Paramount Settles States’ Antitrust Lawsuit. Plus, ‘Lanterns’ Episode 6.

The Watch

Hosts Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss the legal settlement between Paramount and state attorneys general regarding antitrust concerns

Key takeaways

Paramount is nearing a settlement with state attorneys general, led by Rob Bonta, to resolve antitrust litigation regarding its merger plans.
Industry figures like Mike Schur have expressed significant concern that industry contraction and consolidation will reduce opportunities for creative workers.

Main topics

Paramount Antitrust Settlement
Warner Bros. Discovery Merger

Notable quotes

When you have contraction in an industry, It is not good for workers.

Conclusion

The episode provides a nuanced look at how corporate consolidation and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:05) I need supports to have to clear the room. Speaker 2 (0:08) Stand up and walk now. Speaker 1 (0:11) Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at TheRinger.com and joining me in the studio, first in line for one of Jon Stewart's panic rooms, it's Andy Greenwald! I thought Speaker 2 (0:25) we were calling them not, what is it, not necessarily panic room? Whatever Speaker 1 (0:29) it is, that's where you watch The Eagles. Speaker 2 (0:31) I'll tell you something. Every room I walk into is a panic room. You Speaker 1 (0:35) seem stable. You seem great. You seem even keel. Thanks. It was, um... A beautiful weekend here in Los Angeles. Speaker 2 (0:42) Weather was nice. Speaker 1 (0:43) The weather was nice. It's Speaker 2 (0:44) a Speaker 1 (0:44) Monday here. We're going to talk about lanterns. We're going to talk about the settlement between Paramount and the state's attorney generals who had sued them. Is Speaker 2 (0:54) it too late to get like barrister wigs as a prop for when we do legal talk? Is that something we have? It would probably Speaker 1 (0:59) be the most expertise we brought to the proceedings. Speaker 2 (1:03) That's what I'm saying. We need to distinguish somehow that we are not qualified. We Speaker 1 (1:07) got some other news and notes at the top. The Watch. Spotify.com, thewatchpod underscore at Instagram. You can watch us on YouTube at ringer-tv with the Ringer Prestige TV podcast. They're covering Slow Horses these days. Yeah, you can listen to us on Spotify where you can watch us. You can listen to us on all sorts of podcast platforms. National Public Radio. Can you listen to us there? No, but I always have a dream of just doing away with this whole persona that I've built up and just being like, I'm with Andy Greenwald. We're going to talk about episode six of Lanterns. Have Speaker 2 (1:39) you Speaker 1 (1:39) ever listened to my solo podcast? No, honestly. No, but that's kind of my brand. No, I've listened to your work. I think it's wonderful. You're familiar. Yeah. Which part do you like best? How are you doing, bud? Donnie Candles, the Eagles, Victorious? Where do you want to start with real life? No, no. I think we Speaker 2 (1:57) should do that after dark. Okay, after dark. I Speaker 1 (1:58) think we Speaker 2 (1:58) should do it. Speaker 1 (1:59) Let's talk about the biggest news in Hollywood, which is I had a whole A block dedicated to the various leaks that have been coming out over the last four days. David Ellison taking out the tape measure and sizing up some office space in Tennessee. The subsequent hysteria that came out after it was announced that Paramount was starting to look at moving to Nashville in earnest. Then there were discussions over the weekend, leaks over the weekend about how negotiations were ongoing between a group of state's attorney generals led by... California Attorney General Rob Bonta with Paramount over the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers. There was discussions about penalties that would be incurred if they didn't release 30 movies a year. All sorts of business was getting out into the streets. As we were driving in today, it was announced that a settlement is nigh, if not already official, or I think it will be made official today. So we'll operate as if it's going to happen and hopefully... Speaker 2 (3:02) Yeah, I just want to say how heroic you are. This is not unlike Jeff Daniels in season one of The Newsroom when he had an A-block planned and then we got Osama bin Laden and he just bravely crossed out everything. Speaker 1 (3:14) Well, in this case, it would be if Jeff Daniels, who played Will McAvoy. Goddamn, wow. Speaker 2 (3:18) What a pull. Speaker 1 (3:20) Yeah, and I'm sure he and Don were kind of in a corner being like, how should we approach this A-block? And I bet that A-block would have been, when are we going to get Osama bin Laden? And then it was, we got him. So in that case, my A block was just, what's up with this merger? Speaker 2 (3:33) No, I think honestly then it's like, when are we going to get Osama bin Laden? And then the A block becomes US bin Laden reach super cool truce. Speaker 1 (3:42) Yeah. I want to ask you about this on a couple of different levels. Sure. Let's start in a place of personal professional interest. Thank you so much. You Speaker 2 (3:54) know, you really can't think global until you act local. Speaker 1 (3:56) Well, I wanted to ask you more than like as a industry watcher or a podcaster about television, but as somebody who works within it and kind Speaker 2 (4:05) of Speaker 1 (4:06) has one foot in, one foot out, you know? Which foot? What does this mean? And what does this mean to you as a creative person working in Hollywood that this has happened? Speaker 2 (4:16) I mean, I think that it is important to note that all of the industry unions were very, very vociferously against this. Mike Schur, creator of Parks and Rec and The Good Place, penned a pretty strongly worded op-ed in