Too Much TV: Hollywood Rolls Out The Least Effective Way To Oppose The Paramount Merger

Here’s everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, April 13th, 2026:

WOULD IT BE TACKY TO SAY 'I TOLD YOU SO?'
When Netflix was still in the running to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, various Hollywood creatives and movie industry journalists railed against the streamer gaining control of the legendary studio. The trades were filled with thinkpieces about Netflix's possible plans for the WBD theatrical business, and there were complaints across the industry press highlighting theatrical windows and the possibility that Netflix was going to somehow "ruin" Warner Brothers.

My point of view was that complaining about WBD being sold was pointless. It was going to happen. And if that is the case, then Netflix was going to be the best steward of that studio's legacy. It wanted the Warner lot, and it saw this deal as their chance to acquire a turnkey theatrical and television production business. Yes, there would likely be some job losses. But nowhere near the level that would happen under a Paramount Skydance ownership that was buried in a mountain of debt.

So it's a bit frustrating to me that it wasn't until Netflix withdrew its offer and the reality of a Paramount Skydance future hit, did Hollywood's movers and shakers finally realize maybe this wasn't such a great idea.

Which brings us to today, when a letter signed by more than 1,000 writers, actors and directors said Paramount’s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery deal would harm Hollywood’s already distressed entertainment industry:

Our industry is already under severe strain, in large part due to prior waves of consolidation. We have witnessed a steep decline in the number of films produced and released, alongside a narrowing of the kinds of stories that are financed and distributed. Increasingly, a small number of powerful entities determine what gets made—and on what terms—leaving creators and independent businesses with fewer viable paths to sustain their work.

Media consolidation has accelerated the disappearance of the mid-budget film, the erosion of independent distribution, the collapse of the international sales market, the elimination of meaningful profit participation, and the weakening of screen credit integrity.

Together, these factors threaten the sustainability of the entire creative community. That includes endangering the professional lives of the tens of thousands of workers who help make up that community in predominantly small businesses and independent companies embedded in local economies and communities nationwide.

I have no doubt the people signing this petition mean well and I am sure they are sincere. But this is the type of thing that should have happened months ago. Waiting until the deal is nearly completed to sign your name to a meaningless petition is the definition of the phrase "the least possible thing you can do." It is literally the celebrity equivalent of people signing a petition asking for their favorite doomed TV show to be saved.

I believe Paramount Skydance's takeover of WBD will be a disaster for everyone except David Zaslav and some top WBD executives. This merger could have been stopped. But that point was months ago. Or at the very least, some of the same Hollywood creatives finally making their complaints public now could have rallied behind Netflix's offer. Which might have been enough to save that deal. And by extension, save a lot of the jobs everyone is now concerned about losing.

YOU HAD TO WORK HARD TO MISS AMC'S NEW SERIES 'THE AUDACITY'
I continue to be impressed by the development team at AMC. While not every show has been a hit, their track record for creating interesting shows that are worth watching is as good as any other network or streamer. 

The latest series The Audacity premiered last night, and while I was lukewarm on the series, I wanted to highlight AMC's aggressive marketing decisions. 

The series was of course available on AMC's linear network and on-demand. But TikTok users could also watch the show in 21 three-minute segments. That TikTok deal also included outreach to some entertainment creators to do tie-in posts that push to the clips. Samsung TV Plus simulcast the premiere episode on its Samsung TV Network (which is available on Samsung televisions). Samsung TV owners were also reminded that they can subscribe to a three-month free trial of AMC+, which would allow them to watch future episodes. 

And if you are a Charter Spectrum subscriber, you likely noticed ads highlighting the fact that AMC+ is now available for free as part of your subscription, and one reason to watch is the new series The Audacity. And if you leave home, out-of-home ad-tech firm Captivate is showing clips on digital screens in office elevators. 

All of this is another example of the challenges of marketing a new series in 2026. The audience is fragmented into so many diverse segments, and networks have to follow those potential viewers wherever they might be found.

THE MEMORY ECONOMY
For all the talk of the importance of owning a big media catalog and all the potential IP that catalog might include, the truth is that only a small sliver of that material is ever used. A depressingly large amount of old TV shows, movies, random footage and other material sits in vaults never to be accessed by anyone.

Which seems like a strange decision on the face of things. But as Andy Beach writes in his newsletter Andy Beach's Engines Of Change, that dynamic is pretty easy to understand. Because archives were never meant to be used:

Nobody set out to build a storage system that couldn’t be used. It happened one handoff at a time.

Studios are sitting on decades of accumulated material: original camera footage, alternate cuts, production stems, localization masters, promotional variants, performance captures, behind-camera documentation that never made it into a final deliverable. The volume is real. The problem is not volume.

Rights are distributed across filing systems, contracts, and the institutional memory of people who left years ago. Lineage has been flattened at every stage, because the pipeline was built to move the finished artifact forward, not to carry the decisions that shaped it. The relationship between an original performance and its derivatives still exists, but in most catalogs it survives only as fragments spread across systems, contracts, and memory.

Most media libraries are not underutilized. They are structurally unreadable.

The asset exists. The context that would make it computable does not. And without that context, the archive cannot tell you what you own well enough to use it.

If you want to find a piece of footage from Seinfeld or one of the Harry Potter films, that process is pretty easy to do. But figuring out whether a studio owns a usable copy of a one-season television show that few people remember is almost impossible. And to bring it to a streamer would require spending much more money than you could ever recoup using it in a modern setting.

ODDS AND SODS
* I wrote a review of the new Netflix action thriller Thrash, which is the summer shark attack movie you've been waiting for.

* Season two of Black Sands will premiere Thursday, May 14th on Viaplay.

* If you enjoy inspirational soccer stories, but find Welcome To Wrexham a bit overblown, check out the seven-part YouTube series Owning Eastbourne, the attempted turnaround story of Eastbourne Borough FC.

* If you are wondering why you can no longer watch the popular 1980s SNL sketch, "Jackie Rogers Jr.’s $100,000 Jackpot Wad," this Latenighter piece has the answer.

* The satiric soccer series Twenty Twenty Six will be premiering on Friday, May 1st in the U.S. on both BritBox and Tubi.

* This will probably only matter to a very specific slice of readers, but Nickelodeon has finally officially released "The Cat/Dog Theme Song"

CONFESSIONS OF A CANCEL BEAR
In his newsletter The Data Stream, Rick Porter writes about the old web site TV By The Numbers and his run as that site's "Cancel Bear:"

People in the industry started to notice — including Kathy Bates, who was then the star of an NBC show called Harry’s Law. It premiered in January 2011 and had a decent-sized total audience, but one that leaned toward older viewers. The Bear gave a grudging thumbs-up to the show in its first season but came after it in season two, when it had NBC’s lowest 18-49 ratings but still a decent-sized total viewer count. “Some of these people are just so stupid,” Bates said in an interview with EW. “I don’t even get it…. All [they] talk about is the blessed [18-49] demo this, demo that, and how the cancellation bear is gonna eat us and all that stuff.”