Dr. Phil‘s media company Merit TV has named Ken Solomon as its new president and CEO.
The former CEO of Tennis Channel, Solomon says that he and Dr. Phil (his full name is Phil McGraw) go back decades, and yes, they are tennis partners.
Solomon left the Tennis Channel last year, he had been serving in an advisory role to McGraw’s company since it launched. In his new role he will work alongside Merit executive VP and COO Joel Cheatwood on growing the nascent business, which leans heavily on talk, news, true crime and some live sports.
“We talk about the business a lot, how’s it evolving, where’s it going, and we try to look around corners. It’s just a natural function of who we are and the relationship,” Solomon tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “And so as Phil was thinking about the future, it was only natural that we’d be talking about my view of what I thought might be the next step in his evolution as a media icon and as a force in the business.”
McGraw hosts Merit TV’s flagship primetime show, often flanked by news programming or fare led by veteran TV hosts like Nancy Grace and Steve Harvey.
“It’s his honest goal to help as many people as possible, and do it in a fun and entertaining way that’s folksy and which belies his intense research and devotion to facts as opposed to pure opinion. He’ll give you his opinion at the end, if you want to hear it, but he’ll say, ‘you decide,’” Solomon says. “I always think of it as the United Artists of kind of independent talent, that is, that was a big part of his goal, there were a lot of people in his position, one being Steve Harvey, who’s now a partner of ours and Nancy Grace and others, a family of personalities, performers, journalists, media folks who had something to say and wanted to build brands around it across all platforms.”
Merit in recent weeks announced a slate of podcasts (including a show hosted by former Bachelor host Chris Harrison) that will also be televised and streamed, and announced plans to get into boxing a via a league with TCL Team Boxing League.
“We want to fully explore all the things he couldn’t do before, that he can do now,” Solomon says. “It’s just finding the most interesting, relevant stories to the most people. And they can be evergreen, or they can be temporal, in terms of the mix, it’s important, we wouldn’t flip into a library network ever. It’s important to be temporal, to have news.”
And he says that more sports deals are coming soon, particularly “untapped” or “under-leveraged” sports or leagues.
“There are a lot of sports that fall into that we are partnering with,” Solomon says. “We have multiple new partnerships on the blocks that we’re preparing for to scale this company big and quickly.”
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