Media Musings

On the eve on what was going to be a banner weekend for what’s left of FOX the company at long last decided to entered the subscription streaming wars, nearly six years after they sold off what Rupert Murdoch consistently referenced as the “middle of the paper” to Disney and immediately became several of the … Read more

It’s another Super Bowl Sunday, and that means if you believe the pundits at FOX and Nielsen roughly one in three of us will at some point between the hours of roughly 6:30 pm ET and 10:30 PM ET they’ll have at least one of their video sources tuned to one of their affiliates or, … Read more

As regular readers to these musings well know, I have never been shy nor short-winded about my effusive love and respect for Norman Lear.  When a third edition of his marvelously cast LIVE IN FRONT OF A STUDIO AUDIENCE debuted in December 2021, I waxed nostalgic about my involvement in the first two editions and … Read more

Even at a company with the amount of upheaval and attrition that Paramount Global has already seen and is likely to reinforce in coming months, there are likely few jobs as secure as those assigned to  business affairs and legal.  They’re an awfully busy bunch these days, and yesterday was proof positive that they’re probably … Read more

The Sundance Film Festival, which wrapped up yesterday in the gloriously chic hamlet of Park City, Utah, is a throwback to far more significant and prosperous times in cinema history.  When Robert Redford became one of the founders of what was first called the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in 1978, he was among the most bankable … Read more

It’s usually not easy for me to get excited about The Grammy Awards.  I’m increasingly moving out of even the fringe of the target demographic of the majority of nominated artists, and I’d be hard pressed to pick any of them out of a police lineup.  Were it not for the fact that in the … Read more

As “crises” in media go, this particular one that landed in my inbox overnight isn’t a five-alarmer.  Lord knows there are far bigger and far-reaching matters going on these days,  But because this particular one that VARIETY’s Brian Steinberg uncovered resonated with me on so many levels, I felt it’s something you needed to know … Read more

Back in the Pleistine era of Hollywood when newspapers existed and cared about entertainment and budgets weren’t slashed to shreds by paranoid beancounters looking to save their hides by delivering the least negative quarterly results–ya know, the 2010s–this would have been a time of year where a lot of networks and platforms would have gathered … Read more