Decline and carriage disputes
Throughout 2015 and 2016, the majority of the original programs produced for Esquire Network were canceled due to low ratings, with only the youth football reality series Friday Night Tykes and the network's Men in Blazers–produced live broadcasts of Pamplona's Running of the Bulls receiving any critical acclaim or notice. The rest of its lineup was criticized for depending on derivative and "copycat" formats of better programming, which was often found on other networks or produced for free consumption independently and uploaded to streaming video providers such as YouTube and Vimeo. After only several months, the network discontinued airing repeats of Late Night after then-host Jimmy Fallon moved to The Tonight Show in February 2014, which NBC refused to air repeats of on cable television.
American Ninja Warrior, which first premiered on G4, was expected to be on Esquire Network's original lineup, with its fifth season scheduled to premiere in summer 2013 on the network, but with the delay of the network's launch to September 2013, NBCUniversal opted not to wait until then for the season premiere, and the program had success airing on NBC during the summer as repeats in previous seasons. The show's sixth season, which had been taped expecting to air as part of Esquire Network and visually featured its logo in prominent places, then moved to NBC for the 2014 summer season, and airing as a new season on the broadcast network, which had high ratings and subsequent popularity. NBCUniversal decided to move the series permanently to NBC, leaving Esquire Network with repeats rather than to air new episodes, and even before its launch, removing one of the network's G4-era critical series from being used to promote its other content.
Although it did receive a spin-off as consolation, Team Ninja Warrior, Esquire Network had no other compatible programming to promote it, and it never broke into the top 100 cable shows in any of its first season airings. It was moved to USA Network for its second season and beyond.
Press attention for the network's programming soon was limited to network promotions of their premieres, then to their eventual notice of cancellation, including little to no promotion from Esquire magazine itself due to a lack of compatible promotion. The magazine, which under the brand licensing deal was expected to be used to source new series ideas or its writers participating in factual programming such as countdowns, was also severely underutilized, with most of the content developed for the network ending up being from traditional talent pipelines used by NBCUniversal, rather than the magazine itself.
Due to these multiple issues, the network began to carry more repeats of existing library comedy and drama series (many of which were seen over-the-air for free on sister networks Cozi TV, LXTV, and NBC's streaming apps, along with other NBCU networks), which again brought the network towards the same issues as other defunct NBCU channels including G4, Chiller, and Cloo, where little original content being produced made it a network viewers and providers claimed provided little value for its monthly carriage fees.
On October 1, 2016, Dish Network removed the channel from the lineup, alongside the removal of Cloo several months earlier, the provider stated that most of the network's rerun-centric programming was duplicative of that available on other networks and streaming services. The only notice of the removal was through the provider's monthly billing statement. AT&T then gave notice that Esquire Network would be removed from U-verse and DirecTV on December 15, 2016, a move that cut the network's availability by 25% and removed almost all consumer-based satellite service availability outside of niche C-Band consumers.[11][12] Charter Communications through its Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Spectrum subsidiaries removed the channel from their lineup nationwide on April 25, 2017 (the same day they removed Chiller from their lineup, also nationwide), leaving Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber as some of the last cable providers to carry Esquire Network until its closure; online access to the network's TV Everywhere live feed was maintained by Charter until the network's shutdown.
