After 38 Years, Striscia la Notizia Is Effectively Over

Mediaset Has Pulled the Show's Social Accounts, Though No One Will Say the Word "Cancelled" A Show That Outlived Almost Everything Else on Italian TV For 38 years, Striscia la Notizia was one of the fixed points of Italian television, a satirical newscast that mixed investigative reporting, political mockery and pop-culture bits into a format so durable it outlasted dozens of prime-time trends around it. As of late July 2026, that run appears to be over, even though neither Mediaset nor the show's creator, Antonio Ricci, has actually said so out loud. The clearest signal so far isn't a press release, it's silence. According to entertainment journalists covering the story, including Claudio Plazzotta and Davide Maggio, control of Striscia's official social media accounts was quietly handed over from Ricci's production team to Mediaset directly starting July 25. The accounts, which had kept posting archival clips and content even while the show itself sat off the air, went dark immediately afterward. Mediaset reportedly has no plans to keep them active, since they no longer generate advertising revenue tied to a program that isn't actually broadcasting. How It Got Here Striscia la Notizia launched on Canale 5 on November 7, 1988, the brainchild of Antonio Ricci, and quickly built a reputation unlike almost anything else on Italian television: a satirical news format that could deliver real investigative journalism and consumer-protection reporting one segment, then pivot into comedy sketches and showgirl routines the next. For decades, it was appointment viewing in early prime time. Its more recent troubles trace back to June 2025, when Mediaset pulled Striscia from its longtime access prime-time slot to make room for La Ruota della Fortuna, the Gerry Scotti-hosted revival of Wheel of Fortune, which went on to post spectacular ratings against its competition, including outperforming Affari Tuoi with Stefano De Martino. Striscia disappeared from the schedule for more than six months. It returned on January 22, 2026, relocated to Thursday prime time with Ezio Greggio and Enzo Iacchetti back at the anchor desk. The comeback started reasonably well, launching with an 18.6% audience share and more than 2.5 million viewers. But the numbers collapsed fast. By the time the five-episode prime-time experiment wrapped on February 19, the show had fallen to a 10.3% share and just over a million viewers, undercut week after week by Rai's Don Matteo and other Thursday-night competition. That February 19 broadcast is now widely presumed, informally, to have been the show's actual series finale, even though nobody called it that at the time. Mediaset's Careful Silence What's followed since has been a slow-motion non-announcement. When Mediaset unveiled its 2026/27 programming lineup, Striscia la Notizia was simply absent, with no replacement plan mentioned and no farewell acknowledged. Pressed directly on the show's future, Mediaset CEO Pier Silvio Berlusconi offered only a carefully noncommittal line, saying evaluations were still underway and that he had nothing further to share at that point. That kind of studied vagueness has become the clearest tell in Italian entertainment journalism that a show is finished. Dagospia's Giuseppe Candela was among the first to report that every internal assessment inside Mediaset was pointing toward the same outcome: cancellation, after 38 uninterrupted editions, with no indication that a new revival strategy is being developed following the failed prime-time relaunch. An Ending Without a Farewell What makes Striscia's apparent end unusual isn't the cancellation itself, TV shows end all the time, but the total absence of the kind of send-off a nearly four-decade institution might be expected to get. There's been no farewell special, no on-air goodbye from Ricci, Greggio or Iacchetti, no formal statement marking the close of a show that shaped how generations of Italians got both their news and their nightly comic relief. Instead, the ending has arrived in fragments: a missing line in a programming schedule, a CEO's evasive answer, and now, a set of social media accounts that simply stopped posting. For a program that built its identity on exposing what powerful institutions preferred not to say directly, there's a certain irony in how its own ending has played out: through omission, deflection, and a quiet transfer of login credentials, rather than the kind of straight, on-camera reveal Striscia itself spent 38 years specializing in.

WIRE — Mediaset Has Pulled the Show's Social Accounts, Though No One Will Say the Word "Cancelled" A Show That Outlived Almost Everything Else on Italian TV For 38 years, Striscia la Notizia was one of the fixed points of Italian television, a satirical newscast that mixed investigative reporting, political mockery and pop-culture bits into a format so durable it outlasted dozens of prime-time trends around it. As of late July 2026, that run appears to be over, even though neither Mediaset nor the show's creator, Antonio Ricci, has actually said so out loud. The clearest signal so far isn't a press release, it's silence. According to entertainment journalists covering the story, including Claudio Plazzotta and Davide Maggio, control of Striscia's official social media accounts was quietly handed over from Ricci's production team to Mediaset directly starting July 25. The accounts, which had kept posting archival clips and content even while the show itself sat off the air, went dark immediately afterward. Mediaset reportedly has no plans to keep them active, since they no longer generate advertising revenue tied to a program that isn't actually broadcasting. How It Got Here Striscia la Notizia launched on Canale 5 on November 7, 1988, the brainchild of Antonio Ricci, and quickly built a reputation unlike almost anything else on Italian television: a satirical news format that could deliver real investigative journalism and consumer-protection reporting one segment, then pivot into comedy sketches and showgirl routines the next. For decades, it was appointment viewing in early prime time. Its more recent troubles trace back to June 2025, when Mediaset pulled Striscia from its longtime access prime-time slot to make room for La Ruota della Fortuna, the Gerry Scotti-hosted revival of Wheel of Fortune, which went on to post spectacular ratings against its competition, including outperforming Affari Tuoi with Stefano De Martino. Striscia disappeared from the schedule for more than six months. It returned on January 22, 2026, relocated to Thursday prime time with Ezio Greggio and Enzo Iacchetti back at the anchor desk. The comeback started reasonably well, launching with an 18.6% audience share and more than 2.5 million viewers. But the numbers collapsed fast. By the time the five-episode prime-time experiment wrapped on February 19, the show had fallen to a 10.3% share and just over a million viewers, undercut week after week by Rai's Don Matteo and other Thursday-night competition. That February 19 broadcast is now widely presumed, informally, to have been the show's actual series finale, even though nobody called it that at the time. Mediaset's Careful Silence What's followed since has been a slow-motion non-announcement. When Mediaset unveiled its 2026/27 programming lineup, Striscia la Notizia was simply absent, with no replacement plan mentioned and no farewell acknowledged. Pressed directly on the show's future, Mediaset CEO Pier Silvio Berlusconi offered only a carefully noncommittal line, saying evaluations were still underway and that he had nothing further to share at that point. That kind of studied vagueness has become the clearest tell in Italian entertainment journalism that a show is finished. Dagospia's Giuseppe Candela was among the first to report that every internal assessment inside Mediaset was pointing toward the same outcome: cancellation, after 38 uninterrupted editions, with no indication that a new revival strategy is being developed following the failed prime-time relaunch. An Ending Without a Farewell What makes Striscia's apparent end unusual isn't the cancellation itself, TV shows end all the time, but the total absence of the kind of send-off a nearly four-decade institution might be expected to get. There's been no farewell special, no on-air goodbye from Ricci, Greggio or Iacchetti, no formal statement marking the close of a show that shaped how generations of Italians got both their news and their nightly comic relief. Instead, the ending has arrived in fragments: a missing line in a programming schedule, a CEO's evasive answer, and now, a set of social media accounts that simply stopped posting. For a program that built its identity on exposing what powerful institutions preferred not to say directly, there's a certain irony in how its own ending has played out: through omission, deflection, and a quiet transfer of login credentials, rather than the kind of straight, on-camera reveal Striscia itself spent 38 years specializing in.

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