One of the privileges of publishing this Substack is the opportunity to highlight inspiring examples, illuminating insights, and worthy role models of professional excellence from people I admire in fields other than my own.

In June, I launched my What Good Looks Like series with an extraordinary inside look at the actual notes correspondence between writer/director/editor/cinematographer Steven Soderbergh and the creative team led by then-HBO/Cinemax exec Kary Antholis over two seasons of Cinemax’s The Knick (2014–15) — what I called, “without question, by far the finest example” of giving and responding to creative notes “that you or I will ever be privileged enough to get to see so up close.”

Today’s second installment in the series, from executive coach Ed Batista, may be a bit less glamorous than the first, but I suspect that for many readers, it will hit closer to home. It’s a keen examination of the internal dynamics at “elite organizations”1 that often make well-intentioned leaders miserable. More importantly, though, it explores “how a better understanding of these dynamics can allow leaders to successfully occupy roles within elite organizations while also maintaining their health, well-being and sanity.”

I was introduced to Ed by a mutual client this summer, and have worked with him directly over a handful of sessions.2 While our formal relationship is that of “coach” and “coachee,”3 I quickly came to see Ed as more of a professional “fellow traveler.” Many of the values that animate Ed’s coaching — mutual respect, introspection, sincerity, reliability, and empathy (including for oneself) — also lie at the heart of how I think, advise others, and write about careers, workplaces, and the like. Ed also shares my compulsion to write about the things he’s knowledgeable and passionate about for a small but sophisticated and highly engaged audience (but he has been doing it, consistently and prolifically, for around 20 years).

Ed personally comes from the Silicon Valley tech scene (an industry with a culture that is no less pathological than Hollywood’s, just differently so), but his insights about how to thrive at work — personally as well as professionally — resonate not just in entertainment, but across any number of professional fields of endeavor. If you have a high-stress executive job in a demanding organization, you will have no trouble seeing your workplace — and yourself — in Ed’s writing.

The article I decided to feature here — “How to Feed a Monster (Leading in Elite Organizations)” — was originally published in February 2017, but it reads like it could have been written yesterday. I think that’s because Ed’s work generally doesn’t concern itself with “current” trends in business (or business literature); instead, it’s grounded in his genuine interest in, deep understanding of, and sincere compassion for people. (Also, his clever repurposing of a memorable moment from The Wire holds up very well.)

If you like what you read here, be sure to make it all the way to the bottom of this post, where I’ll provide links to a few other articles from Ed’s archive that resonated with me (and, if you’re a subscriber to this Substack, I suspect will do the same with you).

Monsters are always hungry; that’s what makes them monsters. — Sean Hayes [1]

In the decade that I’ve spent coaching senior leaders and teaching MBA students at Stanford, I’ve worked with hundreds of people associated with elite organizations, from blue chip professional service firms to high-profile technology companies. Many of my clients run these organizations, and my work with them involves improving their own effectiveness and fulfillment as leaders, managing key relationships and team dynamics, and shaping company culture. Other clients have transitioned from one elite organization to another, and my work with them has involved better understanding their needs and values as a professional as well as the conditions under which they do their best work, so that they can choose the opportunity that will be the best fit for them. And most of my students are either on a similar path or hoping to get there--the ability to gain superior access to such opportunities is one of the reasons they came to business school in the first place.

In the process I’ve reached a set of conclusions about how elite organizations operate, with a particular focus on the internal dynamics that cause so much stress for leaders and future leaders like my clients and students. These forces aren’t the result of anyone’s bad intentions, but they’re not random accidents, either—there’s a method to the madness. And a better understanding of these dynamics can allow leaders to successfully occupy roles within elite organizations while also maintaining their health, well-being and sanity.

One way to measure an organization’s status is by the level of demand for associated positions and opportunities—the more competitive this process, the more elite the organization. The high demand for leadership roles at elite organizations is a powerful force with significant implications for the dynamics discussed here. And one result is that many of the talented people seeking these positions have less leverage than they would enjoy elsewhere, and are willing to make concessions that they would not make for an organization of lower status.

On occasion this involves a literal trade-off in compensation—people accept less generous terms in exchange for the prestige of being associated with the elite organization. But in many cases elite organizations attract top-level leadership talent on the basis of exceptionally competitive compensation, and then the trade-offs are more complex and subtle. While the material rewards may be fulsome, the hours can be grueling, the pace intense, and the culture unsympathetic. But in almost all situations the elite organization levies some sort of tax on its leaders—something is extracted in exchange for the desired opportunity.

These trade-offs and taxes are critical elements in the relationship between an organization and the leaders who inhabit it. They signify that the association is provisional and contingent upon a leader’s willingness to make concessions. The actual degree of contingency is unclear—it is rarely articulated and usually just suggested—but it is a condition that has far-reaching ramifications. Many leaders within an elite organization feel anxious at the possibility of losing their position--not because they fear unemployment, but because their work is such an important part of their identity. These individuals are also typically strongly motivated high-performers—people I call “happy workaholics.” As a result, leaders in elite organizations can readily collude in undermining themselves. To be clear, this is rarely the result of an intentionally exploitative management strategy. Rather, it’s the inevitable consequence of the intersection of the organization’s elite status as a source of leverage and each individual leader’s combination of anxiety and motivation.

A similar process within elite organizations stems from the competition they face from outside. The position occupied by the elite organization is a desirable one, and it must be defended against others who would claim it. This has numerous consequences for its leaders. An atmosphere of frantic urgency can surge up in response to crises, both real and imagined. There is often a heightened sense of importance regarding the organization’s mission and the necessity of its success in staving off competitors. As a result, leaders in elite organizations operate most of the time in conditions of mild to severe stress—there is rarely, if ever, a sustained sense of calm or ease.

Again, it’s important to acknowledge the ways leaders collude in creating these conditions. Leaders in elite organizations tend to be highly conscientious with a strong need to have impact and make meaningful contributions. These drives are major motivators that attract talented leaders to elite organizations in the first place. And a result of these factors is that leaders internalize the importance of the organization’s mission and feel personally responsible for its success in overcoming crises and beating the competition. The stress of operating in such an environment may be regrettable, but it becomes easier to accept when it can be justified on this basis.

Subordinates and outsiders often imagine that leaders are not subject to these dynamics. This is in part because leaders appear to be in control, but that is an illusion that comforts both leaders and subordinates. [2] In truth power within elite organizations tends to be dispersed among multiple stakeholders who are constantly engaged in struggles to maintain it. This helps to preserve the organization’s continuity and allows it to survive the occasional leadership crisis with minimal impact on its status. But a challenge this poses for leaders is that their sphere of authority is typically much smaller than it appears to subordinates and outsiders. The imbalance between the responsibility elite leaders feel (or that others impose upon them) and the actual authority they possess is itself yet another source of stress.

In my experience almost every leader in an elite organization, up through the most senior levels, faces some version of these challenges. So what can be done? Here are five strategies:

1. Accept Reality Gracefully

There’s a powerful scene in David Simon’s dramatic series The Wire in which an anxious store security guard pleads with a dangerous gang leader who’s just shoplifted, asking him to appreciate the difficult situation in which the guard now finds himself. The gang leader is unmoved. “You want it to be one way,” he murmurs, “but it’s the other way.” [3] There’s a lesson here for leaders in elite organizations. They may feel frustrated or upset by the dynamics described above, and they may yearn for things to be different—and yet this state of affairs is both rational and predictable. You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way--and it’s essential to accept this reality. This can pose a particular challenge for leaders facing a gap between subordinates’ expectations and the limits on their own ability to alter these dynamics—accepting reality may be perceived by others as indifference to dysfunction. It’s important for leaders to actively express empathy for the consequences of these dynamics without creating expectations that they will be able to eliminate them. [4]

2. Pursue Change Thoughtfully

Failing to recognize that the dynamics described above spring from the fundamental nature of elite organizations is a form of magical thinking, but accepting reality need not entail passively tolerating dysfunction or abandoning efforts to make change. Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...”) is a cliché because it’s true, and the quickest way to burn out as a leader in an elite organization is to reject reality and fail to recognize what can’t be changed. And yet a less quick but equally likely path to burnout is to ignore all dysfunction and make no effort to bring about change. It’s essential to find a healthy midpoint between these unhealthy extremes, and to do this leaders have to take some manageable risks to determine what can and can’t be altered. [5] In many circumstances this process begins with identifying one’s personal sphere of influence as a leader and working within those parameters—this may not be a fulfilling long-term approach, but it’s a starting point. In other cases there are opportunities to pursue change on a larger scale over extended periods of time. And while at key junctures leaders can bring about more fundamental transformations, it’s important to acknowledge both the likelihood of failure and its potential consequences. Elite organizations undergo radical change very rarely and usually under extreme financial duress—the leader who seeks to pursue such a transformation must act at a propitious moment.

3. Build Resilience Continuously

The strategies above can diminish the stress experienced by leaders in elite organizations, but they can’t eliminate it. Leaders must be prepared to cope with the dynamics described here on a regular basis, and this requires the cultivation of a personal sense of resilience, the ability to face challenges with equanimity and to recover from adversity over and over again. In Bouncing Back, therapist Linda Graham relates the following story from Buddhist tradition:

A master monk is meditating in a temple with other monks. Suddenly a fierce bandit storms into the temple, threatening to kill everybody. The other monks flee, but the master monk remains, calmly meditating. Enraged, the bandit shouts, “Don’t you understand? I could run you through with my sword and not bat an eye!” The monk calmly replies, “Don’t you understand? I could be run through by your sword and not bat an eye.” [6]

Leaders must strive to be the master monk facing the bandit, and this requires a continuous investment in activities that build resilience [7], most significantly meditation or some other form of mindfulness practice [8], regular exercise [9], and consistent sleep. Note that these activities are in fact investments in a leader’s effectiveness and not indulgences. Also note that they are important-but-not-urgent activities which require a consistent daily commitment, a process that occurs only when the leader allocates time for them and resists yielding that time to urgent-but-not-important demands (which other people will readily supply). [10]

4. Set Boundaries Firmly

While leaders are often advised to pursue so-called “life-work balance,” a consistent theme in my coaching practice is the unhelpfulness of this concept. Leaders in elite organizations are extremely unlikely to achieve “balance,” not only because of the demands imposed upon them by the role, but also because of their own inner drives and motivations. “Happy workaholics” have little interest in living balanced lives. [11] And even in those rare moments when balance seems both possible and desirable, it also feels precarious and difficult to sustain. This isn’t to say that leaders in elite organizations should ignore the underlying needs represented by the idea of balance, but they have to address those needs in a way that’s likely to yield results. A better approach I often discuss with clients and students is the idea of boundaries—borders that distinguish one thing from another in our lives and keep them in the right places and in appropriate amounts. Leaders in elite organizations don’t need (or even want) balance, but they can’t survive without effective boundaries. These can take many forms, such as physical or temporal separation from work, but they all rest on the leader’s ability to direct their attention away from work and toward other activities. [12] In this process an essential task for leaders is recognizing that elite organizations will rarely set boundaries for them, because there are few incentives to do so. It’s the leader’s responsibility to identify and enforce the boundaries they need for themselves, and as with pursuing change, this requires taking some risks in order to test what can be accomplished and what cannot.

5. See Yourself Clearly

Elite leadership roles exist within powerful distortion fields. Compensation and perks allow the leader to enjoy the most luxurious of creature comforts, which are soon taken for granted. Subordinates and others typically approach with deference, which the leader can come to expect as their due. The feeling of importance, even grandiosity, that permeates the elite organization can extend to the leader’s sense of self. And should a leader remain in a senior position long enough they may even come to identify with the organization, losing sight of how truly replaceable they are. There’s a certain inevitability to these dynamics, and in many cases they’re relatively harmless. But they can be problematic when taken to extremes or when a leader’s tenure ends suddenly. Leaders can combat the effects of these distortion fields by striving to see themselves (and the world around them) more clearly:

• Get out of the elite bubble and deprive yourself of some creature comforts on a regular basis to combat hedonic adaptation.

• Seek out candid feedback from subordinates and peers and express appreciation for those who actually provide it.

• Invest in relationships with people who know you as someone other than an elite leader and who have no investment in your leadership role.

• Maintain a personal identity that transcends work, and immerse yourself in experiences that remind you of those aspects of yourself.

• Become a student of mortality—read Seneca, or Atul Gawande, or Joan Didion, or Christopher Hitchens—and bear in mind that we are all ultimately replaced.

A leadership role in an elite organization can be a powerful source of meaning and purpose. The shared status, the ability to command and employ resources, the sense of contributing to an important mission, the opportunity to have an impact in the world, and, to be clear, the material rewards can serve to make these roles immensely gratifying. And yet these roles can also be tremendously stressful and depleting, leaving the people who hold them burned out and overwhelmed. The key is recognizing the necessity of taking responsibility for a positive outcome. Successful leadership careers don’t happen by accident, and neither do fulfilling ones.

More From Ed’s Archive

If you liked this article and want to check out more of Ed’s work, I’d recommend starting with:

• Surviving in a Toxic (or Merely Dysfunctional) Culture (a companion piece to the one you just read, addressing similar issues from the perspective of mid-career professionals rather than leaders; also suggested by Ed as “further reading” below)

• Investments, Not Indulgences (making the professional case for carving out time for self-care and quiet)

• The Judicious Imposition of Structure (a practical discussion about how much and what kinds of structure organizations, and people, need to operate at their best)

• Why Change Is Hard (a scholarly yet surprisingly practical take on a subject you’ve probably already talked to your therapist about, a lot)

Ed’s Footnotes for “How to Feed a Monster (Leading in Elite Organizations)”

[1] “Big Black Hole And The Little Baby Star“ (Sean Hayes, Big Black Hole And The Little Baby Star, 2006)

[2] Pfeffer and Sutton on Leadership

[3] Refugees, The Wire, Season Four (Written by Dennis Lehane, portrayed by Jamie Hector, HBO, 2006)

• Here’s a brief clip that’s worth watching.

[4] Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership

[5] Risk Management (The Importance of Speaking Up)

[6] Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, page 229 (Linda Graham, 2013)

[7] Ignoring Bandits and Building Resilience

[8] Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

[9] Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)

[10] Importance vs. Urgency

[11] Happy Workaholics Need Boundaries, Not Balance

[12] Growth, Profitability, and Return on Attention

For Further Reading

Stop Trying to Be “Good Enough” by “Getting Better”

Truth, Power, and Communication

On the Shortness of Life (Seneca)

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (Atul Gawande, 2015)

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion, 2007)

Mortality (Christopher Hitchens, 2014)

This is a companion piece to Surviving in a Toxic (or Merely Dysfunctional) Culture, which addresses similar issues from the perspective of mid-career professionals rather than leaders.

Ken’s Footnotes for “What Good Looks Like (Episode 102)”

It’s important for entertainment professionals to make an active effort to sustain close personal relationships outside of the industry. In practice, the business’s culture of long hours, perennial drama, and compulsory socializing can make that difficult. But, in addition to being crucial to maintaining a healthy sense of perspective (in an industry that isn’t exactly known for its humility),1 drawing on the experiences and expertise of your civilian friends and family (typically, but not necessarily, in less glamorous professions) can give you fresh insight into your own work.

I emphasize “but not necessarily” in light of the exchange I had just last week with my old friend Tom — a local classmate/drinking buddy from my undergraduate study abroad semester at King’s College London — after he sent me a kind and congratulatory note about the first post in this series.

Tom literally negotiates ceasefires and other peace processes for a living. Working for or with various British and international agencies, he does the kind of diplomatic work that often can neither be confirmed nor denied (at least while it’s happening).2 I just read a sample chapter he wrote for a book proposal that begins with the sentence “The Aga Khan’s private jet is easily the best form of transport I’ve ever taken.”3 In other words, if you’re going to write about negotiation, it’s hard to imagine someone better than Tom to give you feedback.

Seeing what was on deck for the second post in the series, Tom casually asked, “I assume the ‘all negotiations is 3 negotiations’ is the substance-process-relationships triad?”

The substance-process-relationships triad is a foundational framework for analyzing, structuring, and executing deals that independently considers and optimizes around the “what,” the “how,” and the “who” of each negotiation. So, no, that wasn’t what I meant — I was referring to the mix of inward- and outward-facing dynamics in every negotiation. After I explained, Tom generously responded, “Oh that’s a much more interesting point. Glad I asked!”

While he is clearly putting his skills as a literal world-class diplomat to work here, I understand (and appreciate) Tom’s reaction — he had been teaching the substance-process-relationships triad in trainings he led for the British foreign service for years, while my catchy turn of phrase was (for him) a novel way to describe a negotiation dynamic that he recognized immediately, but didn’t previously have a shorthand for.

I, on the other hand, had been using that “every negotiation is three negotiations” line for years by the time I wrote it into my book, but probably hadn’t thought about the “substance-process-relationships triad” since law school — including, crucially, while writing the “academic framework” section of my chapter on negotiation. Because if I had, then I would have realized that my chapter was incomplete: it talked plenty about the first and third parts of the triad, but only in passing about the second: process.

Process is certainly less critical to your average entertainment deal than it is to, say, a mediated multilateral peace negotiation that is conducted in multiple languages to end violent hostilities between parties in a functionally trust-less environment. But while process rarely materially changes what the parties get in the deals I typically work on, it changes almost everything about how getting it feels. And quite often, what drives the parties’ eventual perceptions of a closed deal most is not the substance of the deal’s terms, but the experience of having made it (and, eventually, of having performed it).

In other words: you ignore process at your peril.

I won’t make that mistake again when I sit down to write The Business of Television’s third edition. And when it’s time to update my chapter on negotiation, I’ll start with these two new adages that speak to the no-longer-forgotten third of the triad.

ix. Don’t Always Open with Your Opening Offer

Whoever first came up with the line “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”4 probably wasn’t talking about dealmaking at the time, but they could have been. Opening offers set a tone that influences every part of the negotiation that follows. That’s why they’re often too important to open the negotiation with.

One of the most common mistakes made by new negotiators is to kick off the process with an emailed offer. There are times when that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do — for example, when making extremely simple deals, in casual negotiations between unrepresented principals, between negotiators with significant shared experience and trust, or when working under significant time constraints. But it usually isn’t the right move.

More experienced dealmakers make almost every first offer on the phone. That’s a major upgrade — it smokes out any major misunderstandings between the parties as early as possible; creates an opportunity to modify the planned proposal or approach, based on realtime feedback, before fully committing to it; helps ensure that the offer is understood and received in the way hoped and intended; provides an immediate opportunity to gauge the other side’s reaction to the proposal (and to plan ahead accordingly); and generally helps get the negotiation off on a collaborative foot.5

But the savviest negotiators know that some deals require a so-called “pre-call” (and that the specific agenda for “the call before the call” depends on the circumstances). If this is the negotiators’ first deal together, it might just be a quick “Hi, nice to meet you.”6 If the other side might be walking into the deal with specific expectations or reservations, those can be identified. If the deal structure is complex or unorthodox or the business model is unfamiliar, they can be explained. If the terms of the deal are extremely context-dependent, the context can be introduced.

