Do you really need to ask? They did that, because that is what they sold for money to a client. The money made them stupid, short-sighted, and ultimately led to a bad judgement call.
>we developed an unpaid collaboration to engage our users and viewers of the show in a new way
Assuming no other non-monetary favours (in which case this apology would be pretty disingenuous), I don't think spending resources on a marketing campaign for a TV show the majority of the users do not care about for free is a good and responsible thing to do as a non profit. Not to mention the circumventing the end user part.