Why That Peacock-Paramount Plus Rollup Seems Inevitable

Explosive Next TV writers Daniel Frankel and David Bloom emerged from the long Fourth of July holiday weekend with all of their digits intact.

DANIEL FRANKEL: Happy 4th of July Super-Long Weekend, David. Even the biggest decision-makers in the TMT business seem to be having a hard time not focusing on the election. From Reed Hastings to Barry Diller to Abigail Disney, everyone seems to want Joe to go.

Also read: Netflix Co-Founder Reed Hastings Sticks His Neck Out on Biden Debate

DAVID BLOOM: Biden is pushing back, but yes, the chorus of "Time, Gentleman," is getting rather deafening, especially in a week where the Brits ushered out 14 years of Tory rule, handing a record landslide victory to the not-particularly-enchanting Keir Starmer. Starmer's main pitch boiled down to one word, plastered everywhere: change.

The question with Biden is different, because the "change" would be to another old man of uncertain mental faculties and a far more problematic record. Biden arguably spent much of his four years just cleaning up The Don's many messes at home and abroad. The other problem with "change" now is change to what? Does the VP ascend? Does Joe order a Seal Team Six hit on Trump as he leaves (the Supremes basically said it's a go)?

Or do Dem heavyweights christen someone else, in classic 19th Century smoke-filled room fashion, who hasn't even been out on a national campaign like Kamala Harris? Those choices don't sound so great either. Maybe we should all just vote for Bobby "Parasite Brain" Kennedy Jr. In the meantime, I'm playing the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go" as the week's most pertinent political commentary, even if the song is an impossible 43 years old:

FRANKEL: It's interesting to watch folks with a lot to lose stick their necks out politically, but the stakes are pretty high ... and the heat is on ... Speaking of which, I just watched Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F , and the whole experience felt quite a bit better than the 65% score on Rotten Tomatoes would have led me to believe. Some decent elbow grease in this retread. You're the film guy -- what happened here? How did things go ... so right?

BLOOM: 1.) Eddie Murphy is still a generational talent, even if he hasn't flexed much in far too long; 2.) You can build a credible sequel if the creative vein hasn't been tapped out amid repeated recent efforts, unlike some overworked mines (cough, Marvel); 3.) Reviving three-decade-old franchises successfully is possible, with smart handling. Top Gun, of course, grabbed $1.45 billion in global gross last year, but this summer's Bad Boys: Ride or Die has also done well. It received strong reviews and $338 million in global gross despite starring the Slapmeister himself, Will "Desperately Seeking Redemption" Smith;

4.) Netflix, so anything is possible, especially with Murphy. Speaking of unexpected sequels, David Ellison and crew appear back in good graces with Shari Redstone/Paramount, though after an agreement by the Paramount board Sunday, now we get to endure a 45-day "go shop" period where she can look for even better deals from Barry Diller or others.

Also read: Paramount Global Agrees to Merge with David Ellison’s Skydance, Jeff Shell Named President

Also, maybe Cerberus the Paramount CEO will go ahead and finally sell BET and perhaps make a deal to staunch Paramount Plus's billion-dollar profit drain with a merger at Max or Peacock. You're the streaming guy. What's happening here?

FRANKEL: This is 3D chess that suits you far better than me, but I've always suspected that Paramount Plus will eventually find itself in partnership with Comcast domestically, as it has in Europe with SkyShowtime.

Also read: Comcast and Paramount Talk About Combining U.S. Streaming Services

Even on a week featuring a holiday smack-dab in the middle, there's business to discuss: bankrupt Bally Sports lost two more NHL teams , and Netflix finally eighty-sixed its best value tier , the ad-free Basic. But I still want to talk about stuff on TV. You know, I vacillate wildly on my opinions of Hulu's The Bear , and I'm starting to think I'm not alone.

I binged through Season 1 in January and spouted off in this space that I found the whole widely lauded enterprise a little overblown and pretentious. Then I stumbled on the absolute revelation that was the Jamie Lee Curtis-led, guest-star-packed "Seven Fishes" episode in Season 2, and I totally backtracked. But like The New York Times and a lot of other folks, I find Christopher Storer's highly montaged and stylized third season really uneven and unfulfilling. I made it to Episode 8 ("Ice Chips") and found Curtis' reprisal of her manic matriarchal role really, really good. But that's the only highlight I can note having chewed through 80% of Season 3.

BLOOM: I’m still pro- Bear , though I’m not quite as far along in Season 3 as you are. There’s still time for disillusion. I do think they cheated with S3’s first episode, which skips back and forth in time like one huge recap. That contextualized various story lines for those who hadn’t watched in a year, but it was confusing enough that my spouse demanded we watch it a second time, stopping every few shots for me to provide color commentary: this scene was from before Carmy went to New York, and that’s the brother who killed himself later. For all the cheap episode creation here (at least there are 10 episodes instead of eight, or even six), Storer does an excellent job giving secondary characters full spotlights about their stories beyond the restaurant, and of dramatically shifting tone between episodes. When it came time to watch episode 2, we weren’t in a good place, and had to stop watching the chaotic, argument-filled noise-fest. It was too much to, um, bear at that difficult moment. A few days later, we tried again, and enjoyed it. I loved the pre-credit montage/love letter featuring quick shots of working people in the Chicago food industry. Even better, it was accompanied by an excellent, meditative Eddie Vedder cover of one of my all-time favorite songs, the English Beat’s propulsive 1982 hit Save It For Later.

Vedder’s version has been in my heavy rotation ever since, another of the show’s great needle drops, even as I ponder whether a Peacock-Paramount Plus pair-up is actually enough to get them both to viability. A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times talked to a baker’s dozen of big names in entertainment who collectively opined that the magic number for sustainable success in streaming is 200 million subscribers.