Whatever the circumstances, an opening call that doesn’t include an opening offer is worth your time if it ensures that you know everything you need to know to make an intelligent proposal (and that your counterpart knows everything they need to know to receive your proposal intelligently).

x. When in Doubt, Pick Up the Goddamn Phone

The last adage intentionally focuses your attention on how you kick off a negotiation; this one goes for everything that happens after that. Because in negotiation, it doesn’t matter what you said; it matters what the other side heard.7

Effective dealmakers take care to convey their arguments and explanations intelligibly and unambiguously8 — and to remain vigilant for any indication that they were not received as intended. Email is a convenient but flawed communication medium in which meaning is easily unknowingly garbled, tone is notoriously indecipherable, and intent that seems obvious to the writer is easily lost on the reader. The first of the aforementioned goals is challenging via email; the second is impossible.

Email can be valuable as a shorthand record and shareable reminder to the other side of what you’ve said. But when making a novel argument, delivering a position you know will be poorly received, looking to strike a very particular tone, or sharing essential or sensitive context, the “place” to actually say it is on the phone. That’s where any misunderstandings can be identified quickly, inadvertently ruffled feathers can be smoothed immediately, and both sides can feel free to say the things that would be irresponsible to put into an email that can be forwarded easily.9 And, just as importantly, it’s where you incrementally build the rapport and trust that will carry you through this and future negotiations with your counterpart.

In my experience, there are too few calls taking place in today’s dealmaking environment, and no shortage of reasons why: the hassle of scheduling (especially with large groups of reps), the attention/energy-intensive nature of calls (and, worse, video calls), the vibes of working from home, and, for some negotiators, a lack of confidence about what to say (and how it/they will hold up under cross-examination).

But as they say in the military (and medicine, and construction, and countless other intellectual and physical fields of work): slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

That’s not to say that every single counter demands a pre- and/or post-call, or even that most of them do; as usual, the right move is highly deal-specific and context-dependent. You tend to see calls most neglected by more junior negotiators, and again, no shortage of reasons why: lack of confidence (born of inexperience), lack of mentorship and training, and, yes, at the risk of sounding a bit like I’m telling the kids to get off my lawn,10 I find that there is a generational thing in play here. If you feel at all attacked or maligned by that statement, then by all means: go out there and prove me wrong.11

If you’ve done any kind of focused writing, then you know how valuable it can be to step away from your keyboard and, after a while, return to it with a fresh eye for spotting typos, a fresh ear for writing style, and refreshed clarity of thought.1 For most day-to-day projects, from blog posts to legal briefs, you’re lucky to get more than a single day before deadlines force you back to the keyboard. For me, publishing this series has been like picking up an old draft after two and a half years off.2

Thankfully, I haven’t found any mortifying errors in the form or substance of the mini-manifesto on negotiation that I wrote and edited over the first quarter of 2024.3 But, having gone through the process of dividing my book’s chapter on negotiation into three sections for re-publication here, I now recognize a better structure I could have used to frame my so-called “negotiating philosophy for the working professional”:4

The introductory sections, published last Monday, provide a conceptual framework for the philosophy — possibly tedious if you’re looking for a quick and practical primer, but helpful to people whose brains, like mine, do better with some kind of intellectual scaffolding to hang things on.

The four “adages” from last Thursday’s post speak to how you can apply this framework to effectively persuade others.

The four adages below, in the third and final section of my book’s chapter on negotiation, speak to the values at the heart of my approach (whether or not I recognized them as such when I first wrote them down). The ones that stand out to me are respect, authenticity, discipline, and open-mindedness. I bet you could extract (or project) more of your own.

One last thing before you start, though.

Now that I’ve begun thinking about conceptual framework, persuasion, and values as three “pillars” of my “philosophy,”5 it has also become apparent to me that I missed a crucial fourth pillar altogether: process. In hindsight, it feels like a glaring omission. My approach to process hasn't really changed since I wrote about everything else — I just wasn't thinking about it as explicitly or systematically as I do now. But spotting what I missed is a nice reminder that just the fact that I knew enough to write a book about this stuff doesn’t mean I had (or have) it all figured out.

And just as the entertainment industry never met a three-day weekend it couldn’t turn into a four-day weekend,6 I’ve never met a three-part series I couldn’t turn into a four-part series.7 So I’ll be back next Monday with an unexpected (even to me) “fourth installment” in my three-part series re-publishing 2024’s “On Negotiation,” sharing the (first?) two adages I plan to add when I publish the book’s third edition (which won’t be anytime soon).

v. Don’t Get Nasty; There Will Be Plenty of Time for That Later

This is a variation on one of my favorite all-purpose adages, borrowed from sports columnist Gregg Easterbrook, but applicable to virtually any setting in business or in life: “Don’t panic; there will be plenty of time for that later.”8 As adapted here, the statement’s two halves are each doing something distinct.

The first part, “Don’t Get Nasty,” means exactly what it says: don’t get nasty. As with the advice in this chapter generally, this is not a moral prescription, but a practical one: I just don’t think getting nasty works very well most of the time.

Some professionals favor a “shock and awe” approach to negotiation, characterized by shouts, curses, and threats; an avowed unwillingness to compromise on positions, even very early in a negotiation; the aggressive drawing of conceptual lines in the sand; and a generally “I’m not here to make friends” tone of communication. This style of negotiation can be personally overwhelming and devastatingly effective, especially when deployed against young, fearful, and inexperienced counterparts. Against confident and experienced negotiators, however, attempts at bullying or other especially adversarial approaches to negotiation often backfire.9 A highly vitriolic approach to negotiation tends to galvanize people in their positions, promoting resentful stubbornness that keeps the parties farther apart in a deal, rather than the spirit of compromise that is usually essential to reaching an understanding.

On the other hand, to recycle a few clichés here: you can disagree without being disagreeable, and you don’t have to be here to make friends to act friendly. This is not a paean to being a pushover, nor a call to prioritize harmony over good outcomes. Rather, in my experience, trying to open every negotiation with a tone and spirit of friendly collaboration, and to maintain that tone and spirit for as long as the course of the negotiation allows, tends to create and preserve productive momentum and inspire confidence in all principals and representatives that a deal can be reached, especially when the parties’ starting positions are very far apart.10 That confidence alone is enough to make it more likely that a deal will be reached, or that it will be reached more quickly and satisfyingly than a negotiation that is adversarial from the outset.

As for the reassurance that “There Will Be Plenty of Time for That Later,” the point is not that being nasty is OK but only sometimes. Rather, it is a reminder that, to paraphrase media commentator Marshall McLuhan, “The delivery is the message.”11 Yes, tone and tenor are a matter of personal style; but they are also another channel of communication which, deployed properly, can help effectively convey the importance or urgency of one’s own positions or provide critical feedback on the substance and delivery of the opposing side’s positions. But communication is only effective if it is legible, which requires that it be clear, meaningful, and unambiguous.

Maintaining a generally calm, friendly, and personable affect can therefore make one a more effective advocate and communicator in the toughest and highest-stakes situations. A negotiator with a reputation for a constructive, solution-oriented approach to dealmaking is more likely to be believed when drawing a firm line on an issue that may be hard for the other side to accept. A negotiator with a reputation for a calm and friendly demeanor commands more respect and greater impact on the rare occasions when they do allow sharpness or emotion into their tone. And a negotiator who is willing to acknowledge (and even apologize) when they have crossed a line of basic courtesy or professionalism — as everyone does at one time or another in these stressful jobs — earns trust and grace that will pay dividends in future negotiations.

On the other hand, those who are quick to aggression and vitriol have a “Boy Who Cried Wolf” problem: they don’t have a higher gear to communicate those things when they really matter. If everything is important, nothing is important; if everything gets you fired up, then being fired up doesn’t mean much of anything. The result of such tactics is often a quick devolution into positional bargaining that ultimately disservices everyone.

vi. There’s No Such Thing as “Winning the Deal”

Perhaps the most pernicious myth about negotiations is that somebody must “win the deal” (and therefore, your job as a negotiator is to make sure that “somebody” is you). In this worldview, “winning” can be defined in any number of ways — by reference to a theoretical baseline outcome, according to each side’s satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with the outcome, or perhaps simply by the juicy knowledge that you were totally prepared to give up more than you ultimately had to. But the whole concept reflects an essentially zero-sum view of business (and perhaps of the world more broadly) — for somebody to gain, someone else must lose.

In my experience, the most effective negotiators realize that there is no such thing as “winning a negotiation” or “winning the deal” — or at least, that it does not mean what people usually use it to mean. Deals happen because both sides believe they are better off making a deal than not making one. Frequently, those parties will have to negotiate and make a deal again in the future. Even if they don’t, in our industry, the negotiators who represent them will.

“Winning the negotiation” isn’t about somehow beating the other side — it’s about making a deal that’s good for both sides, not leaving anyone feeling burned, and being right about everyone being better off for having made it.

vii. Play the Long Game

In Hollywood, there is virtually no such thing as a one-off interaction. A small number of companies dominate the overall volume of production, distribution, and exhibition. A small community of professionals, with long careers across multiple major employers, sits at the center of much of the industry’s activity. Any time two parties of any kind make a deal, there is a good chance that it won’t be the last time. And even if it is, whatever professional negotiators personally negotiated that deal, there is a good chance that they will cross paths again in the future (maybe in the same jobs, maybe in new ones). This has at least two key implications.

First, the most effective negotiators tend to be the ones with the best reputations. Some liars are better than others,12 but it does not take long for people to figure out who can be relied on for honesty and who cannot, or who can be trusted to hear sensitive truths and who cannot. There are few things negotiators love to talk about over drinks more than the person they just caught in a lie — it is both a narcissistic act of self-congratulation and a public service of warning. Stick around long enough and negotiators you have never met will know (or think they know, or be able to find out) plenty about you before the first time you get on the phone with them. If they view you as unworthy of their trust before they’ve even spoken with you, that assumption will color every interaction they ever have with you, unless and until you can convince them that they had it wrong all along. On the other hand, a negotiator with a reputation for honesty and fairness enters every negotiation with an advantage, able to quickly build trust and rapport with their counterpart, and from there, to deliver great results while developing great relationships, which can deepen and multiply over a long career.

Second, take extra care when your actions — in ruthlessly exploiting a position of leverage, going “behind the back” of a direct negotiating counterpart, or otherwise — may cause your counterpart real personal or professional distress. To say nothing of the moral implications of intentionally (or at least knowingly) putting someone in a bad position,13 it tends to have long-term consequences that outweigh the immediate gains. Whether or not you act with malice, people have long memories for those whose actions (in business or otherwise) have caused them personal or professional distress. Someone (whether principal or representative) who has been needlessly pulverized or otherwise embarrassed in a negotiation while in a position of weakness will have little hesitation in returning the favor when the tables are turned, as they so often are.14 And of course, one’s willingness to put others in such positions becomes a significant part of that reputation I said was so important.

In the end, the professionals who deliver the best results — and who usually rise the highest in their fields — are those whose value comes not only from their superior skill, knowledge, and experience, but from the superior ease with which they can conduct business with key people around town.15 It’s never “just one negotiation.” Your career is long (we hope). Play the long game.

viii. The Best Way to Negotiate Is as Yourself

A common misperception among early-career professionals is that there is a single “right” or “best” way to negotiate, or a perfect model of negotiating excellence to emulate. Although I obviously advocate for certain shared values that I think promote a thriving and efficient marketplace for our deeply interconnected and interdependent industry, those values are compatible with any negotiator’s personal style and strengths.

Early-career professionals should look for opportunities to observe and learn from negotiators who reflect a variety of styles and approaches. Listen in on calls with particular attention to the models of negotiation you see and hear around you, among colleagues as well as counterparts. In your early, low-stakes negotiations, try a few models on for size if they seem like they might be a good fit. Mix and match elements of them, playing to your strengths. You’ll start by performing the role of professional negotiator, with a bunch of different acting coaches. Although you may start out mimicking these various coaches, over time, you’ll learn to combine influences, prescriptive and proscriptive, from each of them into an integrated version of that role for yourself. Eventually, as your style naturally evolves and grows more comfortable and authentic to you—and probably without you noticing it at first—you won’t be playing a role anymore.

That will be the right and best way for you to negotiate.

D. Final Thoughts

If the advice contained in this chapter comes from one basic assumption about the world, it is that “we are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”16 The entertainment industry seems to attract (not to mention mint and reward) difficult and performative personalities, which can sometimes make basic decency feel strangely hard to come by. The negotiation philosophy set out here is one of basic thoughtfulness, forthrightness, creativity, and collaboration. It’s a humanist approach to doing business. A lot of it is basic “Golden Rule” stuff. It calls for us to extend to others a presumption of good faith, while making it our job to continuously figure out who is and remains worthy of that trust. It is never going to be universally embraced by those who would deride it as naïve or idealistic.17 Carefully and skeptically applied, however, it is still resistant to those cynics—though of course, not invulnerable to those with a bad attitude and a loose relationship with the truth who wield leverage unhesitatingly and without consideration of downstream impacts. It presupposes that doing business the “right” way, doing business the effective way, and doing business the pleasant way can all be the same thing. If lived successfully, I think it can make for a pretty satisfying career; and the more people who embrace it, the better it works for everyone. That may be an awfully aspirational line, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

It’s just like my friend said: “Our careers should all be a paradise! We get to tell stories and do cool shit for a living. This should be a Shangri-la.”18

You’ve made it to the end of “On Negotiation” — but not to the end of this secretly FOUR-part series on my favorite “words of wisdom” about negotiation. I’ll be back in one week with the first publication of two more adages I’ll be adding for The Business of Television’s third edition (which will come out in…uhh…let’s say another three to five years).

I love a good saying.

A good saying distills a lot of wisdom into a small, memorable package. It can provide grounding and clarity in the face of complexity and confusion. It can be a tool for understanding what’s important to other people, or for reminding yourself of what’s truly important to you. A good saying captures a broader truth, which you can use to work better, or to live better, or to be better.

Perhaps that is why I find it so irritating that, if you’ve ever heard any “saying” about negotiation, it’s probably this one: “A good deal is one in which everyone feels equally unhappy at the end.”

I hate that saying.

I understand the appeal. A good saying can also be a salve for an anxious mind, and most negotiators, even professional ones — actually, especially professional ones — are driven first and foremost by anxiety. Anxiety about not asking for enough, or about giving away too much. Anxiety about not knowing the “right” way to answer a question or address an issue. Anxiety that the deal wasn’t “as good as it could have been” (or “should have been”). Anxiety that someone else might have done better.

The great irony of negotiation is that, while the essential purpose of a deal is to leave both sides better off for having made it, the process of making the deal — especially in the entertainment industry, where the pace of dealmaking is notoriously slow — often leaves both sides feeling worse, at least temporarily. So the idea that you’re supposed to feel bad at the end — that feeling bad might even be the sign of a job well done — is very comforting. Even more comforting is the idea that, as bad as you feel, the other side is probably in the same boat.

But as fleetingly reassuring as it might be, I’d argue that this saying is even more pernicious in its implications. It recasts misery as success, positions partners as adversaries, and frames the dealmaker’s role as mitigating loss rather than creating value. It assumes that negotiation is an inherently adversarial, zero-sum process — and, consequently, that if one side is happy, it can only be at the other’s expense. This saying is, at its heart, an incredibly bleak way to think about what “good” looks like.

We can do better than that.

A chapter about negotiation was, by far, the most common request I received from students and readers about what they’d want to see in a second edition. I ultimately organized that chapter around a handful of vaguely folksy-sounding one-liners — what I called my “Philosophy of Negotiation in Eight Adages.” But these adages weren’t written for the chapter; the chapter was written for them.

I developed these aphorisms over hours and years of conversations about the craft with students, colleagues, and mentees. I did so because my job in those conversations was to capture and convey, in brief and densely-packed exchanges, the lessons that I had taken years to learn. The sayings were a good way to try to distill a lot of wisdom into a small, memorable package.

But I soon noticed that I was reciting the same well-worn one-liners to myself even when no one else was in the room. They provided me with grounding and clarity in the face of complexity and confusion. They helped remind me what was important. They captured some broader truths that I care about deeply (then and now). I may have coined these aphorisms to be a tool for others, but they turned out to be just as helpful for me.

Today, in Part 2 of my three-part republication of the full text of Chapter 13 of the 2024 second edition of The Business of Television: On Negotiation, I share the first four of those sayings with you — starting with the three words that embody my most important demand of anyone who works for me:

C. A Philosophy of Negotiation in Eight Adages

This chapter does not provide a comprehensive framework for negotiation as a discipline, nor a list of tactical “tips and tricks” for achieving good results. There are no “dos and don’ts” to be found here. Rather, what I offer is a values-based philosophy of negotiation, embodied in a list of eight personal adages that I have found helpful in developing my style and identity as a negotiator, and in advising other young professionals as they do the same. They can sometimes be a bit redundant with one another, and to some extent repackage the academic literature on negotiation in folksier language, but these are the answers I give when asked to opine on “what makes a good negotiator” or “what makes a good negotiation.” I hope they prove as useful to you as they have been for me.

i. Negotiate, Don’t Haggle

If I still had an office with a whiteboard, that whiteboard would have permanently written across its top, in big block letters, “NEGOTIATE, DON’T HAGGLE.” On its face, that might seem like a merely semantic distinction. But it is meant to capture a wide suite of mindsets and behaviors that distinguish many of the industry’s most respected and effective negotiators, such as:

• Hagglers concern themselves exclusively with what the deal terms are; negotiators are concerned with why the deal terms are what they are.

• Hagglers gain ground in a negotiation through stubbornness, force, and sometimes sheer annoyance and exhaustion; negotiators gain ground in a negotiation through persuasion.

• Hagglers ground their positions solely in their personal instincts and desires; negotiators support their positions using objective criteria.

• Hagglers abstractly know what potential outcome or deal term is better for them; negotiators understand the real-world significance to both parties of such an outcome or deal term.

• Hagglers rely on “policy”; negotiators can articulate the reasons why a policy exists and must be respected.

• Hagglers consider only their own perspectives in a negotiation; negotiators endeavor to understand and account for the perspectives of the people on the other side.