Hollywood Reporter about why the creative community is against this. I mean, I think there are so many ways to consider this entire deal. And obviously the most important one is the great unknown of what is to come. But I think generally when you have contraction in an industry, It is not good for workers. It is not good for people whose job it is to try to have a robust open market in which to sell their goods. There are increasingly limited options for creatives, both whether it's someone trying to sell a show or someone who is just a working gaffer trying to make a living in this town to ply their trade. And not only are there now fewer options and fewer potential... buyers, but there is, there's more likely to be a continuation of what has already been the case within the industry, which is a sort of low key suppression where the bigger players will say like, this is the money we're paying for this. And, and now look, you could be on the other side of it and you could say that, um, and this is absolutely what the more technocratic, uh, or just fully tech bros who have taken over the industry say, which is. you kind of can't have a healthy business run on handshakes, backslaps, and we'll get you on the back end kind of deals. I mean, so much of the success and largesse of Hollywood has been based on that, on personal relationships, on, you know, this is the union scale for the job you're doing, but we're going to sign you to an overall deal that reflects everything that you're doing for the company and to reward you for success and blah, blah, blah. It is not unreasonable from a purely capitalist point of view to say that that is unsustainable and potentially inequitable. But the flip side of it, which is there are now going to be five buyers, whereas a few years ago there were eight or nine, is just, that's just bad news. And that is before you even get into the very complicated specifics of what the Ellisons, what Paramount represent. what they've done in the past with their increased power and where they may go in the future with what is now just becoming an almost comically insane amount of debt. Speaker 1 (6:47) It is a comically insane amount of debt that's going to result in inevitable job losses. Especially Speaker 2 (6:52) because of the redundancy. Yeah, of the Speaker 1 (6:54) redundancy, but also as soon as you come into a situation, as David Zaslav proved when he bought Warner Brothers or merged Warner Brothers with Discovery in the first place, is that when you bring it, when you're buying something mostly with debt, and even though there is a lot of... liquidity around this deal. It does seem like there is also a lot of financing going into this deal from what I can understand. It's just going to be a lot of like changes made to the landscape of television and for the people who, who work in it. And I think there will be less jobs and that sucks. Um, you know, I've been trying to imagine what I would think about this situation if the players were different. And if, if maybe just some of the names were different, if, Speaker 1 (7:37) Paramount was trying to buy Peacock or if Peacock was trying to buy HBO or if Netflix had won the bidding and bought Warner Brothers and now Batman and the DC Universe and Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and all these things were under the control of a Netflix regime that I think we've had some questions about like the quality control over the last couple of years or at least I have in terms of like you know this kind of cheeseburger style television and and i don't know i mean i i think ultimately Speaker 1 (8:12) What stunned me about the announcement, not stunned me, but what I kind of came away from with the announcement is how hard it is to kind of shake these people down when it's all lawsuits and there's no actual government oversight of these things. Maybe Speaker 2 (8:28) nudging things towards what might be the better outcome or more equitable outcome or this idea that everyone wins when there is more competition. And if Speaker 1 (8:36) you have a Federal Trade Commission that's probably going to... be doing whatever it is that the president wants you to be doing. And then the president is going to be looking out for the people who have been there for him financially and support wise over the years. Then it's easy to just kind of throw your arms up. I guess I'll reserve judgment and see how these things shake out in terms of what we get to watch and how they get made and what Speaker 2 (9:03) quality they are. I mean, it's not. It's not as simple or reductive a binary as we might like it to be. Like, I don't know the man, but when David Ellison says that he venerates and adores Hollywood, that he wants to have 30 movies in theaters a year, that he believes that he alone can fix it, which, by the way, is not always a winning strategy historically, but that he's... His main goal here is to preserve the legacy of film studios making movies and releasing them in theaters and working in Los Angeles, except if he doesn't get what he wants and then he's going to move everyone to Nashville, which, by the way, is some real shitty gangster stuff. If we take him at his word, then maybe we do need the billionaires to save us. But, you know, as a former Washington Post subscriber, I once said the same thing out loud. Like, it's... You're Speaker 1 (9:54) missing some incredible op-eds, man. Yo. Really? Speaker 2 (9:57) It's really opening my mind. That's fantastic. One of my favorite op-eds recently was the New York Times over the weekend said, Trump has finally lost the plot. And I was like, the plot to Jeffrey Eugenides' marriage plot? Like, what are we, how thin are we slicing this garlic, Paul Cervino? Anyway, it's not necessarily that the shows that we watch in the short term are going to be ruined. Like, I