Why We Can’t Be Bothered With TCA Anymore

Next TV writers Daniel Frankel and David Bloom argue all the time about who is the domestique and who wears the yellow jersey.

DAVID BLOOM: Happy Dog Days upon us, Dan'l! Still plenty to talk about, from the death of Redbox to Disney’s burly bundle power to the NBA deal about to be ratified without a certain longtime partner. We’ll soon find out whether Warner Bros. Discovery actually can live without the NBA, like Zaz said in an extremely impolitic moment. The NBA Board of Governors meets this week to ratify the record 11-year, $76 billion deal with Disney/ESPN/ABC, Comcast/NBC/Peacock, and Amazon. After that presumed big “hell, yes!” from league owners, WBD has five days to “match” any of the bidders. But after all the negotiations leading up to this moment, do you see any scenario where WBD suddenly wrests back a piece of the deal? A sudden purchase of CBS from Paramount, maybe? And if the deal is indeed done, what next for WBD, its cable networks, Venu involvement, and much else? Shares are already south of $8 a piece, down 36% total in 2024. Ugly.

DANIEL FRANKEL: Coming back at you from Helacio’s, pretty darned fine sandwich shop (with free Wi-Fi and a clean bathroom!) here in Berkeley, where I’m apartment shopping for my older son on this fine mid-July Friday. Second time here in a week. Went with the veggie again, while the son did a repeat on the roast beef. Got to tell them to toast the bread, but it's still top-notch. It’s brilliantly sunny and 72 degrees here. Sure, we saw a guy peeing on the door of a pizza restaurant at 9 a.m. And I did step on a syringe. But I'm pretty stoked the boy gets to go to school here.

Is Warner in position to match or buy anything? It seems like they already spent some of their shopping money on things like College Football Playoff rights, not to mention the French Open .

Also read: TNT To Sublicense College Football Playoff Game Rights From ESPN

I think this upcoming season will be a funeral march on TNT. It’s going to be a little dark. The league must know that. Maybe there’s some bone they can still break off to keep Turner loosely involved? I don’t known what that would be. And yes, it’s a huge loss for Venu.

BLOOM: Maybe they can buy that In-Season NBA Tournament, if Apple or Netflix don't pick it up. But the sharp words Charles Barkley has unsheathed so far for WBD leadership should only be further honed and eviscerating by next season’s end. Given the steady decline of WBD share prices, Wall Street looks like it’s already pricing in what the loss means for post-NBA WBD operations, especially cable carriage negotiations, Venu value and the rest.

WBD is definitely on the wrong side of change right now. I'll tell you who’s on the right side, which no doubt will grump your Lakers-loving soul: the Boston Celtics owners, who said, pretty much hours after the team won its 18th NBA championship, that they’re selling it.

Also read: The Celtics Are for Sale, but Not For the Reasons Many Think

Given that the Phoenix Suns (and their WNBA franchise Mercury) sold for $4 billion 18 months ago, the Kelts should go for a steep price, especially given the new TV deal, and the fact that the Suns have never won anything. Now, if everyone can just figure out their local TV deal, given Diamond Sports Group's slow-motion collapse.

Also read: Bally Sports Meltdown Accelerates: NHL’s Dallas Stars Set To Follow Stanley Cup Champion Florida Panthers Out of the RSN

Franchises can’t wait around much longer for that bankruptcy process to play out. They need to get TV in place ahead of the NHL and NBA seasons that start in about three months. You've been tracking this closely. What’s the latest?