So yes, “Negotiate, Don’t Haggle” is arguably just a folksier way of saying “engage in interest-based negotiation, not positional bargaining.” And to be clear, my premise is not that “negotiating” is a better approach to dealmaking than “haggling” simply because it’s more agreeable — it’s a better approach because in my experience, both in most individual transactions and certainly across many deals over a long career, it yields better results.1

Why, then, does “haggling” remain so prevalent? The short answer is simply that “negotiating” is a lot harder than “haggling,” and usually takes a lot of practice.

Many professionals develop into “hagglers” not necessarily because they’ve judged it to be a superior way to get results, but simply because they haven’t gotten the level of training and education necessary to be capable of truly negotiating. Because the entertainment industry generally does not place a high premium on professional development, many negotiators learn their craft principally via observation rather than instruction. When presented with an unfamiliar type of deal, many early-career professionals are told to educate themselves by reviewing past deals, rather than being actively talked through them. The totally self-directed young professional may be able to identify all the major moving parts of any given deal type and to generally distinguish (from their own perspective) the “good” version of each term from the “bad” version, but without further instruction, may not understand what exactly makes the “good” version of each such term better than the “bad” one, or if and when it will actually matter in the real world.2

Negotiating at a high level requires a deep understanding of the meaning and significance of every point under discussion, the ability to identify issues that are not currently being discussed but could or should be addressed, a familiarity with industry custom and practice as it exists today and as it has evolved over time, an understanding of your client’s priorities and anxieties, and sincere curiosity about and empathy for the priorities and anxieties of the opposing side. And negotiators must be able to identify and make the arguments that will be most persuasive to the people they are actually trying to persuade, and not simply to themselves and their own clients.

That is why the more technical chapters of the book focus not only on identifying the major components of each deal type and the typical range of outcomes in their negotiation, but also on discussing the real-world implications of various deal terms, relevant historical context and business rationale, and the arguments that are frequently deployed by the negotiators on each side of the issue. The fundamental purpose of these chapters is to empower readers to develop themselves as negotiators, and not simply as hagglers, from the very beginning of their careers.

ii. Every Negotiation Has Three “Teams”

People often talk about “negotiating teams.” At a studio, that might mean one or more business affairs executives, perhaps working in partnership with one or more creative, legal, and/or production executives. On the talent side, that might mean the consortium of agent, manager, and/or lawyer representing the individual. But the best negotiators not only recognize, but actively forge, a third team: the direct negotiators from each of the other two teams, joined together on Team “Let’s Get This Done.”

One of the many shared experiences of all professional representative negotiators is the reality of engaging with material that your clients and/or colleagues likely have a less sophisticated grasp on than you do. And to be clear, it is not the job of these clients and colleagues to know the ins and outs of these deals; it is your job to know, and to communicate effectively with those individuals. Nevertheless, that shared experience can serve as the foundation of real trust and camaraderie between negotiators, which can in turn be deployed for the benefit of both of their respective clients.3 Of course, negotiators should always remember whose interests must remain paramount for them, and identifying too zealously with your counterpart can eventually blow back with angry (but sometimes justified) questions like “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

Nevertheless, negotiations that are conducted with some sense of mutual identification between the negotiators, mutual commitment to “be a dealmaker and not a dealbreaker,” and mutual willingness to also let the other side look good almost invariably yield mutually better results and happier principals.

iii. Every Negotiation Is Three Negotiations

Savvy negotiators recognize that, when they are on the phone or trading emails with their counterparts in a deal, they are engaged in one of only three negotiations that are going on: the one taking place on those phone calls and in those emails, and the ones taking place in between — between each of the official “negotiators” and the client companies or individuals that they respectively represent.

When you are negotiating with somebody, you are not simply trying to persuade them; you are trying to both inspire and arm them to go back to the folks they represent and make your case for you. And there are many ways to go about that — by convincing your counterpart that your positions are objectively reasonable and can therefore be advocated for responsibly and safely; by giving them arguments and information that you would want them to repeat to the people they are advising; by making them feel like you are in this together as negotiators;4 and by just making them like you enough to want to help you a bit (or at least enough not to take the opportunity to show off to their clients being a “tough negotiator” at your expense).

And to be clear, all of this works best if you sincerely believe it, as opposed to just performing it.

However you go about it, your most powerful ally in any negotiation is usually the person sitting across the table/email/telephone from you. Give them the will to help you, and the ammunition with which they can do so. Be open to supporting them in exactly the same way you hope they will support you. And if you can do so at little cost to yourself or your “side,” don’t be afraid to give them an opportunity to look good in front of their stakeholders — and you will often find that they are willing to return the favor.

iv. Pay People in the Currency That Is Most Valuable to Them (and Least Valuable to You)

Negotiation is inevitably a process of compromise. Effective compromise requires a good understanding of what concessions are actually meaningful to the other side. And the most effective compromise requires knowing what the other side simply cannot do without.

Specific bargaining positions may or may not be truly about the thing they purport to be about. For example, sometimes a demand for more money, credit, or perks is actually a proxy for someone looking for a sense of respect and recognition in their deal terms — and sometimes it’s really just about the money, credit, or perks that are being demanded. Great negotiators have an innate ability to interpret other people’s words and actions and instinctively understand their underlying concerns, motivations, and intent.

This adage is perhaps simply the folksy version of Getting to Yes’s prescriptions to “focus on interests” and “invent options for mutual gain.” If you know what a counterparty really cares about, you can figure out a way to deliver it to them in a way that satisfies them the most while burdening you (with financial expense or otherwise) the least. It’s the orange rind-zest/pulp-juice hypothetical all over again.

Where circumstances allow it, however, the greatest negotiators pair that sharp instinct with another tactic, one that is available to anyone, regardless of their innate talent for reading others: they ask, and tell, their counterparts what they and their clients really care and worry about.5

To throw in a sub-adage here, “Everyone’s approach to business is a product of their own traumas.” (Once again, that goes for companies as well as individuals, and for representatives as well as principals.) Ideally, explaining the impact of those traumas on each side’s bargaining positions happens organically in the course of a negotiation. For example, a commonly heard bad argument from studio business affairs executives is “I can’t do it. It’s against our policy.” A good version of that argument would be, “I can’t do it. It’s against our policy because the last time we did that, this very bad thing happened that makes it very important that I not put the company in any position to relive that very bad experience.”6 Whether volunteered or solicited, this kind of honest exchange of information about each side’s priorities and anxieties can be the key to unlocking the most difficult and/or complex deals, allowing the negotiators to devise compromises that maximize each party’s sense of gain and minimize its sense of loss.

I sure hope you like your professional advice in the form of an aphorism, because I’ve got four more coming your way next Monday (August 24), when I’ll publish the third and final installment of the complete text of Chapter 13 of the 2024 second edition of The Business of Television: “On Negotiation.”

There are a few questions that I think virtually every young lawyer, talent representative, and executive wonders about at some point early in their career, but almost never asks aloud:

What does being “good” at negotiation look like?

How do I get better at negotiating?

Am I a good negotiator?

(And how can I even know for sure?)

If you’re reading this now, there’s a good chance that — whether or not you’re a lawyer, or even think of yourself specifically as a dealmaker — negotiation is a pretty significant part of your job. But I’d guess that, even among this self-selected group, if you were asked to answer that first question, it would be hard to come up with something more specific than Justice Potter Stewart’s famous test for what constitutes constitutionally unprotected hard core pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

Even well into my own career as a professional negotiator, I probably couldn’t have done much better than that. It was only when I started managing and training more junior negotiators — having them listen in on some of my phone calls, and then debriefing with them afterward about what they had heard — that I began to think systematically about what I had always done instinctively. And as I had more and more of these post-call debriefs, I started noticing a few phrases recurring in my commentary about the negotiations my colleagues had observed.

Negotiate, don’t haggle.

Every negotiation is three negotiations.

Pay people in the currency that’s most valuable to them and least valuable to you.

When I (finally) began writing the second edition of my book in December 2023, the first section that I wrote — the topic that ended a year spent “preparing to start” or whatever other euphemism I was using for “blowing past deadline after deadline while not actually writing” — was my brand new chapter about negotiation. Two days later, I emailed what I described as the “admittedly extremely self-indulgent*** first draft” to a handful of friends who had offered to serve as draft readers, with a promise to “circle back with a future version that reflects plenty of extra effort in editing,” and the following footnote:1

I did put plenty of effort into editing that draft before publication.2 But I guess I didn’t really end up killing any of those darlings.

I led with the chapter on negotiation because, as I wrote in that email to my early draft readers, it was “the one major addition I knew I wanted for this second edition (and which was most often requested by students and other readers I heard from)” — but it was also, I quickly realized, the thing I was most personally excited to start writing about.

By that time, I had learned to talk to my team at work about negotiation in vaguely folksy aphorisms — things I’d call “sayings” if I thought anyone else said them.3 The point was to distill my own beliefs and practices into simple, memorable, and actionable advice. But in the process, I came to realize that, over 15 years of doing this for a living, I had unintentionally developed a whole philosophy of negotiation that guided how I approached the work. That philosophy was grounded in academic scholarship about negotiation, which I had first encountered in law school, but it was also empathetic, values-driven, and aspirational — and, I had no doubt, effective. I was proud to offer it to the executives who looked to me for mentorship.

It felt like a privilege — and a real opportunity to promote the kind of business environment I wanted to operate in — to get to share it with readers of my book. And it still feels like a privilege (and an opportunity) to share it with readers of this Substack.

Over the next three posts, I’ll be republishing the full text of Chapter 13 of the 2024 second edition of The Business of Television: On Negotiation. Having re-read it while preparing these posts, I can tell you confidently: I stand by every word.

13. On Negotiation

One of the essential goals of this book is to help prepare television professionals of all levels and types to be effective negotiators. And most people instinctively understand that highly effective negotiation requires a combination of both talent (or “innate” ability) and skill (or “learned” ability).

In the context of negotiation, then, “talent” may refer to one’s natural ability to persuade others, to “read” the intentions and truthfulness of others, to speak with clarity and specificity, to remain calm and comfortable in stressful or ambiguous situations, to be adaptive or “quick on one’s feet,” and/or to instinctively build trust and rapport with others, even in oppositional situations. “Skill,” on the other hand, may refer to one’s learned intellectual mastery of complex issues, knowledge of historical industry custom and practice, awareness of relevant precedents and analogs, and/or familiarity with negotiating “tactics” that can be helpful in achieving desired results.

In practice, the line between “talent” and “skill” is far fuzzier than that simple distinction between “innate” and “learned” ability would suggest. Great instincts can effectively compensate for (or even altogether mask) a lack of deep understanding, just as many so-called “innate” qualities like persuasiveness and likeability can be honed with study, introspection, and practice.4 Most people instinctively recognize that mastery in virtually any field usually involves at least some combination of discernible “talent” and “skill,” but that greatness can be achieved via a wide array of combinations of the two. As with many pursuits, perhaps not everyone can be a great negotiator, but most smart people can at least become a pretty darn good one.

Perhaps the most underappreciated missing link between talent and skill — the thing that arguably separates the good negotiators from the great, and allows for greatness to be built on virtually any given combination of talent and skill — is philosophy. That is what I try to provide here: a negotiating philosophy for the working professional, developed in the course of my work as a professional negotiator, offered principally for the benefit of those who are on the same career path.

Like the rest of the book, this philosophy reflects the perspective of not just any professional negotiator, but specifically a studio business affairs executive. I note this because, having spent part of my career as a talent representative as well, I recognize that it is a different job, with its own unique set of challenges, expectations, and responsibilities. Lawyers and agents have fiduciary duties of loyalty and zealous representation, which some could interpret as being at odds with the more collaborative philosophies espoused here.5 Moreso than business affairs executives, agents and talent lawyers may be driven toward a more adversarial style by the expectations of colleagues and clients who place a particular premium on toughness and aggressiveness as values in and of themselves. Some clients like to think of their representatives, “He’s an asshole, but he’s my asshole,” and feel more comfortable being represented with a more pugnacious approach than I advocate for here. While throughout this chapter I use the word “client” interchangeably to refer to an artist represented by an entertainment attorney/agent or a company represented by a business affairs negotiator, I recognize that the relationship between an independent representative and an individual artist is fundamentally different than that between a salaried executive and their colleagues and/or corporate employer. And, like it or not, based on my experience on “both sides of the aisle” in entertainment industry negotiations, business affairs executives are simply held to a different set of rules of engagement than their counterparts on the other side — the kind of hyperzealous advocacy that might earn a high five from a grateful client can easily result in ruffled feathers and angry calls to colleagues or bosses for a studio negotiator. Nevertheless, I believe that these principles are fundamentally sound and can be deployed ethically and effectively by negotiators on any side, under any expectations, and in any context (in the entertainment industry or beyond). Others may legitimately disagree, but they aren’t writing this book.

In addition, while business affairs executives and talent representatives often proudly embrace their identities as “the negotiators,” they don’t have a monopoly on negotiation, which is, at its heart, the art of persuasion. And persuasion is arguably at the core of virtually every interpersonal interaction — if not in all aspects of life and business, then certainly in the famously relationship-driven, unavoidably collaborative and interdependent world of the entertainment industry.

If you work in this business, in any discipline, at any substantial level, part of your job is negotiating, whether you explicitly recognize it as such or not. Each of the following adages can inform how you engage with colleagues, business partners, or anybody else you hope will do something you want them to do (and who, in turn, hopes that you will do something they want you to do). At their most ambitious, these adages don’t just represent a helpful framework for doing your job well; they offer you a career path in which meaningful human relationships built on mutual trust and respect are both a cause and an effect of your success.

A. Why Is This Chapter Different from All Other Chapters?

In general, The Business of Television strives for objectivity. Although it is, of course, grounded in the author’s idiosyncratic professional interests and experiences, it seeks to offer information, not advice, and, except in rare and clearly labeled cases, to describe the world as it is and not as it “should” be.

This chapter is unique in that it is very much about advice. Like all advice, it is subjective and personal, which is why this chapter is the only one in the book to use the words “I” or “my,” or to address the reader directly as “you.” Like all advice, it necessarily reflects my personal biases and preferences. And, as with all advice, readers will no doubt find other purveyors of wisdom who would disagree wholeheartedly with any or all of it, starting with my earlier assertion that negotiating philosophy matters at all.6

Some might also argue that this chapter describes the world as it “should” be rather than as it is. I might agree with that statement, at least in part. A close friend (and creative executive) once said to me, “Our careers should all be a paradise! We get to tell stories and do cool shit for a living. This should be a Shangri-la. But a few people just have to go and ruin it for everybody.” And to some extent, the philosophy presented here represents an aspirational worldview in which we all finally get that Shangri-la.

But when I say this chapter is about advice, I of course intend that it be good and helpful advice — and, based on my own personal experience, that’s what I think I’m offering here, for people across the negotiating landscape. I don’t pretend that the beliefs presented are (or will ever be) universally held within the industry, or that there aren’t plenty of prominent negotiators who have succeeded with a very different approach (and perhaps a very different worldview). But I would argue, conservatively, that most of the best negotiators in the business have built their success on at least some of the values embodied in this philosophy.

B. But First, an Academic Framework

The philosophy presented here is heavily influenced by contemporary academic literature about negotiation, particularly the concept of “interest-based negotiation,” a negotiating paradigm first developed and promoted by law school faculty members at the Harvard Negotiation Project.7 Scholars may use the term “interest-based negotiation” somewhat interchangeably with “principled negotiation” and/or “non-adversarial bargaining.” The founding text of interest-based negotiation is Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, first published in 1981 by Harvard professors Roger Fisher and William Ury (with Professor Bruce Patton added as a co-author for more recent editions).8 Getting to Yes offers four guiding principles for negotiation — (1) separate the people from the problem; (2) focus on interests; (3) invent options for mutual gain; and (4) insist on using objective criteria. In so doing, it offers “interest-based negotiation” as a superior alternative to what might be considered the “traditional” negotiating paradigm, referred to as “positional bargaining” or “position-based negotiation.”

Positional bargaining conceptualizes negotiation as a fundamentally adversarial and zero-sum process. Discussion is focused narrowly on the issues presented, and every negotiation is approached as a one-off exercise in which there is a fixed “pie” of value to be divided, with each negotiator trying to secure as much of that “pie” for their side as possible, at the direct expense of the party on the other side. In positional bargaining, negotiation is a form of warfare, meaning that somebody wins and somebody loses — and that, as the old saying goes, “all is fair in love and war.”

Interest-based negotiation presumes that the desired outcome of any deal is to leave both sides better off for having made it, and that — especially where both parties work interdependently and rely on one another to achieve common goals — a good negotiation considers and protects relationships as well as outcomes. In interest-based negotiation, a great negotiator isn’t someone who claims the most value; it is someone who creates the most value. Interest-based negotiation challenges both sides to consider not just what both sides say that they want, but crucially, to consider why they want it. It therefore emphasizes fairness, credibility, trust, and creativity.

Countless academic classes on negotiation present the same “day one” hypothetical to illustrate the difference between positional bargaining and interest-based negotiation. Imagine two friends who are arguing over the use of a single orange. Positional bargaining assumes there is one orange to go around, and the “winner” is the person who gets the most of it for themselves. Party A’s starting position is that Party A gets the whole orange; Party B’s starting position is that Party B gets the whole orange. All other things being equal, the most obvious and likely result is that the parties simply cut the orange in half.

Interest-based negotiation demands that both sides seek to understand why each party wants the orange, on the belief that such understanding will yield a more efficient and mutually satisfactory outcome. If the negotiators commit to this inquiry, they might learn that Party A wants to grate the skin of the orange for its zest, while Party B wants to squeeze the orange’s pulp for its juice. If the negotiators can look past the parties’ respective positions (“I get the orange”/“No, I get the orange”), and get to their underlying interests (“I want orange zest”/“I want orange juice”), then both sides can leave the negotiation happier and better off just by peeling the orange rather than chopping it in half.

Interest-based negotiation isn’t a perfect paradigm. Obviously, few real-world negotiating problems are quite so simple, or so elegantly resolved, as splitting an orange. Critics have derided the approach as idealistically taking the world as it “should be” rather than as it “actually is.”9 Some issues — most obviously, money — really are zero sum, at least when taken in isolation. And some negotiations are true one-offs, in which there is little or no value to either side in preserving a long-term relationship rather than ruthlessly maximizing immediate gains.

Though undeniably imperfect, interest-based negotiation has grown increasingly influential as a productive and refreshingly un-bleak alternative to the Kissingerian10 worldview embodied in traditional positional bargaining, and high-level business executives and government officials routinely receive trainings from Harvard’s Program on Negotiation.

