisers and media buyers.

The network, co-owned by Sony and DirecTV, said it has two other shows developing a pilot besides the untitled Skin Wars spinoff (which will invite artists who excel in other media to learn to "use the human body as a canvas for the first time"). One is Hellevator, a game show that asks three friends to ride a scary elevator to the basement of a warehouse and compete in challenges there. Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity) is an executive producer. The other is Winsanity, a game show about guessing the order in which seven surprising facts should be ranked. Hellevator and Winsanity were previously announced as being in development.

GSN also ordered 50 three-minute episodes of a British interstitial series, Man Vs. Fly, in which a human does battle with a housefly in a sealed room.

GSN's development slate also includes Window Warriors, a competition show about retail-window designers.

GSN will air a special surrounding the Sept. 24 finale of its reality series Skin Wars, the network announced Monday.

The Skin Wars Reunion Show, which will air immediatly after the Skin Wars season ends, will welcome back all of the talented season one contestants, as well as Skin Wars judges and bod-painting icons Craig Tracy and Robin Slonia.

The show will also highlight the series’ most memorable moments and go behind-the-scenes to delve into relationships that evolved druing the show's freshman campaign, said network officials.

The reunion special will also feature a “sneak peek” of RuPaul’s new song, Color Me Love (featuring Rebecca Romijn), said network officials.  

As part of the reunion, viewers will have the opportunity to submit questions in advance via Facebook and Twitter about their favorite episode, challenge, contestant, model and more, with questions to be answered on-air, said the network.