manner that would be more compelling to viewers. In 1994, Scripps began an agreement with ESPN to broadcast coverage of the national finals; the network added a larger focus on analysis and profiles on the competitors. The broadcasts were credited with having brought greater prominence to the event. ESPN would later expand its coverage to encompass the early rounds of the competition as well, and added features such as a "play-along" broadcast on its streaming platforms. In May 2006, it was announced that the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee would be moved to primetime on ESPN's sister broadcast network ABC, with Robin Roberts of ESPN and Good Morning America serving as host. ABC executives positioned the primetime broadcast as a form of reality television, while the move came on the heels of the release of Akeelah and the Bee—a drama film based on the event. By 2013, the ABC broadcast had been dropped, with the finals returning exclusively to ESPN. In October 2021, Scripps announced that the event's broadcast would move to its co-owned broadcast television networks Bounce TV and Ion Television beginning in 2022; the company promoted that the event would be "accessible to the widest audience in its nearly 100-year history". In popular culture Fiction The drama film Bee Season (2005), based on Myla Goldberg's novel of the same name, follows a young girl's journey through various levels of spelling-bee competition to the Scripps National Spelling Bee, as did the drama film Akeelah and the Bee (2006). The 2nd episode of season 1 of Psych, "Spellingg Bee", dealt with a murder during a Spelling Bee event. Contestants in the musical-comedy play The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which ran on Broadway starting in 2005, are competing for a spot in the National Spelling Bee. The 2013 film Bad Words revolves around a forty-year-old eighth grade dropout (Jason Bateman) attempting to win a fictional equivalent of the SNSB. Nonfiction The Netflix documentary Spelling the Dream (2020) chronicles the ups and downs of four Indian-American students as they compete to realize their dream of winning the iconic Scripps National Spelling Bee. The Academy Award-nominated documentary film Spellbound (2002) follows eight competitors, including eventual national winner Nupur Lala, through the 1999 competition. The book American Bee, by James Maguire, profiles five spellers who made it to the final rounds of the competition Samir Patel, Katharine Close, Aliya Deri,