Hollywood — with its close-knit group of repeat players, both as principals and as representatives across a variety of business relationships, all mutually interdependent on one another to generate anything of substantial value — would seem to be an ideal context for interest-based negotiation to thrive. Unfortunately, this largely has not been the case.11 And admittedly, ruthless negotiators with unflinching willingness to unapologetically exercise their leverage can be particularly difficult to productively engage with this approach. Nevertheless, I stand by my earlier statement that many of the best negotiators in town (and certainly the ones that people generally enjoy dealing with) have thrived by — in their own ways and on their own terms — putting the following adages to work in their own careers.

Analogies about the best way to divide an orange are all well and good, but how do you make interest-based negotiation work for you in the real world, where the stakes are a bit higher (and the issues more complicated) than juice and zest? Over the next two posts — running this Thursday (August 20) and next Monday (August 24) — I’ll share the eight adages that guide me in every negotiation to this day, starting with the three words that I believe most separate the good dealmakers from the great.

If you’ve ever tried to look up a union scale number by browsing through one of the “wage tables” or “schedules of minimums” that are published by the WGA, DGA, and SAG-AFTRA, then you know that they are…less than user-friendly.

It’s not that there isn’t any logic to how these “official” guild-published tables and summaries are organized; it’s that the logic is absolutely useless to at least 99.99% of the people who use these documents. That’s why many larger companies require some junior member of the business affairs, production, or finance team to create and/or maintain a one-to-two-page “cheat sheet” summarizing that company’s executives’ most frequently referenced minimums, and why many more companies employ at least one executive who is able to obtain copies of such cheat sheets from friends at larger companies.

I first attempted to create my own tables of key union minimums while working on the first edition of my book, published in 2018. For the second edition, published in 2024, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA tables were well-organized, but slightly off due to a combination of author errors, rounding errors, and the WGA electing to divert 0.5% from its wage increase to PH&W.1 The DGA tables were…a noble effort. I tried very hard and spent many, many hours trying to crack them. I made real progress! I didn’t quite get there.

When I decided to launch this Substack, I figured it was time to conquer these damn things once and for all — if not for the benefit of the readers who had already seen me go through two close-but-no-cigar efforts in my books,2 then for the satisfaction and utility of creating for myself a reference tool that organized all of this information exactly as my own brain preferred.

This is that reference tool. The full set of tables is available only to subscribers, but you can check out a few samples below.

WGA Minimums Organized However Your Brain Likes Them

Spend enough time staring at tables of WGA minimums and you’ll realize that, although they are individually defined for each pairing of platform type and budget range, the whole system pretty much comes down to a “broadcast/A-level streaming” tier and a “cable/B-level streaming” tier. I experimented with two different ways of organizing this information, unsure of which I should use, until I realized that any given person might prefer one format or the other depending on how their brain worked, which meant I should just publish both:

Pilot and Episodic Script Minimums by Platform

Pilot and Episodic Script Minimums by Fee Grouping

Here’s the full list of WGA rate tables:3

1. Minimum Scale Weekly Compensation

2. Major WGA Money Breaks

3. Pilot and Episodic Script Minimums by Platform

4. Pilot and Episodic Script Minimums by Fee Grouping

5. Upset Prices and Minimums for Rewrites, Polishes, Stories Only, Teleplays Only, Formats, and Bibles

Share

DGA Minimums Without the Eye-Glazing Density

One of the things that makes the DGA’s wage tables so difficult to read is the density of numbers on every page, which is a function of the DGA’s uniquely complex, budget-sensitive, and platform-specific approach to minimums. That’s why I start by defining specific “High Budget,” “Mid-Budget,” and “Low-Budget” tiers, broken out by program length and platform type:

DGA Program Budget Thresholds by Program Length and Platform Type

That makes life much easier for the other seven DGA rate tables on the list:4

1. DGA Program Budget Thresholds by Program Length and Platform Type

2. Standalone Pilot Directing Minimums

3. Episodic Directing Minimums for One-Hour Programs in Broadcast and Basic Cable

4. Episodic Directing Minimums for One-Hour Programs in Streaming and Pay TV

5. Episodic Directing Minimums for Half-Hour Programs in Broadcast and Basic Cable

6. Episodic Directing Minimums for Half-Hour Programs in Streaming and Pay TV

7. Straight-to-Series First Episode Directing Minimums for One-Hour Programs

8. Straight-to-Series First Episode Directing Minimums for Half-Hour Programs

SAG-AFTRA Minimums Organized Usefully if Unimpressively

There’s one table. It’s actually quite helpful, given how many different SAG-AFTRA minimums there are (and how few of them actually matter for most working executives). So I’m going to save it for subscribers.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

But if you’ve been on the fence about subscribing, would full access to the Scale Cheat Sheets help you with your decision? Because if so:

Subscribe now

Since Comcast first announced its plans to spin off its NBCUniversal and Sky units into a new debt-laden standalone publicly traded company — which, for convenience, I’m just going to refer to as “NBCU” — one question has dominated the public conversation around the news:

So who’s going to buy NBCU?

And since day one, I’ve given the same answer to that question: don’t sleep on David Ellison.

Typically, my provocation elicits a response in the neighborhood of “No way. It’s unimaginable.”

To which I usually respond: have you been paying attention for the last decade or so? Because a lot of things that once seemed “unimaginable” — in this business, in this country, in this world — have proven to be very very real. And in this, the year of our lord 2026, the mere fact that something seems like it “couldn’t” or “shouldn’t” possibly happen just isn’t reason enough to conclude that it won’t.

Over the first two installments of this series, I’ve argued for why you shouldn’t underestimate the transformative impact of Comcast’s plans to spin off NBCU. I’ve pushed back on those who think it means the end of the bigger-is-better logic that has dominated the industry throughout the twenty-first century, and on those who dismiss the announced spinoff as “never going to happen.” But at the same time, I’ve joined the chorus of voices predicting that Comcast’s announcement will prove to be merely a prelude to a bigger process (and a bigger deal) that will truly define what the immediate future will look like — for NBCU, for its employees, and for the industry as a whole.

Today, I conclude my three-part series on the Comcast/NBCU split by taking a closer look at what that bigger process might look like. Is Comcast looking to expand NBCU or to expel it? What companies and individuals might be plotting their next big move right now? And is David Ellison taking over a third major studio really as unimaginable as it seems?

Share

Is NBCU a Buyer or a Seller?

It’s a seller.1

That’s not to say that a standalone NBCU doesn’t have the wherewithal to be a buyer. But I don’t see any plausible acquisition targets that would materially improve its competitiveness as a standalone player.

Lionsgate? I actually have a soft spot in my heart for the perennially-for-sale Lionsgate, which I think deserves more credit than it gets for investing successfully in innovative but risky and unproven concepts and platforms (like AMC’s Mad Men and Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black2), or for nurturing a small but mighty list of surprisingly durable franchises (such as The Hunger Games, John Wick, Twilight, and Saw). But I don’t see how absorbing Lionsgate meaningfully changes NBCU’s competitive position, or makes it significantly more appealing as an acquisition target.

Sony? Unlike Lionsgate, Sony/Columbia seems substantial enough to meaningfully move the needle for NBCU both as an active competitor and an acquisition target. But Sony has demonstrated a consistently careful, cautious, and deliberate approach to high-level corporate dealmaking. As a buyer, it has largely focused on targets like Industrial Media and Alamo Drafthouse — big enough to meaningfully expand its capacities, but small enough to reliably ingest without choking. And while buyers love to speculate about it as a seller, I’m not aware of a single time that Sony Corporation in Japan has seriously entertained any such opportunity.

A24? A24, with its uniquely strong brand identity and cross-generational cool factor, would theoretically give NBCU something genuinely new and additive. But if its owners are looking for an opportunity to cash out, they may find that they’re a victim of their own success. A24’s private equity-driven $3.5 billion valuation will be hard to justify or sustain as part of a publicly traded enterprise. Even more importantly, it may well be impossible to convert A24 from a scrappy indie upstart to a subsidiary of a stodgy corporate behemoth without torching the brand credibility, distinctiveness, and goodwill that are the company’s greatest assets.3

Roku? Maybe if Fox hadn’t beaten them to it. No chance now.

If NBCU Is a Seller, Then Who’s the Buyer?

Saying that NBCU is ripe to be sold is easy. Identifying who will buy it is substantially harder. When Paramount and Warner Bros. went on the block in 2024 and 2025, respectively, there was a clear shortlist of credible buyer candidates for each. The outlook for NBCU is much murkier — many plausible options to entertain, many legitimate reasons to doubt each, and no clear frontrunner. None stands out as probable, in the sense of being more likely than not to happen. But some certainly seem more likely than others.

I’ve organized the candidates into three “tiers.” So let’s consider our candidates, from Tier 3 (least likely) to Tier 1 (most likely). Who tops the list?

Tier 3: Apple and Amazon

Why will it happen? Two numbers: 15.6 and 8.6. The first is the ratio of Apple’s market capitalization when the markets closed earlier today ($4.89 trillion) to that of Netflix, the most valuable “true” entertainment company, even if it refuses to acknowledge itself as such ($313 billion). The second is the ratio of Amazon’s current market capitalization ($2.69 trillion) to Netflix’s. If we instead compare Apple and Amazon’s market caps to that of Disney, the next most valuable entertainment power ($173 billion), those numbers become 28.3 and 15.5, respectively. In other words: Apple and Amazon can do pretty much anything they damn well please. If motivated, they cannot be outbid (except perhaps by each other). And Apple — whose streaming service boasts many of the kinds of high-quality originals that tend to attract subscribers, but almost none of the sticky franchises or beloved and rewatchable library titles that tend to retain them — could especially benefit from taking over the Universal content library.

Why won’t it happen? Just because Apple and Amazon could buy NBCU without breaking a (financial) sweat doesn’t mean they’d want to. That Universal content library is appealing, I’m sure. But I suspect both would be even more repelled by virtually every other part of NBCU, including the regulatorily intensive (and politically sensitive) broadcast TV business, the hospitality-adjacent theme parks business, and the highly unionized studio production facility business. Apple and Amazon are already managing significant public and governmental concern about artificial intelligence, and treading very lightly in a political environment that has grown increasingly hostile toward “Big Tech.”4 Neither is likely to make a move that could easily put a target on its back with a capricious presidential administration, skeptical and opportunistic legislators, and fired-up antitrust activists.

Tier 2: Netflix and the Usual Billionaire Suspects

Netflix

Why will it happen? After Apple and Amazon, Netflix is the biggest fish (with the deepest pockets) in the pond. Despite its success in most respects, Netflix has struggled to develop its own durable, multifaceted, and culture-defining franchises. Netflix already made a serious run at Warner Bros. Discovery; NBCU — with its robust theme parks business and particularly strong marketing operation — would arguably be an even better strategic fit. While Peacock may be a less shiny prize than HBO, it would be much easier to swallow culturally and operationally. And while buying NBCU may represent a less emotionally satisfying declaration of victory over “old Hollywood” than taking over HBO would have been, it would still make an unmistakable statement about who’s really in charge around here these days.

Why won’t it happen? Since dropping out of the bidding for WBD, Netflix has quietly worked to fan the flames of antitrust skepticism toward this kind of deal; reversing course now would require them to face a hostile regulatory and PR environment that is at least partially of their own making. Competition drove the price of Warner Bros. to unsustainable heights, enough to raise concerns about the debt burden a deal would require; if there is even one other serious bidder for NBCU, it’s likely to cost even more. The market already told Netflix how it felt about the idea of Netflix paying top dollar to buy a legacy studio, and it was not a fan: in the three months between Netflix’s announcement of its tentative deal to acquire Warner Bros.’ studio and streaming assets and its announcement that it would concede the deal to Paramount, the company’s stock lost over a quarter of its value. Worse still, although its share price briefly rebounded once Netflix walked away from the bidding for WBD ($2.8 billion richer for the failed effort), the recovery was short-lived: Netflix’s stock is back down to 25% below its price when the bidding began, and down around 40% from where the stock was trading this time last year. Ignoring that feedback to pursue NBCU could risk even greater damage to Netflix’s identity as a “technology company” rather than an “entertainment and media company,” and with it, even greater and more sustained harm to the company’s appeal to investors. Hard to imagine them playing with that kind of fire.

The Usual Billionaire Suspects

Why will it happen? If a studio is for sale, it’s a safe bet that somewhere out there, Byron Allen, Edgar Bronfman Jr., and Casey Wasserman are working the phones and trying to figure out if they can buy it for themselves. I’ve made this case before.

Why won’t it happen? For the same reason it hasn’t happened yet: these guys are at least as passionate and motivated as anyone on this list, but they’re not as well-resourced. They’re rich — insanely, incomprehensibly, problematically rich — but they’re not “single-handedly buy a major studio” rich. Any deal to acquire NBCU would require them to piece together a complex and fragile financing scheme with multiple backers. There’s no guarantee they could get a credible offer together at all; and even if they can, they’d be at a significant disadvantage relative to competitors with deeper pockets, more flexible financing options, and greater freedom to act decisively without having to muster support among multiple backers with their own agendas. Bronfman and Wasserman bring the family bona fides (and perhaps the faint memory of happier times for the business), but among the three, Allen appears to have the strongest track record to support this kind of deal — in the last year alone, he acquired a majority share of BuzzFeed and an 11% stake in Starz. But, as his targeting of BuzzFeed and Starz suggests, Allen’s greatest strength has always been efficiently squeezing every dime out of challenged or declining businesses, not in making costly strategic investments to compete among the industry’s major powers.5

Tier 1: Paramount-Skydance-WB-Redbird-Ellison

Why won’t it happen? Let’s reverse the order and start by talking about all the reasons why I might be freaking you out for no reason:

One of the things that helped elevate Paramount’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery over Netflix’s was Ellison’s eagerness to acquire the entire company (as opposed to Netflix, which wanted to peel off only the company’s principal studio and streaming assets). That strategy is unquestionably off the table here — it’s safe to assume that the FCC — even this FCC — would regard joint ownership of CBS and NBC as a complete non-starter. Despite surprisingly strong and sustained resistance to the deal from both the creative community and state and foreign regulators, I still fully expect Paramount to overcome this week’s challenge from 12 state attorneys general (led by California’s Rob Bonta) and complete its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. But the kind of resistance that an attempted roll-up of a third major studio would surely generate should give even the most bullish corporate consolidator pause.

The Ellison family’s vast personal fortune was instrumental to the successful financing of Ellison’s acquisitions of both Paramount and WBD. But much of that fortune comes from the family’s huge stake in Oracle, whose stock dropped by nearly 50% since this time last year, and by over 60% from its peak in September 2025. They’ve already pledged tens of billions of dollars as collateral for the loans being used to buy Warner Bros. — a guarantee made while Oracle’s stock was trading near its peak. Can they really have enough liquid and uncollateralized assets left to finance a third mega-deal in three years? And even if they could somehow finance a deal to acquire (most of) NBCU, would there be any money left to actually run it and invest in its further growth?

And yet…

Why will it happen?

Paramount’s core argument for why its acquisition of Warner Bros. should be approved is that the business’s future will be based on streaming, and even a combined Paramount+ and HBO Max is still sub-scale compared to the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. If that narrative wins the day, then it’s not a stretch to argue that adding Peacock — arguably the weakest of the major subscription streamers — still wouldn’t give the company monopolistic market power. To the contrary, it would just allow the company to close the remaining gap and compete as near-equals with its tech rivals.

The single biggest regulatory hurdle to a deal would be bringing NBC and CBS under one roof. That’s fine — they’d happily exclude the NBC broadcast network from the deal, just as Disney (owner of ABC) left the Fox broadcast network out of its deal to acquire most of Fox.

The next biggest regulatory hurdle would be on the theatrical production and distribution side. Much of the community’s resistance to the WarnerMount combination has focused on its impact on the market for feature film development, production, and distribution. But, consistent with its focus on direct-to-consumer streaming as the most significant and relevant market, Paramount could partially defuse that resistance (and its antitrust risk with foreign as well as domestic regulators) by also leaving the Universal Pictures film studio out of the deal. This would require some complex rights management between the divorcing film and TV units. But Paramount already knows a thing or two about making that work — once-shared operational and intellectual property assets were divided between CBS (for TV) and Viacom (for features) when the companies split in 2005.

Another node of controversy around the Paramount/WBD deal has been the prospect of bringing CBS News and CNN under one roof, and the implications of that combination not just for the American news business, but for American democracy. But those concerns won’t be in play for a deal to add NBCU, since MSNBC — sorry, MS NOW — has already been spun off into Versant.

Comcast has announced its intention to maintain a stake in the spun-off standalone NBCU. Assuming the Roberts family (which controls Comcast) would be similarly interested in keeping a significant long-term position in a combined Paramount/WB/Universal, that opens the door to a more stock-heavy, less cash-and-debt-intensive structure than the brute-force $110 billion all-cash fight we just watched.

Now: does it still sound so “unimaginable” to you? Because if you’re forcing me to bet, my money is on the guy who, one way or another, always seems to get what he wants.

Could NBCU “Go It Alone” Without Fully Going It Alone?

Again, it’s not a fait accompli that NBCU will be sold, and I believe Comcast is fully prepared to go through with its spinoff plans as announced (assuming a more appealing option doesn’t present itself first).

But a standalone NBCU — whether as it has been proposed or under new owner-management (see “The Usual Billionaire Suspects” above) — doesn’t mean an NBCU that must simply do its best to carry on with business-as-usual. And while I doubt Netflix’s appetite to buy NBCU outright (for the reasons described above), there is a way that it could, as the old actually-pretty-disturbing-and-misogynistic-if-you-think-about-it saying suggests, “get the milk for free without having to buy the cow.”

An independent NBCU could very reasonably conclude that Peacock is too expensive, and too far behind its competitors, to justify its place at the strategic heart of the company’s future business. But rather than writing it off altogether, NBCU could enter into a joint venture, or some kind of exclusive licensing arrangement, to turn Peacock into an NBCU-branded and programmed tile on the Netflix service. NBCU would retain a consumer-facing brand while saving billions by essentially outsourcing the effort and expense of operating the service.

There’s plenty of precedent for this sort of thing. While Disney continues to offer Hulu as a standalone service, it is in the midst of a long-term process of essentially converting Hulu into a tile on Disney+ — a process that I suspect would already be complete if not for the company’s Hulu + Live TV virtual MVPD offering. It wouldn’t even be novel for Netflix, whose French service already offers dedicated tiles featuring local live channels with companion on-demand options. And it would fit in nicely with current trends toward multi-channel streaming services and bundled subscriptions combining services from competing providers.

This strikes me as the best of the plausible outcomes — not just the least traumatic for the employees of NBCU (or for the town as a whole), but the healthiest for the overall competitive landscape of the industry. It offers NBCU the opportunity to preserve as much value as possible from what it has built, to bow out gracefully from the losing game of competing head-on with the tech companies in direct-to-consumer streaming, and to start charting a sustainable path forward for itself as an independent mid-major power.