Netflix is there, Disney’s three services are kind of there, and everyone else is sub-scale and sub-profitable. The P-PP pair-up actually only gets about two-thirds of the way there. So, who joins next? Max? CrunchyRoll? Fox Nation? Certainly not Biggest Loser Starz. Here’s an idea: Sony, which doesn’t have a streaming service, but makes lots of fine shows for everyone else. They’d bring value, if not a subscriber base. And of course, wouldn’t things have been so much simpler, and more profitable, if all these empire builders had just stayed on Hulu, and split the resulting sturdy, reliable profits year after year like normal aging plutocrats cashing in their bond coupons?

FRANKEL: I've had that Vedder cover in my head for a week. Totally agree. Same with Nine Inch Nails' Together .

And I'll give Storer further credit for making me able to stomach odiously earnest Adam Duritz and Counting Crows for the first time since 1993, with that re-mix of  the legit classic The Murder of One at the end of S3:E9.

Moving on, and I'll put this analogously, as to protect what's left of my career ... and the delicate feelings of certain under-the-radar Hollywood trade executives who also assign movie reviews (or oversee those who do) of films for which they have top-line credit on. What if a tree falls in the forest, and only the lumberjack's friend is around to hear it and document the event? The friend makes full disclosure -- up high! -- in his journal that it was the lumberjack himself who hired him to take notes ... And the friend wasn't effusive about the felling (this time) -- It was only just an OK cut. Just because the lumberjack is paying him, the friend doesn't want you to think of him as fawning. But was there, in fact, a first-class, action-packed, heart-rending sound of a cedar pine falling at all? And is sound, ethical forestry being practiced by the, er, he Saudi-backed arborists? ... who have, on numerous occasions in the past, haughtily deemed themselves arbiters as to who should be allowed to cut wood? I mean, screw the disclosure. The sound of this tree's felling, on its own merits and without the aid of the lumberjack's publicity tools, might not have otherwise been loud enough to attract attention required to even justify a Rotten Tomatoes score . But the lumberjack knows how to exploit his connections to draw attention to his own work. It's a competitive advantage -- a rigging of the system -- that not many others in the forest can benefit from. Heck, he seems to do it every time he cuts down a goddamned tree. Like ol' Merle, the grift has proven quite durable. Oh, and not for nothin', check out Variety 's review of Heart Strings . And check out the trailer. Film does look interesting.

BLOOM: Not for nothin’ indeed. There was a reason that earlier Steve Gaydos film was called, in a divine cosmic joke, Road to Nowhere, because that’s where it went. Variety has a long and complicated history of dancing around the business it covers. Not long before I joined Variety back in 2001, Los Angeles magazine outed kingmaker/editor/"Most Feared Man in Hollywood” Peter Bart for trying to sell a script of his, in direct contravention of company rules. The resulting kerfuffle minimally damaged Peter’s princely powers; he still ran the publication, and the town, for some years to come, and was an entertainingly biting columnist for many years after that. These days, conflicts at the Penske Awards Media-Industrial Complex are far bigger than the one that reviewer Joe Leydon honorably outlines in his first sentence. And if punches were pulled in his resulting review, they were at least thrown: “passably pleasant but utterly predictable” seems to at least edge toward the rotten side of the tomato scale. That said, I look forward to giving a glowing review to the no-doubt imminent release of your trenchant, semi-autobiographical script based on your days coaching youth baseball in Hollywood, Balls to the Wall.

FRANKEL: Well sir, if you're saying you want me to recollect the high point of my youth athletic coaching career, Wilshire Warriors 12U All Star Baseball's stirring 1-0 ninth-inning win over powerful Simi Valley on July 5, 2018 comes to mind. Standard six-inning Bronco Division frame went into extras -- all the way to the ninth inning. Each team had only a single hit at that point amid masterful pitching performances. In the dying light, a "California Tiebreaker" took hold -- each team started its inning with an out and a runner on second. In the bottom of the ninth, our pitcher/first-baseman Ben Escobar, now playing D-1 college ball at Xavier University, hit a walk-off RBI single, scoring Kelvin Martinez (who would become a three-year varsity third-baseman at Gardena Serra High School here in L.A.). Best youth ball game I was ever part of. Our Warriors, who started as a scrappy "B Team" and who had won just three games all season a year earlier, earned a PONY District Championship that night. I still have a giant banner I don't know what to do with. The parents, mostly Hollywood lawyers and producers, lost their giddy minds. Glory days, they'll pass you by ... but they live on via the internet.

Now, we could get into that Netflix rom-com with Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron, A Family Affair . Mildly decent safe ... family fun.

BLOOM: I’m more intrigued at the moment, though, with the world's most-watched video streaming service: YouTube. Needham & Co. Sr. Analyst Laura Martin put out a research note last week pondering what YouTube would be worth as a standalone company, should the European Union someday break up Alphabet for antitrust reasons. She actually gives several compelling reasons why a breakup would be good for Alphabet and its shareholders, but along the way, she estimated YouTube’s standalone value. Based on three methodologies (revenue, users, engagement), Martin came up with an eye-popping range of $455 billion to $624 billion. For comparison, No. 2 most-watched service Netflix has a market capitalization of just under $300 billion, and that’s after an epic 42% rise in its share price this year.  YouTube dominates online viewing by younger audiences, would benefit hugely from a TikTok ban, reaches 2.7 billion monthly users globally in 100 countries, generates $31.5 billion in ad revenue,  and has about 100 million subscribers to its YouTube TV, YouTube Premium, and YouTube Music services. Here’s a fun stat: 2.9 million YouTube channels have at least 10,000 subscribers. I wonder how many FAST channels can claim that level of fan connection?