Paramount's boss blames CNN for everyone hating his merger

David Ellison spent a truly cosmic amount of money trying to fuse Paramount to Warner Bros, and this week he sat down in the New York Times to explain that the only reason anyone objects is CNN. Not the roughly six thousand jobs the L.A. County analysts say the thing could vaporize. Not the small matter of two of the last major studios standing wanting to become one slightly larger studio that will still, somehow, be broke. No — the holdup is that people are worried he'll turn a cable news network into his personal group chat. He wants you to know he won't. "I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views," he wrote, which is a sentence you only produce when several lawyers are standing behind you nodding slowly.

He also volunteered that he votes for candidates of both parties and holds "some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans." That's the way a man describes himself right before he asks to borrow your car for the weekend. Meanwhile the actual merger got quietly shoved to 2027 so a coalition of state attorneys general can sue it in a nice quiet courtroom. The biggest deal in entertainment is now a guy writing op-eds about his own character while the whole apparatus sits in a legal parking lot for eighteen months. Great. Anyway.

Reacher: Season 4 (Prime Video)

Alan Ritchson is back to being six foot five and a fully solved problem. Season 4's first three episodes dropped August 12, adapting "Gone Tomorrow," Lee Child's thirteenth book, except they've relocated the whole thing from the New York subway to the Philadelphia one — presumably because Philadelphia handed them a tax credit and a cheesesteak. It opens with Reacher watching a woman die on a train and deciding, as he does, that this is now his entire personality for eight episodes. You know exactly what you're getting. A very large man identifies an injustice and walks slowly toward it until it stops existing. After a week of executives explaining their souls in the newspaper, a show with zero interior life is weirdly restful. First three now, one a week through September.

✅ WORTH IT

Tires: Season 3 (Netflix)

Shane Gillis reopens the garage. Twelve new episodes landed August 13, still parked at the same failing Pennsylvania auto chain, still built almost entirely out of Gillis and Steve Gerben insulting each other next to a tire rack. The new season drags in Garret Dillahunt and Matt Walsh, which is what happens when a show nobody at Netflix expected to work climbs to number two in the country and suddenly gets handed a real budget. It is not sophisticated. It's two guys and a lift. But it's the rare Netflix comedy that reads like it was made by people who actually find each other funny, instead of a room that A/B tested a chuckle against a focus group in Ohio.

🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Mourinho (Netflix)

Three hours of José Mourinho explaining, calmly, that he was right about everything. The documentary hit August 11 with the full confession-booth lineup — Sir Alex Ferguson, Zlatan, Drogba, Frank Lampard, Iker Casillas — all lined up to talk about the most quotable man to ever stand on a touchline scowling in an expensive coat. It's from the crew that made the Beckham doc, so expect glossy, expensive, and a tendency to fade out right before the genuinely humiliating parts. If you don't care about soccer, this is nothing to you. If you do, it's a portrait of a man who won leagues in four countries and made a personal enemy in all of them, cut like a heist film.

✅ WORTH IT

Pick of the Week

Reacher, Season 4. In a week where the most powerful man in the business burned his energy writing a newspaper essay about how much he can be trusted, there is something clarifying about a show where a guy just locates the bad people and removes them from the situation. No press strategy. No "trusted steward" language. No 2027 closing timeline. Start the season, turn your brain off at the neck, let the large man do his work.

The Closer

Next Saturday HBO Max — the very network at the dead center of this whole CNN psychodrama — drops "Lanterns," its Green Lantern show where Kyle Chandler, Aaron Pierre, and Nathan Fillion investigate a murder in rural Nebraska, because every superhero property is now contractually required to also be True Detective. It arrives August 16 into a company that might belong to a completely different billionaire by the time the finale airs in October. Picture the marketing meeting. Please get emotionally invested in this eight-episode arc, and also we may be owned by a guy who writes op-eds by the time it wraps. See you next week, assuming the merger hasn't finished digesting us.