Of course, in this, the year of our lord 2026, the mere fact that something seems like it really “should” happen just isn’t reason enough to conclude that it will. But we can hope.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

There’s an adage in journalism called Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. Named after Ian Betteridge, a British tech journalist who wrote about it in 2009, it states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”1

Perhaps the editors of Semafor had Betteridge’s Law in mind when they decided to run an article on Sunday afternoon from business reporter Rohan Goswami under the title “Paramount weighs leaving California over Warner Bros. rift.” Goswami’s piece can be fairly summarized by its lede paragraph:

Unlike Goswami, I have the liberty of choosing my own headlines and deks here.2 And I very much had Betteridge’s Law in mind when I posed the question at the top of this post: is Paramount really going to leave California to get its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery done?

No. But the fact that we’re even having this conversation is very much the point.3

Over the last few years, a lot of reporting and analysis about the entertainment industry has relied on the metaphor of a “house on fire.” Perhaps a more apt metaphor for our business would be a “theater on fire.” Which makes this article the journalistic equivalent of running into the auditorium and yelling:

As of the publication of this post — less than 24 hours since Goswami’s article dropped — I’ve been contacted by eight different friends, colleagues, and contacts for my take on the Semafor piece. And in those conversations, I’ve encountered reactions representing at least three out of five of the so-called “Five Stages of Grief” popularized by Swiss-American Elizabeth Kübler-Ross.

There has been anger. There has been denial. There has been depression.

But I think this news story is about one thing above all others: bargaining.

And the four reasons why I believe that can be found right in the Semafor article, and in the circumstances immediately surrounding its publication.

Subscribe now

1. The Article Doesn’t Match the Headline

Let’s go back to the specific title of the Semafor piece that has the town so abuzz: “Paramount weighs leaving California over Warner Bros. rift.” But is that actually what the article says?

Digging into the full text, and paring away the context and speculation, I can identify two bits of “news reporting” that are broadly consistent with the headline (which appear in the very first two sentences):

• “As California tries to derail Paramount’s $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount CEO David Ellison’s friends and advisers have been pushing the media executive to consider shifting his business out of the state.”

• “Ellison’s confidantes have pushed him to consider moving its corporate headquarters and reallocating much of its $30 billion in planned spending outside the state if California Attorney General Rob Bonta were to sue to stop the merger, according to people familiar with the discussions.”

To even describe these statements as “broadly consistent” with the headline is a bit generous on my part. All this article really says is that “People are telling David Ellison to think about moving the company.”

So is Paramount actively considering the prospect of leaving California? Maybe. The headline certainly suggests as much. But the article never actually says so, nor does it identify anything that Paramount or its leaders are actually doing to assess or prepare for a move. The reader is simply left to infer that Paramount is actively considering the prospect.

This should be your first indication that this “news article” might be more laundered company-issued publicity than actual reportage.

2. The Sources Paint Ellison as the Reluctant Hero

The next clue that Semafor’s article is more buffed-and-shined press release than meaningful journalism is the subtle reality of exactly what statements or intentions are (and are not) being attributed specifically to Ellison — who is as much an individual human stand-in for Paramount as any single individual can be considered for any company in the industry these days — as opposed to “friends,” “advisers,” or “confidantes”:

• “For his part, Ellison remains wary of the idea of leaving California, some of the people said — he relocated Paramount’s corporate headquarters from New York to Los Angeles after his original deal to purchase the company closed last year, and has spent most of his life in California.”

That’s it. That’s the whole list.

To the extent the article purports to reveal anything about the thinking of Ellison or other actual decision-makers at Paramount, we get the following:

• “Privately, Ellison and other Paramount executives have expressed frustration at [California Attorney General Rob] Bonta’s refusal to engage” with the company on negotiated concessions that Bonta would accept in order to drop his objections to the deal.

• “But Paramount believes Bonta’s office has rebuffed its overtures, creating what one Ellison adviser said is an ‘inhospitable’ environment for Paramount to operate in.”

So, divorcing the article from its provocative headline and taking its text at face value, Ellison doesn’t seem to be doing much “weighing” at all. To the contrary, we are told only that he doesn’t want to do something so drastic. It’s those dastardly friends, confidantes, and advisers who are in his ear!

This is what a smart, deftly executed publicity strategy looks like. Nothing controversial is attributed to Ellison, or to any other executive of the company — only to the outsiders. Readers are given space to infer and speculate themselves into a tizzy, while Ellison himself is positioned as a reluctant and put-upon leader who isn’t keen on any of this, and who has total plausible deniability. You can already imagine Ellison reassuring an anxious industry community, “Hey, I never said anything about moving the company! I’d never want to do such a thing. I just want that damn Rob Bonta to call me back so they can figure it out like grown-ups!”

3. Timing Is Everything (or, “Don’t Talk About That; Talk About This”)

You also can’t read this article in a vacuum. Rather, you have to look at it in the context of when it was released, and what else was in the news over the last two days.

Paramount’s departure from California would certainly qualify as Very Bad News for the industry. And companies tend to drop (or work very hard to persuade journalists to drop) Very Bad News on Fridays, in hopes that it will be largely missed and forgotten by Monday. This article came out on Sunday afternoon — timed perfectly to allow it to dominate industry conversation this week.

And why might Paramount want this to be the story on everyone’s minds this week?

I’d wager that it’s because, if it wasn’t, everyone might instead just be talking about Sunday’s report in the New York Times that “[s]tate attorneys general are said to be getting ready to file a lawsuit as soon as this week to halt the $111 billion deal.” But only until that was superseded by discussion of this morning’s filing of the promised lawsuit, a showy press conference in the shadow of the iconic Hollywood sign, and an accompanying press blitz from the CA Attorney General’s office.

Paramount and its leaders understand full well that the industry community is, at best, deeply wary of its imminent merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Once Donald Trump’s Department of Justice fulfilled everybody’s most cynical expectations by announcing its decision not to oppose the merger (or even to extract some nominal concessions from the company in exchange for its approval), many had turned their attention to Bonta as their Last Great Hope for blocking it.

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in Hollywood who is especially happy or optimistic about the prospect of “WarnerMount.” But there are plenty who have been willing to begrudgingly conclude that, in a world in which the only plausible alternatives were for Netflix to buy Warners (memorably called “the death of Hollywood” in one piece from the few weeks when that appeared to be happening) or Warners and Paramount both slowly withering and dying in the face of the Netflix/Amazon/Apple onslaught, Paramount acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery was “the best of the bad options” (at least for some constituencies).

Semafor’s report is a megaphone through which Ellison and his partners can subtly half-reassure/half-warn those who know they hate this deal but are still on the fence about whether to actively oppose it: “This deal is fine. And if you think you want Bonta to block it? Just know that it could get worse. It could get so much worse.”

4. Don’t Bet on Outcomes in Which Everyone Loses

The best reason to assume that Paramount isn’t seriously entertaining leaving California is because, in short, it’s an outcome that literally no one wants.

Skeptical as I am about that Semafor article, I fully believe its suggestion that Ellison himself would not want the price of his prize to essentially be his banishment from California, and with it, exile from the social and cultural power center of the industry.

First, there’s the personal factor for Ellison, whose individual aspirations toward industry moguldom are, I have argued, an important frame for understanding what he and Paramount are doing. I can tell you from personal experience that a five-minute stroll down the Paramount Lot’s historic Paseo between one’s parking space and office is one of the greatest perks of working at that or any other company in Hollywood — one that I felt so strongly about during my years there that I commissioned local artist Andy Bauch to create a 3’ x 5’ landscape of the gate out of 19,083 Lego bricks (an image of which appears at the top of this post). I’m no mogul, but taking that walk, strolling through that gate, is enough to make almost anyone feel like one for a few minutes.

I don’t think Ellison would feel like all that much of a mogul taking his morning stroll on the New Jersey boardwalk or through tourist-ridden Times Square.4

At the same time, while the Semafor article holds up Chevron, Oracle, and Tesla as examples of mega-corporations that abandoned California for the most “hospitable” regulatory environment of Texas, it’s hard to believe that other major executives in our industry would feel as sanguine as the leaders of those companies about moving to Texas or New Jersey.

Admittedly, it’s unclear how much of the company’s operations, and how many of its key leaders, would have to travel with the corporate headquarters as part of this transition.5 But the mere fact of it would be a devastating psychological wound to the industry — one that would come with real consequences for the company’s future success. Reports have already started trickling out that some creators and talent with enough options and market power to be choosy have shied away from working with the company, and especially with Ellison’s controversial hand-picked chief for CBS News. Paramount’s key partners are far more likely to punish the company for its defection than the people and companies that do business with Chevron (for which oil-rich Texas is a natural home), Oracle (which joined an already growing tech community in the state), or Tesla (whose CEO Elon Musk has gone all-in on Texas more generally). Already living on a razor’s edge of industry/creative community sentiment, I have to think Ellison and his team would be very concerned that winning the deal and losing the state would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory in the long run.

Meanwhile, California Attorney General Rob Bonta doesn’t want to be the politician who drove not one but TWO legacy studios out of California any more than Ellison wants to be the CEO who left with them. I don’t question the sincerity of Bonta’s concerns about and objections toward the Paramount/WBD deal. But I also don’t doubt that he is acutely aware that he is playing a game with tremendous political promise and peril. If Bonta can bring Paramount to heel, he might start drawing up designs for his office in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. If he fails to block the deal, and in the process drives Paramount and Warner Bros. to one of the 38 states (including Texas) that haven’t sued to block it, he’s more likely to be looking at floor plans for his window office as “Of Counsel” at a large corporate law firm in San Francisco.

Which is why I’m sure that, if Bonta has been a reticent and unresponsive partner to Paramount in negotiating concessions in exchange for dropping his opposition to the deal, it is only because he has wanted to negotiate with as much leverage as possible. This morning’s filing gives him that leverage.

Now the real negotiations begin.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

I’m not usually the type who tries to understand the world in terms of fables and fairy tales. Even so, I can’t help but think about the industry’s reaction to last Monday’s announcement by Comcast, that it planned to spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a new standalone publicly traded entertainment and media company, in terms of one of the most famous fairy tales of them all: Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Last week’s post was my response to the industry’s Mama Bears — those whose reactions were, in my opinion, a bit too cold or too soft for news that marks the beginning of what I think will prove to be lasting and transformational change for the industry (and certainly, at the least, for two of its most historic brands in NBC and Universal).

Today’s post addresses the Papa Bears — those who strike me as running too hot, too stiff, making too much of the news.1 In some cases, it’s trade press editors wildly overextrapolating in search of an attention-grabbing headline. In others cases, I see industry lifers too jaded by recent experience to take any news at face value. And really, I’m no less cynical than they are — I just land somewhere a bit more nuanced.

Subscribe now

NBCU Spinoff Overreaction #1: Bigger Is No Longer Better!

One headline I’ve seen stands above all others in capturing the trade press’s thirstiness to squeeze a big headline out of this story. Care of Deadline on June 30 (the day after Comcast’s announcement):

You hear that, everyone? Now that we think about it, there was really no reason for the industry to have contracted from six major studios to (soon) four, or from eight premier streaming services to four or five or however many we end up with. Were we saying bigger was better before? Just kidding! Sounds like we won’t have to worry about several more years of ever-churning M&A&S2 activity after all.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not here to sing the praises of corporate consolidation. I’m on record as being deeply skeptical of these big combinations — not least because, in my own experience at major corporate conglomerates like Amazon, Sony, and pre-Skydance Paramount Global, I saw firsthand just how bad all of these companies were at promoting collaboration and unlocking value across intuitively complementary business units. “Consolidation” and “efficiency” are stories that sell well to investors, but are seldom actually operationalized effectively.

But that doesn’t mean that the spinoff of NBCU and Sky into a standalone unit — in essence, their vertical de-integration from Comcast’s broadband/pay TV business — signals a broader reconsideration by investors and corporate leaders of their obsession with scale as a business strategy unto itself. Rather, it just reflects an ongoing pendulum swing, in both market sentiment and regulatory focus, between horizontal and vertical integration as the leading models of corporate strategy and growth. Bigger is still “better.” The question is: what kind of bigger?

“Bigger” Like Wider, or “Bigger” Like Taller?

To start, let’s define two common and familiar terms that are essential to understanding not just Comcast’s decision to spin off NBCU, but our industry’s ongoing obsession with consolidation and scale more generally: horizontal integration and vertical integration.

“Horizontal integration” refers to the combination of companies that are in essentially the same business — i.e., competitors buying competitors so that they can increase their revenue through the exercise of greater market power, and reduce their costs thanks to “eliminating redundancies”3 and achieving economies of scale. “Vertical integration” refers to the combination of companies that are separate links in the chain by which products and services are created and brought to consumers — a company buying its own suppliers or distributors in order to “maximize efficiencies” and capture the profit available at each link in the value chain.4

In the context of the entertainment business, then, a movie studio combining with another movie studio with more or less the same business is an example of horizontal integration; a movie studio acquiring physical studio production spaces or a theatrical exhibition chain is an example of vertical integration.

A Trip Down Antitrust Memory Lane

The foundational American antitrust statutes of the Progressive Era — the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 — were enacted in an effort to rein in massive horizontal combinations such as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, and American Tobacco, which exercised overwhelming market power within their respective industries as a result of their extraordinary scale.

Through the end of the 1920s, in the face of a legislative and regulatory environment that had become increasingly hostile toward horizontal trusts, American businesses pivoted toward vertical integration as the next big thing in corporate consolidation. In Hollywood, this took the form of the so-called “Studio System,” in which the industry’s major powers each owned and controlled all of the steps in the chain of film production, distribution, and exhibition.

The New Deal swung the political climate back against corporate concentration, with a new skepticism toward vertical integration in particular. In the entertainment industry, this shift culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 1948’s United States v. Paramount Pictures, which effectively dismantled the “Studio System” that had dominated the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, an obviously hostile political, legal, and regulatory posture toward both horizontal and vertical combinations resulted in the agglomeration of large, diversified conglomerates without any obvious corporate efficiencies — think Gulf + Western Industries, which grew from a 1934 auto parts maker into a massive empire of over 100 businesses spanning mining and resource extraction, film and TV production, cigar manufacturing and distribution, and more.

By the 1970s, however, the so-called “Chicago School Revolution,” driven by the scholarship of Judge/Professor/Crank/Supreme Court Reject Robert Bork, reimagined antitrust law as essentially indifferent to any corporate consolidation that didn’t obviously result in higher prices or reduced choices for consumers. During the Reagan era and beyond, the predominance of this theory of antitrust created a permissive legal climate toward consolidation, especially vertical deals, which eventually gave rise to AOL’s disastrous acquisition of Time Warner, Comcast’s fairly smooth acquisition of NBCUniversal (and, later, Sky), and AT&T’s disastrous acquisition of Time Warner.

Today’s Corporate Consolidation Landscape

The landmark deals that have caused the most consternation in the industry over the last decade — first Disney’s acquisition of most of Fox, and now the pending merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery — are essentially horizontal in nature. But, unlike in prior eras, the market’s most recent reorientation from vertical toward horizontal combinations doesn’t reflect a shift in legal/regulatory priorities.5 Instead, the market seems to have finally figured out what almost any employee of any of these companies could have told them at any time in the last 20 years:

We suck at this.6

At multiple companies, I worked hard to find creative ways to marshal resources and capabilities across complementary businesses. I did it both because I’m a professional overachiever, and because it seemed cool, and potentially fun, and certainly like the thing I should be doing. I have zero wins to show for any of it.

Even within a relatively coherent large business (like NBCU), different divisions may have vastly and unexpectedly different cultures. (I spent years of my career learning the hard way about the dramatic differences in culture, language, and values between the video game and film/TV industries.) Such differences are often especially pronounced (and impactful) between businesses that come together via M&A activity, rather than developing in parallel organically within an existing organization.

Beyond organizational dynamics, there is also good old fashioned individual insecurity.7 Generally well-intentioned people are often so rattled by the inherent insecurity of working through a major corporate M&A process (often more than once) that they naturally begin to view more distant colleagues less as teammates and more as competitors for finite resources (if not survival).

In the end, I believe there is one rule when it comes to executing on the promise of corporate integration: “Bonus pool is destiny.” Overstressed and undersourced executives will not commit scarce resources (in time, money, or effort) for the benefit of affiliated businesses unless that benefit is somehow eventually reflected in their own compensation (and that of their teams). Undifferentiated bonus pools are controversial, and structuring compensation schemes and effective incentives for collaboration is hard.8

I’ve never seen a company “get it right.” Have you?9

So yeah, maybe there is something to this repudiation of the tempting but unproven theoretical logic of vertical integration.

I don’t believe, as LightShed’s Rich Greenfield argued, that Comcast’s decision was “an admission that there is literally no synergy between Comcast and NBCUniversal.” I just think it’s an admission that they haven’t been any better at “unlocking the synergy” or whatever than anyone else.

And I don’t take it as a sign, as Deadline suggested, that the market has fallen out of love with “bigger is better.” It just means that the market is directing its affection away from vertical scale (which requires harnessing complex cross-divisional strategic and operational efficiencies), and toward horizontal scale (i.e., good old-fashioned market domination). And the best evidence of that might be what happens to NBCU next.

NBCU Spinoff Overreaction #2: This Is Never Going to Happen

What I consider to be the “Baby Bear” interpretation of this news — not too hot, not too cold, just right — was best represented in the press by Puck’s Matt Belloni10: there’s a good chance this spinoff never actually happens.

Recall that, while essentially everyone understood that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO/Hollywood’s favorite Temu Bond villain David Zaslav had all but placed a “for sale” sign on the iconic WB water-tower from the day he arrived, it was WBD’s announcement that it planned to split the company into two parts — a slimmed down Warner Bros. comprising most of the company’s film/TV production and film distribution assets, and a new publicly traded spinoff called “Discovery Global” housing declining linear TV assets such as TNT and CNN. In practice, however, what was presented as the announcement of a corporate split was more like the announcement that the bidding for Warners was, at last, officially open. So began the bidding war from which David Ellison and Redbird Capital eventually emerged triumphant by paying nearly three times the value assigned to the company by the investment markets before the bidding began.11

Comcast was surely well aware of that recent history when it made its announcement, and I have every expectation that, in the weeks and months ahead, they’ll be at least entertaining serious inquiries from buyers eager to take some or all of the NBCU/Sky assets off their hands.

The overreaction, however, has come from those who say that’s all this is — a stealth announcement of a public sale process — and that Comcast has no intention or even desire to actually go through with the spinoff as it has currently been announced. I’ve actually heard some friends and colleagues misinterpret Belloni as making this overreaching version of the argument.