apologize for this, that usually... There's a bad pattern I have when I'm reading a book that's quite long. I will bring it up on successive podcasts until I'm done. So I'm bringing up the fact that I am reading this HBO book for Tinderbox. And one of the things that it really reminded me of... It's an oral history written by Jim Miller. Speaker 1 (10:35) Jim Speaker 2 (10:35) Miller, yeah. But like how the Time Warner merger in the 90s was catastrophic. Everyone's like HBO is doomed. But HBO was so... uniquely successful and culturally whole that it survived. Then there was the AOL merger, which was even more catastrophic. And HBO plugged on. HBO has continued to thrive and succeed in this Zaslav era. I think Casey has Speaker 1 (11:01) been pretty public being like, plus a chance. Like, this is always been... This is Speaker 2 (11:05) what we do. And so the worry that you're hearing is definitely downstream from this moment. It is not that HBO is now in existential peril. or that the wire is going to be remade with the good guys and bad guys swapped or something. That's not where we're headed. Only Speaker 1 (11:27) this strong-willed politician, Clay Davis, can turn the tide. With the will of Speaker 2 (11:33) the people. So I just think it is a... It's concerning and it's distressing and your point about like, you know, who's in charge of it? Look, I mean, I try to be as transparent as I can about these things, but like I am working for HBO. I work for Netflix. I'm working for Amazon. I've done work for Paramount. Like I, the personal relationships and the- It's just Speaker 1 (11:57) fingerprints all over you, man. I am, Speaker 2 (11:59) I am not the, I am an imperfect vessel. Yeah. for outsider rallying cries of change. But as someone who is trying to navigate all this, I just think it's a larger bummer for the industry. And I think I would feel that way no matter who was buying who and what was potentially being contracted. Speaker 1 (12:16) I'm trying to think of if there's anything else about this that we could even begin to speak to. I Speaker 2 (12:22) think your point that you made earlier too about it being ultimately the states I think had Speaker 2 (12:30) they had momentum in the sense that like, is anyone rooting for this merger other than the Ellisons and the White House? Like, is anyone like, this is awesome. I can't wait for this merger. No, they had the wind at their backs in that sense. And I think the delay of discovery into a trial in March was costing Paramount dearly, as you saw from some of their behavior. But there was a Speaker 1 (12:54) note in one of the articles that Speaker 2 (12:55) have Speaker 1 (12:55) gone up, I believe it was in Bloomberg, that the... Several states were basically like, we don't have the money to fight this. This Speaker 2 (13:02) is Speaker 1 (13:02) where you get into like, if you don't have a mechanism in place that's dependable, that adjudicates these kinds of situations, then you wind up getting into a pissing contest with the richest man in the world. Well, the Speaker 2 (13:17) other one is also on that side. Right. So like if we really want to live in this world where... it is a race to the bottom of just oligarchs controlling every single aspect of everything we do, which for the moment, we're just greasing it and that's what we're doing. Well, I've got good news for you today. But again, we are now talking about things much larger than the usual remit of this podcast. Speaker 1 (13:41) Okay. Let's talk about what we usually talk about on this podcast, which is actual TV. Now, I'll just do a bit of housekeeping and say that we'll split Thursday's show. Andy and I will talk about Slow Horses Episode 2 a bit and some other stuff. And then I think Van and I are going to talk about the entirety of really one of the crowning achievements of David Ellison's young career, which is Lioness. And it's the conclusion of Season 3. You know, I don't want to spoil anything for our listeners who maybe haven't caught up at the end of Lioness. It was a busy Sunday. Speaker 2 (14:11) Yeah, that would include me. Speaker 1 (14:14) Where would you say on your to-do list it ranked yesterday? of watching maybe like 22 episodes of the show to catch up for the finale. Speaker 2 (14:23) Yeah, I mean, it was on my, I make a little cheat sheet for the day, you know? Do you? Yeah, to sort of like optimize Speaker 1 (14:29) my- Do Speaker 2 (14:29) you Speaker 1 (14:29) have Speaker 2 (14:29) a GTD kind of Speaker 1 (14:30) system for your life or do you? Well, you know, I- That's us for getting things done. Speaker 2 (14:35) Not to, I had no idea because I never do. Not to offer too much of a peek behind the curtain here, but I think a week or two ago, we talked about like how I make my show notes in the same notes app doc. that is interspersed with like a grocery list. Yeah, for sure. So currently, just so you have some insight into this, I have this week's notes on lanterns. Speaker 1 (14:58) Then Speaker 2 (14:58) I have like six things I have to do before my plane tomorrow. And then I have last week's lanterns somehow because I kind of jumped backwards. So to your point is, even if I wrote down, watch 23 hours of extractions. on Paramount, I don't think I would have noticed my note in time to do Speaker 1 (15:14) it. I'll tell you one thing that happened. Sure. A surprise extraction happened. Speaker 2 (15:18) You can tell me anything and I'd believe you. At the end of Speaker 1 (15:19) this line of season, which is Joe was extracted from her family. What? That's Speaker 2 (15:23) a Speaker 1 (15:23) beautiful family. Well, Speaker 2 (15:24) it just turned out Speaker 1 (15:24) Dave Annabelle weighed no longer. He was just like, just one too many trucks to get Mo. And I'm no longer going to be home brewing up a hot pot of coffee or...