FRANKEL: Diamond Sports Group, the bankrupt Sinclair subsidiary that manages the Bally Sports Channels, has a hard can't-delay-it-any-longer July 29 court date to present a restructuring plan. Without pay TV carriage via Comcast and Altice USA, and with significantly fewer NBA, NHL and MLB teams under its portfolio than when it arrived in Chapter 11 back in March 2023, Diamond will have to prove that it has a viable business model moving forward. It's league constituents aren't confident. Diamond very well could be in liquidation starting next month. And speaking of liquidation, writer Janko Roettgers went about as deep as anyone ever has on a niche media-tech bankruptcy, exposing the downright shockingly bad numbers tied the final days of Chicken Soup for the Soul and Redbox. This is worth a read. One lawyer brought in by Redbox to try to — against all odds — avoid liquidation said, “I have seen a lot, but I had not quite seen this before.” And say, I know I'm late to this Kendrick Lamar/Drake beef. The boy (Kellen) caught me up as we careened up and down the 5 this week in our rented Chevy Malibu (which is better than I expected). I don't get the cultural weight of this particular petty-seeming squabble. But damn, Mr. Lamar has a way with words.

BLOOM: Yeah, Janko’s piece is alarming. As the bankruptcy judge pointed out, the worst aspect of Redbox In the Soup is the 1,000 workers who suddenly lost back pay and health insurance in the dissolution. I don’t know if other streaming services are about to die off, too, but this wasn't a good sign, five years into the ruinously expensive modern streaming era. Same with MoffettNathanson’s announcement that it no longer will track AMC Networks and its bevy of niche cable networks and streaming services. Analyst Robert Fishman’s curt note didn’t explain the discontinuation, but the move suggests too few investors (and possibly customers) care about the stock to justify Fishman’s time.

Meanwhile, Mario Gabelli and Ariel Investments chairman John Rogers Jr. — both major long-time Paramount investors — weighed in negatively about Shari Redstone’s long-in-coming deal to sell Paramount and her family media company to a group led by David Ellison. Both told Barron’s in an unrelated general mid-year story that Redstone is getting an unfairly sweet deal. Gabelli said he’s “likely to activate ‘Operation Fish Bowl' — to put in place visibility of the process and the terms of the trade.” Late Friday, Gabelli’s company filed a “books and records demand" with Paramount to dive deeper into the deal. As owner of the second-biggest portion of Paramount voting stock, Gabelli wants the same deal Redstone gets.

Also read: Skydance May Not Be Able To Rescue Paramount From Junk-Bond Status, Credit Rating Agencies Say

Meanwhile, Rogers said, “We don’t feel that this complex proposed transaction reflects the underlying value of the company’s assets, and it continues to preferentially treat certain shareholders over others.” Deal approvals likely will take more than a year, given concerns like these and that new faces who almost certainly will be running federal regulators this winter regardless of who is elected president. That’s a long limbo for a loss-making company run by a committee of three division heads.

Ellison said on CNBC this week that he’s worked with those executives for years on movie projects, and trusts they’ll do the right thing with big issues such as deep staff cuts, selling BET, or merging Paramount Plus with another service. That’s to say, Ellison knows where to reach Cerberus if he has any issues before the deal closes. Ellison and backer Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital said, rather inanely, that storytelling and technology will help the reformed, reduced, resulting Paramount generate far more revenue in the future. We’ll see what story and technology they use, rather than still more cash, to make shareholders such as Gabelli and Rogers happy.

FRANKEL: The narrative our Jon Lafayette is hearing is that Ellison wants to keep control of streaming. That would seem to preclude a rollup into some joint venture that’s independently managed. I envision a marketing/bundling partnership. The Disney+/Hulu/Max/Par+ “Almost Everything” bundle for $19.99 with ads? $29.99 and you also get Venue Sports. That’s a value. Ampere Analysis had a report this week suggesting Disney Plus churn fades by 59% in the Disney Bundle. So it turns out that packaging shit works.

BLOOM: That definitely would be a bundle value at $19.99 a month, but I can’t imagine seeing a real price anywhere near that, ever. Way too many hands are digging into that theoretical pie to be satisfied with a piece smaller than what they get from cable operators. Have you not been watching the past five years of relentless price escalation amid self-defeating programming and operational decisions? Yes, bundling absolutely works, in the old cable days and in these new days, too. But that means you trim 10% of the cost of the combined services, not 75%. Much deeper savings seems antithetical to everything studio operators have learned the past half century, and something they couldn’t afford anyway.