I can certainly understand why people might feel inclined to interpret current events in our industry in the most cynical possible terms. But I view Comcast’s move here as more similar to how I interpret Netflix’s participation in the WB sweepstakes — with confidence that pretty much any outcome leaves them in a better place than where they started. That’s because, whether or not a spinoff is the “best” move for NBCU, there’s reason to think that — even in the absence of a direct sale of its NBCU assets — it’s the best move for Comcast.

At the time that Comcast first announced its intention to acquire NBCUniversal from General Electric in December 2009, and continuing through the completion of Comcast’s multi-stage acquisition in March 2013, institutional investors — no doubt aware of the historically permissive attitude of regulators toward vertical combinations at the time, as described above — were celebrating and rewarding the basic business logic of the deal. Rather than being a lonely piece of an inefficiently diversified conglomerate, as it was at GE, NBCU would now be a key part of an efficient, mutually complementary vertically integrated company. Today, the prevailing sentiment among investors seems to be the one in the quote from LightShed’s Rich Greenfield above: that there is “literally no synergy there.”

All at once, institutional investors seem to have suddenly rediscovered the concept of the conglomerate discount, in which a diversified group of businesses and assets is valued at less than the sum of its parts (usually by about 10% to 15%) due to the conglomerate’s inability to manage various and different businesses as well as a focused company would do. But wait — should we instead apply the conglomerate premium, in which the market values a diversified parent company higher than the sum of its individual business units (because of vibes, I guess)? Or is it that all of this is faux-precise made-up nonsense? I say the latter, but it doesn’t matter — in the Game of Thrones of the American economy, reality is whatever market sentiment says it is.

Thirty years from now, investors might once again embrace vertical integration as the key to smart corporate growth. Today, their opinion can be seen in Comcast’s moribund stock price, which has declined by roughly 60% from its pandemic era high in September 2021 (a period when most entertainment and media stocks were flying high in the months following the widespread rollout of Covid-19 vaccines). And it’s not just Comcast being picked on — Disney’s stock is down by about 45% over the same period.

But again, just because “vertical integration” is out of style doesn’t mean that the market has lost its lust for M&A&S activity generally. It’s reasonable for Comcast to have concluded that, based on prevailing market sentiment, there was simply no way to convince investors to reverse that decline without making a corporate event of it. Whether that event is a spinoff or a sale unfortunately matters less than the mere fact of it being an event. And the institutional investors who have shown so little affection for Comcast over the last five years seem to agree: Comcast shares rose 4.5% on the day of the announcement, on roughly 4x typical trading volume, and then added another 2% the next day (though they have shed most of those gains in the roughly week and a half since).

Comcast likely has other strategic considerations on its mind as well. Comcast’s core broadband/pay TV business has been vulnerable to secular decline, but — at least until recently — somewhat impervious to direct competitive threat. Every merger among its rivals, like the 2016 merger of Charter and Time Warner Cable, meant one fewer competitor seated at the table. At the same time, the incredibly high cost of building and deploying the necessary infrastructure to launch a new broadband or pay TV business effectively deterred new players from sitting down at the table.

More recently, however, the emergence of Starlink — as well as an expanding group of rivals like Amazon Leo that have followed Starlink into the emerging business of delivering broadband Internet access via low earth orbit (LEO) satellites — promises to substantially disrupt the industry and challenge the once-impregnable-seeming fortresses of Comcast and its terrestrial broadband/pay TV kin.

I expect that Comcast is eyeing a combination with Charter as a defensive move against these new satellite-based competitors. Charter, you may recall, ultimately walked away with Time Warner Cable in 2016, after the breakdown of TWC’s initial tentative deal with Comcast. It is currently mid-close on a $34.5B acquisition of Cox, a big move that is also likely informed by looming competitive pressure from Starlink and its ilk.

Divesting NBCU positions Comcast for an easier political and regulatory climate through which to push through a deal with Charter — one that would have been virtually unimaginable in a pre-Starlink world, effectively combining the U.S.’s four largest cable/broadband providers from before the current wave of consolidation began.12 And I’m not the only one who seems to think so — Charter’s stock price jumped by about 10% in the days immediately following Comcast’s announcement of the NBCU spinoff (though it has also since shed most of those gains).

To be clear, I still fully expect that the months ahead will see a flurry of additional potential M&A activity around NBCU. But I believe it would be a mistake to assume that, if a sufficiently compelling offer doesn’t materialize, Comcast isn’t fully prepared to see the spinoff plan through as it has been announced.

So if the bidding for (or by) NBCU is about to begin in earnest, who should we expect to see at the auction? In Part 3, I’ll conclude this series by considering all of the plausible players in the drama to come, and share my sure-to-be-unpopular pick for the potential buyer that I think isn’t getting nearly enough attention.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

Like many of you, I’m sure, I woke up on Monday morning thinking to myself, “Gee, has it only been 123 days since the last industry-transformational corporate reorganization was announced?”

How lucky for all of us, then, that Comcast was there to save us the boredom of a 124^th day of relative quiet, peace, and stability, with its announcement that — just six months clear of having ejected most of its inexorably declining (but, for the time being, still quite cash-generative) cable assets into Versant1 — it would spin off its NBCUniversal and Sky units into a new debt-laden standalone publicly traded company (in which Comcast could retain up to a 19.9% equity stake).

My immediate reaction, if I’m being honest, was smug satisfaction, as I thought back to this passage from Part 4 of my Paramount/Warner Bros. series back in March:

In the original post, that prediction appeared immediately following my acknowledgment that my last big prognostication about Comcast — “that I expected Comcast to eventually make a move on Warner Bros., likely at Zaslav’s (repeated) invitation, and possibly to spin off its own NBCUniversal content unit into a newly combined entity with Warner Bros. Discovery that would be loaded with debt taken off the Comcast books” — had turned out to be a big whiff.3

For that reason, I think it’s fair if I now indulge myself in a quick:

Among people without such specific, petty, and ego-driven interests in this news as my own, however, I’ve found reactions to be noticeably more muted, and intriguingly more varied, than we’ve seen with most of the other marquee M&A&S4 blockbusters of the last several years. People are…pretty chill, right? Plenty of speculation, but unusually un-obsessive, with few strong opinions. But, facing a surprisingly placid, fragmented, and disengaged audience during what should be a banner week for ad revenue, I’ve also seen some toasty takes in the trade press that I think fundamentally misjudge the significance5 of what’s happening here.

My prediction about Comcast’s “quiet quitting” from the entertainment industry was included in my four-part series about the Warner Bros./Paramount merger, which ran during The Business of Television Max’s launch week in March 2026. That series featured much of what has come to distinguish this Substack — the discursive footnotes, the willingness to write about prominent people and institutions without concern for the effect on my own future employment prospects, and my unintended habit of turning virtually every topic into a multi-part series.6 So you shouldn’t be surprised when I now say:

Welcome to my three-part series on Comcast’s spinoff of NBCUniversal!

• In today’s Part 1, I’m going to talk about the people that I think are — generally for very understandable reasons, sometimes even for admirable ones — underreacting to today’s news, and why I think they should probably be steeling themselves a bit more for what likely comes next.

• In next week’s Part 2, I’ll turn my attention to the overreactors who think that this news means “medium is the new big” in corporate scaling, before sharing my own opinions of what to make (and not to make) of Comcast’s unexpected announcement. (Preview: I don’t think you’ll be too surprised.)

• And in Part 3, I’ll consider the major candidates to buy or be bought by the newly independent NBCU, and share my best guess for its ultimate fate. (Preview: I think you’re going to be surprised, and that you’re going to hate it.)

NBCU Spinoff Underreaction #1: This Is Fine

Given my prediction in March, I wasn’t surprised by Comcast’s announcement of its plan to spin off NBCU and Sky. I was quite surprised, however, when I checked in with a few friends at Uni and found that the mood there is nowhere near as existential or bleak as I expected (and am used to hearing from insiders at times like this). As far as I’ve seen, employee sentiment has ranged from “Sure, why not, it’s better than getting sold to Netflix” to “Sure, why not, it’s better than buying WB would have been” to “This is fine.”

And yes, of course, that’s “This is fine” with a nod to this timeless Internet classic:

But can you blame the employees of NBCUniversal — or pretty much anywhere else — for kind of being half-dead about the whole thing at this point? It’s hard to find any major company that hasn’t at some point been a potential buyer, or a potential seller, or both. And as I observed in the March post I quoted earlier, an employee who started at Warner Bros. in 1990 or earlier and somehow survived long enough to retire after the pending “WarnerMount” deal closes will have incredibly and improbably survived seven different major mergers and ownership changes with their job intact.^ It’s easy to understand how they end up at a place of “Just tell me when the meetings are where I find out who my boss is, who my division head is, and whether or not I’m fired.”

World-weary as that may sound, I think it’s actually pretty wise for employees to somewhat divorce themselves, both emotionally and intellectually, from grand processes and outcomes that they can’t predict, much less control. That isn’t to say that employees should be indifferent about those processes and outcomes. But it’s also healthy to recognize that, in the face of such chaos and uncertainty, no one really knows which scenario will actually play out best for them in the end — or what “best” will even turn out to mean.

To be clear, though, maintaining a healthy, humble, and sanguine attitude about transformational change doesn’t mean that it isn’t transformational change. Saving the worrying about the impact on you and your business for after you’ve learned what you actually have to worry about is sensible and mature, but the impact will come.

I think there are a lot of plausible final outcomes here — more on that in Part 3 next Thursday — and any number of ways it could turn out in terms of how immediate, dramatic, and traumatic the impacts would be for NBCU and its employees. Prolonged discomfort, distraction, and uncertainty are guaranteed. But how much more uncomfortable, distracted, and uncertain than the recent baseline? Could be a little, could be a lot.

If that sentiment feels disappointingly lukewarm, then let me remind you that, not even four months ago, I addressed the employees of Warner Bros. Discovery in a section titled “To The Employees of Warner Bros. Discovery: I’m Really Sorry but This Is Going to Suck.” You’ve got to admit, it’s getting better.8

NBCU Spinoff Underreaction #2: This Is Good

NBCUniversal has been viewed as a bastion of relative stability over the last several years, and rightly so.9 Its financial condition and performance have been steadier than most, it has never seemed as vulnerable to bigger competitors, or as functionally out of control of its own destiny, as many of its once-proud rivals, and it has never made it past the exploratory stages of any major M&A&S10 transaction.11 That sounds like a company that has a fighting chance out there, right?

The Ankler’s Rich Rushfield has gone even further than “this is fine” — all the way, in fact, to “this is actually pretty good!” I’ve always been struck by the familiar stubbornly hopeful streak running through Rushfield’s frequently acerbic and exasperated commentary about the industry.12 When the industry’s leaders yet again make a decision that proves our worst assumptions about them, he is never surprised, but always disappointed. Even so, I was quite surprised to see that, while he acknowledged an initial reflexive sense of dread, Rushfield optimistically welcomed the return to the market of a genuine, reasonably well-scaled (by contemporary standards), standalone media and entertainment company — fully committed to its own business, and liberated from its corporate ghetto within a broader technology or infrastructure behemoth that has bigger things to worry about on its balance sheet.

But to be optimistic about NBCU’s prospects as an independent company because of its recent relative stability and resilience is to underestimate the extent to which NBCU has owed that relative stability and resilience to its lack of independence.

Simply put, NBCU has been somewhat sheltered from market forces that hit its competitors much harder — including growing investor skepticism/antipathy toward traditional content businesses — because of its position as a subsidiary component of a bigger infrastructure business. Not unlike the cable network businesses that were spun off into Versant, Comcast’s core broadband/pay TV business may be in long-term secular decline, but it still generates large and predictable revenue. And it does so in what has historically been a pretty stable and minimally competitive industry — you might remember that, in 2014, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts defended a proposed combination of Comcast and Time Warner Cable against antitrust concerns by arguing, “They’re in New York. We’re in Philadelphia. They’re in LA. We’re in San Francisco. You can’t buy a Comcast in New York. You can’t buy a Time Warner in Philadelphia. So there’s no reduction in competition in broadband or in television.”13 All of that has substantially reduced pressure on and scrutiny of the performance of NBCU in isolation over the last few turbulent years.

The last thing I want to do is try to convince somebody who is currently feeling happy and confident about the industry to just succumb to the existential dread with the rest of us. But Rich and I clearly have fundamentally different opinions about the benefits of an entertainment and media company trying to “make it on its own” out there, at least as a publicly traded company. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I believe that the realities of the entertainment industry have never held up well against the expectations of institutional investors. Rather, it seems to me that our industry’s most vibrant and celebrated eras have been those in which its major powers were largely owned and operated either as the personal playthings of wealthy moguls14 or as weirdo subsidiaries of much larger diversified conglomerates.15

In other words, I don’t view the severing of NBCU’s relationship with Comcast as breaking NBCU’s chains; I view it as removing NBCU’s corporate security blanket.

Of course, all of that only really matters if you assume, as Rushfield evidently does, that NBCU/Sky’s next phase will be as a standalone entertainment and media company in substantially its current form. But I’m far from alone in doubting it. Rather, I think we will look back at this week’s announcement not as the beginning of NBCU/Sky’s new era, but as the start of a bigger process (and the prelude to a bigger deal) that will truly define what the next era will look like — for NBCU and Sky and their employees, and for the industry as a whole.

Happy Fourth of July! There’s a lot to criticize about the culture of the entertainment industry, but if there’s one thing we should all be able to celebrate about that culture, it’s our collective commitment to turning any 3-day weekend into a 4-day weekend. Possibly a 5-day one. Maybe even a 9-day one? So stay ambitious, folks, and enjoy a well-earned holiday break! I’ll see you next week for Part 2, in which I’ll turn my attention from critiquing those who I think aren’t freaking out enough about this news, to critiquing those who I think are freaking out too much.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

Editor’s note (October 2026): The contributor search and the reader-survey offer described below have closed.

In general, I avoid reading comments on Deadline, which should come with a warning badge that says: “The Internet is not real life.” Or at least I hope real life isn’t a teeming mass of fanatics, shitposters, publicists/plants, Kevin Durant-like burner accounts, and occasional poor bastards trying earnestly to make a good-faith point for some reason.

Despite my better judgment, I can’t help but occasionally take a peek. (Doesn’t everyone?) When I do, I’m usually reminded that my default policy is the right one. But every once in a while, I see a comment that is like this one on a story about the defenestration of long-time Amazon Studios head Jen Salke, the day after Seth Rogen’s The Studio premiered on Apple, with its whole story kicked off by a long-time studio head played by Catherine O’Hara going through a very similar experience:

As Max Verstappen would say: that is simply lovely.

As someone whose best life choice1 was to opt out almost entirely from engagement with social media,2 where am I going to find a better one-liner than that?

And while no one should ever make too much of them, Deadline comments can also sometimes reveal an amusingly clear public consensus about certain major executives. You know you’re looking at one of the “good guys” (or gals) when even the wretched hive of scum and villainy that frolics through those comment sections can’t come up with a bad thing to say about them. And likewise, you can get a sense when the only positive comments seem to be the result of a suddenly-deployed astroturfing campaign following a sustained run of unanimously critical (and occasionally gleeful) comments.

I assume that, on some assistants’ email list (or group chat, or message board, or Slack, or Discord, or DM, or whatever it is the kids use), there’s already a “best of” compilation of Deadline comments going around somewhere. But I am not privy to such things (and, most likely, neither are you).

So if I’m going to start featuring the best of this industry on this Substack, I figure I might as well interpret that mandate broadly enough to have some fun with it (and perhaps also occasionally feature a bit of the worst of the industry too, if it’s funny enough and there’s something to learn from it). And I’d like to see if one of you would like to help with it.

I’m looking for a reader to become a very (very) part-time contributor to The Business of Television Max, with some kind of take on a “Best of” Deadline comments feature. How frequent should it be? What should it celebrate? How much commentary is involved? I could come up with answers to those questions, but I’m much more interested to see what someone else thinks would be good — so good that they'd want to write it themselves. And for that, I can offer:

• A one-year Premium subscription to The Business of Television Max (including the TBOT chatbot) for helping me launch this.

• An additional year of Premium for every 3 months you keep at it — and at the one-year mark, free Premium for life.

• I’m a reasonably nice person who knows some people and some things. We’ll talk while we’re working on this. Maybe I can be helpful with some advice or introductions, if it seems appropriate.

If you’re interested, please send me an email at ken@tbotmax.com, telling me a bit about yourself, what you have in mind for the feature, and maybe what compelled you to respond. Because I truly have no idea how many (if any) of you will respond to this, I don’t know what the process will be from there. But I promise to reply to you (in a non-perfunctory way) no matter what!

Or Help Me Out With Considerably Less Effort: Take a Survey

Looking for a lighter-touch way to help out (and get at least $40 of value for 5 minutes of your time)? Help me make The Business of Television Max better by filling out a quick reader survey, and get two free months of The Business of Television Max on me.

Current Max subscribers will automatically receive two free months applied to their subscriptions, and will receive one month of free Premium access, applied starting on the launch date of the upcoming TBOT chatbot.3

If you’re not a current subscriber, then take the survey and subscribe now to get your two free months of The Business of Television Max. In fact, if you’re still reading this, I trust you so much that I’m just going to give you the link for the 2-month free trial right here and now, totally on the honor system:

I’m obviously going to be able to tell if you sign up using this link without having submitted a survey. It’s fine. No one will know but you and me.

My first post on this site was a mini-manifesto called “The Stubborn Idealism of Substacking,” in which I dedicated my efforts, here and in my concurrently-launched Prime professional training/coaching service, to the cause of helping people access the confidence and pride — and maybe even improved general sense of well-being — that come with a well-earned sense of mastery of one’s professional craft.

For the most part, I’m only qualified to try help people toward that goal whose professional interests and backgrounds are relatively close to my own as a TV studio business affairs executive, lawyer, and consultant. But my own success in those roles owes a lot to the generosity of the many colleagues in creative, finance, production, marketing, and other departments who have generously served as my tutors and phone-a-friends in their areas of expertise.

That’s why I also want this to be a forum to highlight inspiring examples, illuminating insights, and worthy role models of professional excellence from people I admire in fields other than my own. I’m calling this series: What Good Looks Like.

Today’s opening installment also doubles as an epilogue to Tuesday’s post, which sprang from an exchange between Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, For All Mankind) and David Shore (House, Sneaky Pete, The Good Doctor) about their diametrically opposed preferences when receiving creative notes from studio or network executives. A key takeaway from that exchange was that neither was right or wrong — they just had their own ways they liked to work (which could be understood and adapted to).

So, for this first celebration of What Good Looks Like, it wouldn’t be intellectually honest for me to call what I want to share with you today “The Right Way to Give and Respond to Creative Notes.” But it is, without question, by far the finest example that you or I will ever be privileged enough to get to see so up-close.

