After more than 50 years on CBS, Christmas classics Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Frosty the Snowman will have a new home for the holidays this year: NBC. As part of a new multiyear licensing deal, Vulture has learned, the Comcast-owned network has snagged the broadcast-TV rights to the beloved Rankin-Bass holiday specials, which have been on CBS every holiday season going back to Richard Nixon’s first term in the White House. News of the deal comes just days after Disney announced it had won the rights to another half-century CBS staple, the Grammys.
Frosty has aired on CBS every year since its premiere in 1969, while Rudolph has been part of the Eye’s annual holiday festivities since 1972. But despite the latter special’s close association with the Eye Network, Rudolph actually began its broadcast run 60 years ago next month on NBC, airing as part of The General Electric Fantasy Hour. That means this season’s 60th-anniversary telecast of Rudolph will be a homecoming for the special, and to mark the occasion, NBC has scheduled Rudolph’s return for Friday, December 6, at 8 p.m. — the same date it premiered back in 1964 (though, interestingly, the show’s first airing was outside of prime time, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.) NBC will air the extended version of Rudolph, devoting 75 minutes with commercials to the telecast. There will also be an encore showing on December 11.
As for Frosty, it will have its first broadcast-TV airing outside of CBS the night before Rudolph, debuting on NBC on Thursday, December 5, at 8:30 p.m. with an additional telecast on December 11 at 8 p.m. But if you’re a cord-cutter, be warned: Like CBS before it, NBC does not have streaming rights to the specials, at least not as of this writing. Music rights have apparently kept the shows off subscription digital platforms, though the specials can be digitally downloaded. However, NBCUniversal apparently controls the distribution rights to the two specials through its DreamWorks Animation holdings. It’ll be interesting to see if their move to NBC results in a fix to the streaming problem. Meanwhile, if you still have a cable log-in, both Rudolph and Frosty are once again part of Freeform’s “25 Days of Christmas” lineup with multiple telecasts of both specials scheduled beginning December 7.
Meanwhile, NBC’s yuletide coup marks a rare disruption in the holiday-specials universe, in which things are generally stable for decades. The biggest movement came in the 1960s when Rudolph’s debut on NBC spurred CBS to strike back with a wave of holiday classics–to–be of its own. The Eye debuted A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 (a year after Rudolph), then followed that up in 1966 with Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and again with Frosty 1969. In 1972, CBS moved in and stole Rudolph away from NBC, giving the network a near monopoly on the season’s biggest holiday classics for decades. But the Eye’s Christmas hegemony ended in 2001 when A Charlie Brown Christmas (and the other Peanuts specials) moved to ABC (where they stayed until 2020, when Apple TV+ picked them up). And then in 2015, NBC stole away Rankin-Bass special How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Another Rankin-Bass production, the lesser-known-but-still-loved Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town will air on ABC Tuesday, December 3, in the kid-unfriendly 9 p.m. time slot (but will then get an encore Sunday, Dec. 22 at 7 p.m.)