What the hell is even going on in the year of our lord 2025?
First The CW and Ion start airing live sports? Fine. That’s fine. In fact, that makes sense. There’s plenty of smaller sports properties that can benefit from the reach provided by those channels.
Next, QVC starts airing pickleball. Whatever. I mean, the moms watching QVC probably already play pickleball anyway, so I guess it makes sense. Might as well sell a few more paddles.
But Dr. Phil’s TV channel airing boxing? Now we’ve gone too far.
For the uninitiated, yes, Dr. Phil of The Oprah Winfrey Show fame now has his own television network. It’s called Merit TV and is available on all of your normal cable and satellite providers, and even over-the-air in certain markets. Merit TV primarily deals in true crime and lifestyle fare like Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, but has recently dipped its toe into sports programming.
First, Merit TV aired Professional Bull Riders (PBR) events that weren’t designated for CBS or CBS Sports Network. That deal seemingly fell through last year over alleged unpaid rights fees from Dr. Phil’s media company.
Now, Merit TV has debuted TCL Team Boxing League (TCL), a new boxing promotion that divides fighters into different teams split between weight classes with each team designated to a city. And shockingly, the first five weeks have gone very well.
According to a report by Marc Berman in Forbes, TCL has amassed a combined audience of 3.5 million viewers through its first five weeks on Merit TV. That data is according to Nielsen, so it’s legit. Across five weeks, that comes out to an average of 700,000 viewers per week. Those are numbers that are on-par (if not slightly better) than the UFL spring football league is putting up on Fox, ABC, and ESPN.
“Boxing is underleveraged, underutilized, underexposed and I just spent many years of my life building a sport into a full-time destination. This is a real sport. We are not selling violence. And are telling stories and building fandom,” said Ken Solomon, the CEO of Merit TV and the former CEO of, wait for it, the freaking Tennis Channel! That’s right, Dr. Phil’s TV venture has a legit sports media executive at the helm.
Let’s just say, I didn’t expect Dr. Phil to lead a burgeoning sports media empire in the year 2025. But here we are.