Subscribe now

You might remember Cinemax’s The Knick, a stylish and substantive Clive Owen period drama that was as critically acclaimed as it was criminally underwatched — including, if I’m being honest, by me, other than a few scattered episodes watched with (or over the shoulder of) my then-roommate, who could catch me up quickly and well enough for me to really appreciate the accomplishment of what I was watching. The show was canceled after its similarly outstanding second season in 2015 — which, I might add, premiered exactly one year after the prior season’s finale’s initial air date, in case anyone needs a reminder (other than The Pitt) that it is indeed possible to deliver continued excellence on an annual basis (and on a reasonable budget).

Less than a year later, then-HBO/Cinemax exec Kary Antholis, who led the Cinemax creative team that worked with writer/director/editor/cinematographer Steven Soderbergh, published on Medium the aptly named The Knick Notes: a series of unabridged and uncensored examples of Cinemax and Soderbergh’s real-life email correspondence during post-production of The Knick, giving and responding to Cinemax’s notes on cuts of every episode of the series.

They are, in short, extraordinary. The Cinemax team’s notes are specific and actionable without being overly prescriptive. They are spare but dense, and come off as both comprehensive and carefully-curated. And on the other side of the process, Soderbergh — who controls and personally executes virtually every aspect of the preparation of these cuts — delivers an absolute masterclass in how to take, adapt, deflect, or reject network notes. Somebody at the WGA or DGA, please get this guy to teach a class.

I find it amazing enough that Kary — for whom The Knick was just one in a murderer’s row of projects that he oversaw during his 25-year run at HBO and Cinemax (which I just linked to because simply listing them here could too easily come off as a sly attempt at advertising or flattery) — decided he wanted to try to publish this stuff in the first place. But I consider it almost miraculous that he got both HBO and Soderbergh on board with the idea pretty much immediately.

Now working as a writer and producer under his own Crime Story Media banner, the ever-affable Kary was just as supportive and decisive when I first approached him for his blessing to feature The Knick Notes on The Business of Television Max. (Thanks again, Kary!)

Below, I’m republishing the notes correspondence for Cut A of episode 101 of Cinemax’s The Knick — the series premiere. If you find it half as fascinating or inspiring as I do, then check out the complete Knick Notes for Seasons 1 and 2 (and know that you are in for a treat).

Share

101 CUT A

1–2
As discussed, this is our most radical structural thought in the series: we suggest lifting this sequence and placing it at the end of the episode. We’ve discussed the intended effects (delaying our knowledge of Thackery’s addiction and propelling us into the next episode), and acknowledge that we may be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and may be creating others. But let’s revisit the suggestion, after we have all had a night to reflect on its full implications.

SODERBERGH: The primary reason for this note was an interest in saving a “reveal” of Thackery’s addiction to propel us into the 2nd episode, but in point of fact Lucy’s retrieval of Thackery for the Gentile surgery makes that idea unworkable. The real problem, to my mind, was a missing beat between Thackery leaving the hospital and then being rousted by Lucy, exacerbated by the confusion caused by Thackery leaving cocaine behind at the office and then having some on his nightstand at home.

SOLUTION: Cut Thackery pulling cocaine out of his bag and then leaving the office; steal scene of Thackery working late at night at home and flashing back to Christiansen introducing him to cocaine from episode 103 and place it between the two scenes of Lucy checking on Gentile at The Knick. By doing this, we imply that Thackery’s attempt to go without cocaine was instigated by this late night flashback. Snap! Please make check out to CASH!

1–10, 11
Can we tighten here, possibly cutting Nurse Monk up top walking around for prep and beginning with Thackery and Christiansen entering behind Lucy? Can we find trims and cuts to ratchet up the tension as the confidence of surgeons and spectators gives way to anxiety and eventually distress?

SODERBERGH: Trimmed head of scene as suggested. Don’t know how to make the surgery scene and more tense/intense, but I’ll keep looking at it.

1A-13, 1B-13
Can we tighten? Perhaps we can hold back on the reveal of the gun in the drawer and ease up on the score so Christiansen’s act lands as a shock?

SODERBERGH: Done.

1–13
Can we come into the funeral scene a beat later, perhaps on Thackery up at the lectern looking at Christiansen’s casket? Are there trims in the body of the eulogy?

SODERBERGH: Trimmed head of scene.

1–14

Any plans for score on Cornelia and Sister Harriet’s walk outside?

SODERBERGH: Not currently, for reasons of tone. If the music is too light (or in the “things are moving along” vein), it’s out of kilter with the fact we’re leaving a funeral; if it’s too heavy, it’s out of kilter with the dialogue, which is quietly sarcastic.

1-A20
Can we find trims in this boardroom scene?

SODERBERGH: Not really. Already cut 1.5 pages and this is information we need re: The Knick’s status and Algernon.

1–22
Can we cut this first orphanage scene?

SODERBERGH: Done.

1–27

Can we cut Algernon’s, “you envisioned something different, something lighter,” and Thackery’s response, “I did”?

SODERBERGH: Not sure why we would cut that exchange, but I tried it and it resulted in a very awkward transition in the dialogue.

1–29
Can we find trims here? Perhaps cut from Speight’s line, “good looking family…” to “where did you get those patients…”?

SODERBERGH: I like that stuff; it’s good character detail re: Speight’s values.

1–31
Can we trim Bertie’s ministrations here, possibly even start out on Bertie and Cornelia’s conversation in the hallway: “I don’t think she makes it through this week”?

SODERBERGH: Done.

1–33
If we decide to hold back the knowledge of Thackery’s addiction until Lucy finds him and end with Thackery shooting up in the carriage, can we cut Thack dumping the vials into his drawer?

If we don’t make that change, can we make clear that Thackery is deciding not to use here, i.e. see his face? We are aware we may well not have it, but can we cheat his face from somewhere else? Additionally, this scene raises the question of what Thackery’s point is leaving the vials in his office since he has cocaine in his apartment that we later see Lucy shoot him up with.

SODERBERGH: See first note.

1–36
The jump cut from day to night threw us slightly. Can we can just show the day piece of the scene and cut Lucy’s discovery at night that Gentile is getting sicker?

SODERBERGH: See first note.

1–38
Can we trim Algernon’s reaction to Barrow’s pronouncement?

SODERBERGH: Not sure which reaction you mean.

Given Gentile’s later racist comment, is it peculiar that he is not recoiling at being touched by Algernon?

SODERBERGH: Agreed. I’ve cut Gentile’s comment in this scene.

1–39–1–42
Can we use jump cuts here to advance the urgency? Get Lucy to Thackery’s bedroom quicker? Can we play this whole sequence more frantic and frenetic and get into the act of Lucy shooting Thackery up quicker?

SODERBERGH: Done.

101 MUSIC

Thanks for taking the time to chat this morning. As discussed here are a couple of final music notes for episode 101.

Under the board meeting, perhaps a version of the heartbeat from the final episode board meeting.

SODERBERGH: Tried that, but it’s a little too foreboding considering the content of the meeting, and we don’t want to rob that final scene of its dramatic weight. We’ve also got a completely scored scene immediately following, so scoring the entire boardroom scene isn’t really an option. What I DID do is to put a transitional piece between Cleary getting the phone call and Thackery waiting in the boardroom just to give a sense of going somewhere.

Perhaps rather than thinking of our suggested cue as a “typhoid theme” we can think of it as a “public health theme” which might go under Speight inspecting the tenements or talking to the German slumlord. Also under the Chickering-Cornelia scene regarding the tuberculosis patient.

SODERBERGH: Think I found a piece from later in the show that could work as a typhoid-type theme. Trying it under Speight’s first appearance and at first Hemming house scene.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

When I was an executive at Sony Pictures Television, during the heady and irrationally exuberant early-to-mid-Streaming Wars era, things may not have been as cushy as they were for the generation of execs that immediately preceded me (with their car allowances and their generously sized offices), but the job still came with some perks. One of those was our annual retreat weekend at a fancy hotel in Orange County — just removed enough from regular life to feel like a genuine retreat, at the least expense and distance necessary to achieve the effect.

These weekends were well worth whatever the company paid for them. From indulging in multiple “market price” seafood towers at a team dinner, to swapping stories over drinks long after the hotel bar closed, to my bosses deciding to conclude a mini-game of entertainment industry Jeopardy! between myself and two other execs with game show experience1 by suddenly darkening the hotel multipurpose room’s lights and playing the YouTube video of my greatest moment of (gameshow-related) public infamy2 without having given me any prior notice of that plan: these were the experiences that formed the professional and social glue that united, empowered, and motivated our team when things got difficult or messy with a show or relationship.

For me, the second most memorable bit of “official” retreat programming was a moderated panel discussion with four big macher creators who were in overall deals with the studio. Paraphrasing very loosely from memory, here’s the part of the discussion that stuck with me, when the panel was asked to describe their likes or dislikes when receiving creative notes from studio and network executives:

Ron Moore (Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, For All Mankind): “I hate it when executives come to me with some problem they have with a script, without any point of view about what to do about it. Like, don’t just tell me that you have an issue with something, give me some sense of what you actually want, or work with me on figuring out how to ‘fix’ it.”

David Shore (House, Sneaky Pete, The Good Doctor): “That’s funny, because I hate that.3 I’m the writer; let me write. Tell me what you don’t like, but leave it to me to figure out what we should and shouldn’t do about it and how.”

Giving creative notes has never been part of my own job description. But hearing this exchange between Moore and Shore — the diametrically opposed nature of their views, the conviction with which they each described their preferences, and the total respect they had for one another’s perspectives — changed the way I think about how I do my job.

There are certain things you pick up in the course of your career that change the way you think about how you do your job, but that, for the most part, no one ever teaches you explicitly. These insights are usually hard-won with experience — which is a bit of a shame, because they’re often the kind of insights that could have made you a bit better at your job (or made your career a bit easier) more quickly had you figured them out sooner.

Today’s post is the first installment in a new series called The Things No One Teaches You, in which I’ll try to crystallize and share lessons from my own career that are easy to overlook as “too meta” — or even “too obvious” — to be taught explicitly, but which have helped me succeed in my career (and can help you do the same). And the first of those is the thing I realized from listening to Ron Moore and David Shore debate studio notes.

Why Guess When You Could Just Ask?

I’m not a creative executive (actual or aspiring) and I don’t presume to know everyone else’s jobs the way they do. But from what I can tell, note-giving — like the practice of effective creative collaboration generally — is a learnable, improvable craft. In practice, that seems to entail watching many people do it, in many different settings, across many different relationships, and trying to suss out from those many observations (and from personal trial and error) how to do it in a way that feels both authentic and effective. An up-and-coming exec may be lucky enough to have a boss who talks to them about all of this in a “meta” way that they can learn from directly. But for the most part, my sense is that most creative executives essentially pick this up as they go through their careers, and eventually develop a style that works for them.

Yet as much as note-giving (and creative collaboration generally) is a learnable, improvable craft, it also needs to be adapted to the personal styles and expectations of different creative partners. As Moore and Shore’s comments reveal, those styles and expectations can vary wildly from relationship to relationship. And these two creators, accomplished and experienced as they were, were probably uniquely capable of proactively identifying and articulating their needs and preferences with such clarity.

Which is why, when the panel with Moore and Shore ended, I found myself wondering: do the creative execs ever just ask writers, at the beginning of their relationship, whether they’re a Moore-type, a Shore-type, or somewhere in between, and go from there?

That question — what kind of notes do you like or dislike from executives? — piqued my curiosity because I immediately recognized it as just one expression of a broader, more fundamental question that I knew could be tremendously helpful in my own work. And in the years since, I’ve realized that this question is even more powerful and universally helpful than I first gave it credit for — something that virtually anyone can ask, in virtually any professional relationship, to make themselves more effective in their own work, whatever that might be:

“How Can I Best Help You?”

It’s a big question which, depending on the professional context, can be used for different purposes, mean different things, or be expressed in different ways.

The nature of one’s professional interest or responsibility in “helping” another person — and of what it means to do so “best” — naturally depends on the nature of the work to be done. Is your work internal-facing (such as addressing operational issues) or external-facing (such as negotiating deals with third parties)? Are you answering your counterpart’s questions, giving them feedback on their own work, or generating your own more “formal” work product at their direction?

Equally important, however, is the nature of the relationship involved. Is this an “internal” relationship or an “external” one? Are you dealing with a boss, a colleague, or a subordinate? A client, a customer, or a counterparty?

Understanding the specific dynamics, expectations, and norms for each of these relationships — both in the abstract and with each specific individual — is crucial to figuring out not just the most relevant and helpful kind of information for each working relationship, but also the most effective and/or appropriate ways to seek it. Does it feel “safe” to just ask, or are there norms of etiquette or professionalism that call for a more circumspect approach? Who (if anyone) is understood to hold more “power” or “authority” in the relationship? Would your counterpart understand intuitively why you’re asking these questions (and feel naturally inclined to answer them), or do you need to first establish a stronger foundation of understanding and/or trust?

To get started, I find it is helpful to first split that one big question — how can I best help you? — into two basic sub-questions. Each of these, in turn, can and should be adapted or reinterpreted based on the specifics of any particular professional relationship or task. Specifically:

“How Do You Like to Be Helped?”

That is, what professional style would best ensure that you — my client, my boss, my colleague, my partner, whatever — get the most out of our work together? Other ways this question might be asked across a variety of professional disciplines include:

• Do you like partners or supervisors to be prescriptive with their feedback, or to alert you to issues but give you space to create solutions?

• Do you want junior employees to be proactive about offering ideas and solutions, diligent about learning and collecting information before trying to contribute, or to wait patiently to be asked for their opinions?

• Do you like to be given multiple options at once, or one “best recommendation” (with backup options held in reserve)?

• Do you prefer to receive longer emails with spelled-out reasoning on important or difficult issues, brief emails with conclusions and recommendations that can be followed up on as the client sees fit, or somewhere in between?

• What kinds of issues do you like to address via email vs. by phone or zoom? Do you have a general preference between phone calls and videoconferences?

• What kinds of ideas, messages, and/or materials do you want me to run by you before sending them to outside parties?

Fundamentally, these are all questions of process and personal preference. But you also have to engage on substance, which means asking a similar but distinct version of that same question:

“What Do You Care About?”

That is, what outcomes, relationships, messages, or impressions are you most interested in and concerned about? Again, how to meaningfully express this question will vary depending on the professional relationship and context, but to highlight some versions that are especially (but not exclusively) relevant to dealmakers:

• Who do we need to convince here?

• Who do we need to keep happy here?

• How much do you care about this — is it a must-have, a really-like-to-have, or a could-live-without?

• What issues are most and least important to you?4

• Is your goal to make a “good, fair” deal or “the best possible” deal?

• Would you rather maximize upside in success, or minimize downside/maximize guarantees in average (or worse) outcomes?

• How important is it to you to make a fast deal (and how willing are you to compromise on making a great deal to make that happen)?

I often frame this discussion with an explicit analogy to a common adage about real estate construction and renovation: it’s basically impossible to find someone to do your job (1) well, (2) quickly, and (3) cheaply. At best, you’ll have to pick two out of those three qualities. You may well have to settle for one. In other words: knowing that you can’t truly “have it all,” what qualities or outcomes do you want to prioritize and optimize for?

Asking People to “Help You Help Them” in the Real World

As you think about how you might use the above in your own work (or perhaps about how you’re already doing so), there are a few practical considerations to keep in mind.

First, I want to reiterate that the specific questions above are just examples of how these more conceptual inquiries might be interpreted or expressed in real life — and, given my background and perspective, the list is biased toward what is most relevant for professionals in my general line of work — but virtually all of them have some variation or counterpart that could apply in many other professional contexts. Moreover, simply taking time to consider how they might apply to yours helps you develop a kind of “meta-awareness” about your own craft, which is invaluable to truly understanding how to do your job (whatever that is), and to thinking deeply about how you could do it better (whatever that means).

Second, while this may all seem very intuitive when spelled out so plainly — and I expect that you probably ask at least some of these questions (or ones like them) in your day-to-work without thinking about it — there is great value in framing and engaging directly with such potentially “obvious,” yet usually implicit, questions and concepts. Do you actually ask these questions, or mostly just make assumptions about the likely answers? Are there some helpful questions here that you hadn’t thought of, or that inspire other ideas about how to make yourself more effective? And while there are probably some questions here that you would never want to ask certain people directly, can you talk around the subjects enough to suss out what you need to know to do your work more effectively?

Third, it would be easy to misinterpret the act of seeking explicit guidance on the substance or process of your work as somehow rendering you a drone or mere messenger, rather than an empowered strategist/tactician with unique and valuable expertise. As often as not, your counterpart will need your help answering the very framing questions you’re asking them. Representatives and executives with expertise, confidence, and tact can substantially drive decision-making while fully engaging and empowering their clients, colleagues, and partners with ultimate decision-making authority.

Finally, in the course of a long career and across a wide array of relationships, almost every professional will sometimes be called upon to help and serve others, and sometimes be the person that others are called upon to help and serve. Learning to be more thoughtful and tactical about what information others could provide you to help you help them better will also make you more aware of what information others would benefit from when they’re trying to help you (and more proactive about offering it even to those who don’t think to ask). That means that this way of thinking isn’t just a low-effort and high-impact technique that makes you better at helping others; it also makes your own life easier by making other people better at helping you.

In Conclusion: Thing #1 That No One Teaches You

You don’t have to guess the best way to “do a good job” for the people whose interests you have to somehow serve in your work. You can just ask them.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

Want to further develop the meta-awareness about your professional craft that you need to get the most out of your team (or yourself) at work? Keep your eyes peeled for future installments of my “Things No One Teaches You” series! Or, better yet, check out the Prime tab of this site to learn more about how I can help you, your team, or your organization thrive with a personalized professional training or coaching program that is tailored to your specific needs and goals.

TBoT Prime

Do you know someone who you think would find this interesting or helpful? You should send it to them! Sharing The Business of Television Max with your friends and colleagues is the best way you can support this work (other than becoming a Paid subscriber yourself).

Share

2

Because the Internet is an exceptionally weird place, over 12 years after my episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire first aired in August 2009, I was given a frankly unsettling glimpse of an alternate universe in which I correctly answered the million dollar question. (Why would someone create such a thing, you may ask? Apparently, so that a friend of mine could use it to introduce me when I make my annual guest appearance at a USC course he teaches.) But I’m still nostalgic for print media, so in my mind, that’s nothing compared to the New York Post running this honestly pretty sick burn on the front page of their TV Tuesday section the day after my episode aired:

I know what you’re thinking: finally, someone in the entertainment industry is writing on the Internet about artificial intelligence!