In another blast from the past, I was interested to see the primacy of Hulu-FX's Shogun in this weekend’s TV Critics Association Awards . Not that the series doesn’t deserve the hosannas. It does. But mid-July is a weird time to hand out awards, even for critics, and even if it comes amid critics' traditional SoCal migration to hear highly processed conversations about each network’s coming fall programming. Do the TCAs matter one whit? Will these awards move any Emmy voter decisions? Will the awards dragoon a few extra viewers to check out Anna Sawai's sublime Shogun turn, for instance? For that matter, Max’s Hacks was another big winner, but Jean Smart has been winning Emmys longer than Sawai has been alive. Smart’s still going to get what Smart's going to get Emmy night. If an award is handed out in mid-July in a pricey Southern California hotel without a media line or TV deal, does anyone hear about it? This is about as philosophical as I get.

FRANKEL: I consider myself progressive, and I generally see DEI movements as a good thing. That said, I recall being at my last TCA event a dozen years ago and watching the, er, working press obsess about the raw numbers of onscreen diversity in the most pedantic way imaginable. Over and over again, day after day, the same questions. How many of X do you have in your show? How many of Y? Yes, representation matters … but to seemingly every TV writer there, for years and years, it was like it was the only thing worth asking about. It smothered every other topic. I know this will elicit some pushback from some folks who practice this dogma — how do we get there from here if we don't pay attention to this stuff? That’s a fair point. I guess it was just the way the questions were being framed. I can see making art with some guidelines, but not hard quotas.

Also read: Talk of diversity (or lack thereof) dominates TV press tour

To more concisely answer your question, TCA, to me, devolved, with the demise of the newspaper business into  … adult-children bloggers obsessing about TV show content. We have Comic-Con for that. And the panels just got so predictable and soft. Show-runners waxing on and on about “working with this amazing cast.” Talent blabbering on over and over again about working with “these amazing writers who challenge us every day.” Thy cup of hyperbole runneth seriously over. We still dispatch East Coast-situated members of our dwindling staff with our dwindling budget to cover TCA. It makes absolutely no sense to me that a business publication still does that, especially when I have to go through hoops to attend meaningful (to us) events like NAB.

BLOOM: Some of that event coverage feels like a reflex from an earlier time, tucked in the budget year after year, so don’t question it or we’ll just lose the junket and never get it back. But it started in a far different era, when newspaper TV critics from across the land gathered twice a year at the luxurious Huntington Hotel in Pasadena , to be spoon-fed weeks of star and showrunner and executive talk that would fill their notebooks. They’d then return home and mine those notebooks for material for months to come, once each finally arrived on air. Nowadays, all that stuff’s on social media in minutes, or live-streamed, long before most people still called critics make it back to their hotel room. The TCA still has a modest purpose as marketing amplifier, but yeah, it’s mostly a reflex these days in terms of journalistic uses.

By contrast, that long-ago head-counting exercise you recount actually served a significant purpose, given the extreme whitewashing of U.S. TV and film long past any possibly acceptable date. Isn’t it great that we no longer have Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi, a goofy, buck-toothed, myopic Chinese man, in Breakfast at Tiffany ’s? That’s only one of countless egregious examples from decades of baldly racist Hollywood productions. The head-counting was wildly deserved and necessary, if wildly tiresome in the moment. These days, Shogun ’s awards recognition represents a hard-won DEI victory The original James Clavell novel and network TV adaptation were all about the white dude surviving in an exotic land. This year’s remake still featured a noisy fish out of water (Cosmo Jarvis), but it was largely centered on exquisite performances by Japanese actors speaking largely in their native tongue. They did an excellent job portraying a dangerous, bloody and treacherous era when warlords vied for control as Westerners first arrived in Nippon. Big step forward for Hollywood creators and for U.S. audiences who made it a hit show.

FRANKEL: Listen, I can't wrap this up without noting the political violence directed at the Republican presidential nominee over the weekend. We have no doubt entered into a strange, dark place … again. Just senseless, cowardly and awful. As much as I despise MAGA and everything it stands for, you can't murder it. You can't stop ideas with violence. The only way you end ideas you don't like … is with better ideas. This is a major setback in many ways.