But bear with me! Because I think that there is one aspect of AI’s impact on the entertainment business that somehow remains genuinely — and dangerously — underdiscussed.

Most public debate/panic about the potentially existential threat posed to creative industries by generative artificial intelligence focuses on one of two general themes. The first is the replacement problem — the question of what the technology will be capable of in the future, and what those capabilities will mean for the continued ability of human beings to make a living from creative work (and, if they cannot, for the fate of human creativity itself). The second is the AI training problem — that is, how the uncompensated and unauthorized use, at staggering scale, of existing creative works to train AI models is already depriving the creators of those works of fair compensation for their output while, in effect, conscripting these artists and their work as unwitting and unwilling instruments of their own eventual obsolescence.

We’ll come back to those existential questions in my next post.

But right now, I want to direct your attention to how we're already using the technology today is doing quiet damage to the industry of tomorrow. And that starts with acknowledging a different “AI training problem.”

What Do These Ten Tasks Have in Common?

1. Note-taking in meetings and conference calls;

2. Script coverage (i.e., creative review and feedback);

3. Script breakdowns (i.e., identifying and quantifying major production elements such as unique locations, speaking and non-speaking cast, and prop/set decoration requirements);

4. Coverage of newly published books and articles;

5. Collecting and summarizing press coverage;

6. Creating clean demos from “rainbow” negotiation email chains;

7. Drafting and revising deal memos, certificates, and other simple and form-driven agreements;

8. Summarizing key terms such as option dates and other deadlines, granted and reserved rights, credit entitlements, and approval rights across groups of agreements;

9. Reviewing chain-of-title documents and performing basic clearance research; and

10. Standard administrative correspondence and schedule management?

This seemingly disparate list of common entertainment industry-related tasks, which cut across creative, marketing, business, legal, and general administrative functions, has at least two things in common.

First, they are all tasks that are capably performed by — and, in fact, are already commonly being delegated to — existing large language models and other AI-powered tools.

And second, they are all fairly simple but essential tasks that have traditionally (and efficiently) been delegated to young1 entry-level professionals, who effectively learn how the industry works — and figure out not only how to do their jobs, but also what jobs they want to do in the first place — by closely observing professionals working in a variety of professional capacities and contexts and developing core job skills in meaningful but low-stakes circumstances.

That is the AI training problem we should be talking about more.

The Industry’s Other Generational Crisis

Much has been written about the industry’s building generational crisis. As others have noted, Mike De Luca literally started as an intern at New Line and was running the studio at age 27; now age 60, he co-runs New Line’s parent studio, Warner Bros.2 Bryan Lourd and Kevin Huvane were 34 and 36 years old, respectively, when they and (the slightly older) Richard Lovett took over CAA in October 1995; now aged 65 and 67, they remain firmly in charge.

This was once the norm, not the exception. In 1966, Bob Evans became President of Production at Paramount at the age of 36. In 1974, Barry Diller became the studio’s Chairman and CEO at just 32 years old. In 2026, the Ankler’s Elaine Low launched an ongoing series, examining “how Gen Z, millennials, Gen X and boomers are navigating Hollywood’s narrowing path to power and relevance,” called The Disappearing Ladder.

But, just as there is quietly a second “AI training problem” that the industry has largely ignored, there’s also another looming generational crisis we aren’t paying enough attention to — and in this case, one begets the other.

The rest of this post is for Paid and Premium subscribers. A subscription to The Business of Television Max opens the full site archives, as well as special articles and other professional resources available only to paying subscribers.

Read more

Bidding wars are where market-defining precedents are made and broken. At the outset of a negotiation, the two words that tell a dealmaker the most about how much (or how little) fun they’re about to have are “It’s competitive.” Aggressive competition for the most sought-after projects, talent, and IP during the industry’s “Streaming Wars” era (roughly 2013–23) upended decades-old dealmaking norms — with consequences that the industry is still reckoning with today.

Winning a bidding war can also be a transformative moment for a company’s future — but whether that’s for good or for ill depends on the deal. Netflix’s aggressive outbidding of its rivals for MRC’s House of Cards set the streamer on its path to dominance in original content production and exhibition. Vivendi’s acquisition of Universal in 2000, widely regarded as an overpay, led directly to the company’s near-collapse in 2002.

Hollywood just loves a good bidding war. And in today’s TV business, A24 — the prestige indie studio whose auteur-driven, aesthetically distinctive films have, in less than 15 years since its founding, earned the company unique and enviable cachet with critics1, investors2, filmmakers3, and audiences4 alike — wins a lot of them.

Last week, the Ankler’s Lesley Goldberg published a piece about A24’s disruptive impact on the TV business, with “fast deals and creator-friendly terms [that] make the studio a favorite among agents, and a headache for everyone else.” Goldberg addresses the question of “How A24 Wins Bidding Wars Beyond Money,” crediting the studio’s success to several factors, including its generous backends, creator-friendly development process, passionate advocacy with network partners, and willingness to contribute additional production funding and marketing resources to support its shows. And above all, she writes, “Speed is the separator.”

How to Really Win a Bidding War

Goldberg offers a robust answer to a very carefully framed question — one in which the words “Beyond Money” do a lot of heavy lifting. Because the main way that A24 wins these bidding wars is with money. Lots and lots of money.

A24 is one of a small handful of independent studios that seek to secure the most sought-after projects by intentionally and consistently offering well above top-of-market financial terms — seven-figure option fees, purchase prices that occasionally tack on an eighth digit, and pilot writing fees that compete with the highest-level feature scriptwriting deals.

That’s not to say that Goldberg’s reporting is inaccurate, or that A24’s creator-friendly practices — especially the speed and decisiveness she highlights — don’t matter. But while I’m sure writers, rightsholders, and their representatives love how quickly the offers arrive, I suspect it’s all the extra zeroes that really win those sellers over.

I also understand that Goldberg’s analysis wouldn’t have been as interesting or instructive had it just been her copying and pasting a gif of Mad Men’s Don Draper shouting “That’s what the money is for!” But while “money wins bidding wars” is about as exciting of a headline as “water is wet,” there is actually something very interesting — and frankly weird — going on here.

How Can David Afford to Outspend Goliath: With Goliath’s Own Money

To win the hottest projects on the market, A24 must outbid the likes of Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, companies worth roughly 100 to 1,000 times A24’s own (already dubiously inflated) value. How do they do it? With their rivals’ own money.

When it comes to TV studios, today’s buyer is tomorrow’s seller. While A24 is built to finance and produce original series, monetizing those series requires licensing them to a consumer-facing exhibition platform. In the modern market, that license will inevitably be on a “cost plus” basis — that is, for an amount equal to the full cost of production, plus $2 million per episode or more for a sought-after one-hour drama.5 And licensees routinely agree to reimburse seller studios’ out-of-pocket development expenses, in whole or in part, simply to acquire the exclusive option to order a series.

So when A24 agrees to these outsized financial terms to win a sought-after project, it does so knowing that, in success, the costs will be borne in full by some other (richer) company. Of course, it takes the risk that no buyer will step up to license the project, leaving A24 to absorb those costs itself. But A24 enters those situations knowing that at least some of those potential buyers have already signaled interest in the project — in their studio capacities, before losing the initial bid.

Viewed in those terms, A24’s willingness to write such big checks is easier to understand. But the whole thing gets weird again when you realize that, to earn any return on these investments, A24 must go on to sell its costly prizes to the very companies that it outbid to acquire them.

Why Streamers Agree to Rent Projects for More Than They Were Willing to Pay to Own Them

A streamer that loses a bidding war for a hot project, but goes on to buy that same project from the studio that defeated it, effectively agrees to pay more to license intellectual property than it was demonstrably willing to spend to own it.6 If that sounds crazy to you, imagine how offensive it is to the people at Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. And yet, it happens. Why?

The first explanation is simple and evergreen: this is a creative business, and what creative wants, creative usually gets.

Over the last few years, all of the major streamers have, with varying levels of conviction, sought to warn (and train) the market not to expect them to buy, as networks, the same projects that they previously tried and failed to acquire as studios. And each of the streamers has, at various times, explicitly cited having lost out in the initial bidding for a project to explain its unwillingness to make an offer to license it from the winning bidder.

But experienced business affairs executives are usually wary of trafficking in “always” and “never” statements, because they know that, when something shiny and appealing enough comes along, most so-called policies prove to be “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” And, as I’ve emphasized elsewhere: it’s a creative business, and whatever creative wants, creative usually gets.

Beyond realism about their own lack of dealmaking discipline, there’s a systemic reason for streamers to be wary of adopting too strict a policy here. The purpose of such a policy would be to gain leverage in its negotiations following that first round of pitches. But, because the universe of credible buyers for costly premium series is so small, agents are more likely to preserve the project’s long-term prospects by simply excluding any streamer with such a policy from that initial stage of pitches altogether.

To a streamer like Netflix, Amazon, or Apple, occasionally having to pay more than its own “best and final” offer for the rights to any given project is a galling annoyance. But being systematically excluded from the opportunity to make such bids in the first place would be a massive competitive disadvantage, both creatively and financially.

A Sane Strategy for Streamers to Bid Competitively in a Cost-Plus Market

So does that mean that, in order to secure their access to the initial marketplace for the most promising projects, streamers must tolerate occasionally spending more to rent those projects than they were initially prepared to pay to own them outright? Not necessarily.

If I were setting the rules at Netflix, Amazon, or Apple, I would apply a two-pronged policy to such situations.

First, I’d require that, if we lose out on the initial bidding for a project as a studio, we will only consider buying it as a network if it has been materially developed or enhanced beyond what we were initially given the opportunity to acquire — e.g., with a new pilot script written based on the initial pitch, or with an actor, director, or other new and material creative element added to the original package.

In theory, a creative package could justifiably be worth more because of such additions/developments than the same package would have been without them. And in practice, such a policy would discourage indie studios from hastily making crazy deals for hot projects in hopes of quickly and cynically arbitraging them without contributing significant effort and value.

And second, when making a deal to license a project from a studio that outbid us to acquire ownership and control of that project in the first place, I would require the seller studio to bear from its own profits 100% of the cost difference between the studio’s negotiated deal terms and our own highest bid for the same assets.

In other words, if A24 wants to sell to Netflix a project based on rights that A24 paid $2 million for, but that Netflix had previously offered only $1 million to acquire directly, I’d say A24 should expect to bear the full $1 million difference solely out of its own profit from the “premium” portion of Netflix’s “cost-plus” license fee (and not to pass that full cost onto Netflix as part of the budget of the licensed series).

This is, admittedly, a more complicated approach than streamers simply deciding to buy a project (and accept the terms that come with it) or not. And complication tends to prolong dealmaking, especially when a novel approach is first being introduced into the market — a pretty unappealing prospect for an industry that already justifiably bemoans the often glacial pace of dealmaking.

But that extra time and effort is worthwhile if it solves a real problem. And for the streamers, the current status quo — a binary choice between passing on projects they want (and potentially jeopardizing their own early access to the most promising projects in the future), or suffering the indignity (and bearing the cost) of being stuck with terms they already refused to agree to when they had the chance — is a problem worth solving.7

Moreover, there is good reason to be optimistic about the market’s ability to quickly integrate such terms into dealmaking for network license agreements: streamers are already using similar tactics to counter independent studios offering over-generous terms to actors when packaging projects before taking them to market.

While A24’s hyper-aggressive deal-making for rights and scripts is still somewhat novel, the same dynamics driving that behavior8 have also propelled the explosive growth of TV acting fees for over a decade. For at least half of that time, streamers have sought to disincentivize supplier studios from making overgenerous acting deals by (a) requiring the seller studio to disclose all of the major terms of the existing deals for the project before it will agree to close the license deal, and (b) sometimes refusing to recognize astronomical acting fees in the network-funded approved budget of a series, at least to the extent those fees exceed what the streamer would have agreed to — or at least what the streamer claims would be the most it would have agreed to9 — had it made a deal with that actor directly.10 In other words, what I’m proposing above isn’t so much a novel dealmaking practice as it is a logical extension of an existing one.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

On Friday, reflecting on the WGA and AMPTP’s unexpected early announcement of a tentative deal for a four-year extension to the WGA Basic Agreement, and with the just-ended Passover holiday, I likened the quick and drama-free closing — a stark and welcome contrast to the experience of 2023 — to the angel of death1 passing harmlessly over our homes this year.

As dramatic as it may seem to invoke the tenth biblical Egyptian plague to describe an unexpectedly peaceful outcome in what is essentially a routine triennial process, if you followed the hot mess of the 2023 collective bargaining season as closely as I did — and if you’re reading this, you probably did — it felt earned. For those fortunate souls who didn’t spend that summer making themselves miserable, I re-published the first of three posts I wrote for the Ankler that summer as the “Anonymous Business Affairs Exec.” And, to celebrate 2026’s markedly less hostile and poisonous vibes, I officially removed the “Anonymous” part.

Today, I’m kicking off my long-promised Ask the Author series, in which I’ll (usually) be answering questions and taking on topics requested by readers. But for this first installment, I’m doubling down on 2026’s (comparative) non-toxicity by doing one of the dumbest things you can do on the Internet — responding to criticism from anonymous commenters.

And while at it, I’m doubling down on Passover references too — this time, by addressing these (mostly) anonymous commenters as the “Four Sons” of the Passover Haggadah (the traditional Jewish text used for seders), in which four brothers of varying moral and intellectual character ask their father to explain the traditions of Passover in distinctly different ways.

The Wise Son

In the Haggadah, the “wise son” demonstrates his wisdom by asking his father about Passover traditions in a way that includes the son himself as part of the community he seeks to better understand.

Tim earns the “wise son” designation by disagreeing with me in good faith, without accusing me of bad faith, and by treating us as members of the same community with common interests.

And he raises a fair point, as far as it goes. There was a disconnect between the spirit of the 2017 span protection provisions and the way studios deployed them — I’ve said as much myself. But his argument rests on a premise that “presumably collectively” quietly smuggles in: the idea that the WGA Basic Agreement is meant to operate as a guarantor (or at least a driver) of ever-increasing aggregate revenue flowing to the writers as a class. It isn’t, and it never has been.

Rather, while the WGA Basic Agreement may sometimes have the power to move market realities, it is first and foremost a response to them. It is an instrument of power-balancing to set default rules of engagement — a vehicle by which thousands of individuals can pool their leverage to achieve outcomes that, given those realities, most of them could not hope to achieve acting on their own. And in my view, the beneficiary of the WGA Basic Agreement is each of those individual writers, not the profession as a whole.

It also matters because, once you understand the purpose of the WGA Basic Agreement as I’ve described it above, the studios’ behavior looks less like bad faith and more like an entirely predictable institutional response to cost pressure. And, crucially, one in which no individual business affairs executive had the power — or, honestly, the incentive — to resist that logic unilaterally.

So I agree with Tim that there was a meaningful gap between the spirit and collective implementation of the 2017 “span protection” rules (that the writers can very reasonably be mad about). But if you believe — as I do, for both conceptual and pragmatic reasons stated above — that the people implementing those rules owed a duty solely to the writers in front of them (and not to the profession as a whole), then as much as we might bemoan the implementation, we can’t condemn it in moral terms.

The Wicked Son

In the Haggadah, the “wicked son” shows his wickedness by asking his father to explain Passover in a way that holds himself separate and apart from the community that he is asking about.

Matt’s comment beautifully illustrates why I couldn’t attach my name to the pieces I published in 2023, even though they were conciliatory in tone, granular in substance, and about as “both sides have a point” in spirit as you can get: people were goddamn crazy.

This isn’t what a person who is trying to solve a problem, persuade a counterpart, or even just get back to work sounds like. It’s what it sounds like when a person is so committed to the “us-vs.-them” dynamics of the moment that they can’t see who their allies are (or realize how they sound to normal people).2

Whereas “wise son” Tim G. accurately quoted my words to support his arguments, “wicked son” Matt “paraphrases” me with misleading quotes which are designed largely to set up his big finish, presumably because he is not familiar with Godwin’s Law3 (and therefore doesn’t realize what a sad — and, reading this in 2026, actually fairly offensive — cliché he’s being when he attempts to factually or morally equate studio dealmaking with Nazi genocide).

Matt is the wicked son not because his anger is illegitimate — writers got squeezed, and anger about that is earned — but because he ignores the complexity of the situation he’s angry about so that he can hold himself apart from, and direct that anger toward, a blameworthy foe. He’s not asking to understand, nor even to be understood. He’s asking to be enraged.

The Simple Son

The “simple son” of the Midrash asks his father “What is this?” — a question that represents the son’s unsophisticated but sincere curiosity.

Tony is our simple son, and I mean that affectionately. He opens with a candid admission that he has no industry knowledge, extends good faith anyway, and then reaches across countries and industries to offer the only lens he has: corporate M&A dealmaking in financial services. It doesn’t quite fit — a guild contract negotiation and a business acquisition are structurally different things — but the impulse is genuinely collegial, and the “ego” remark is both salient and charming in its observational confidence.

For what it’s worth, Tony: 2023 was, at least in part, a process of overcoming those egos, but 2026 seems to be an example of what’s possible when they don’t get in the way. We can count that as progress.

The Son Who Does Not Know How to Ask

Finally, there is the “son who does not know how to ask,” who is included to emphasize the Torah’s commandment to tell the story of the Exodus even to those who cannot ask to hear it. The obligation of transmission is unconditional.

I recognize that the “Four Sons” framework starts to strain here. PMason is not uninformed or incurious — this is someone with two decades in the industry who has clearly watched the BA function up close, formed real views, and seems to be operating in good faith. The problem is the misplaced certainty.

PMason condemns resistance to weekly compensation structures, but even at the time he was writing (in July 2023), weekly deals were becoming increasingly common. Today, in 2026, weekly deals are relatively common, as are hybridized episodic deals that involve separately stated weekly rates for extended (e.g., beyond 52 weeks) and/or post-production services. He misunderstands the purpose and impact of the 2017/18 laws that prohibited employers from inquiring about a candidate’s salary history while negotiating terms of employment (which were intended primarily to counter the persistent gender wage gap across industries).4 He repeats the commonly held belief that Disney replaced traditionally calculated contingent compensation with its “Series Bonus Exhibit” as a scheme to depress backend payouts — it wasn’t and it didn’t.5 And while I share PMason's disdain for reliance on “policy” or “precedent” as a freestanding justification devoid of context or rationale (and have also criticized it in my own writing6), studio over-reliance on “precedent” in negotiation is an annoyance — not a theory of the case for critiquing evolving dealmaking practices.

PMason sounds like someone who, in a better format than the Internet comment thread, would be willing and able to have a serious, good faith conversation with someone with a different perspective. I’m sure he knows how to ask good questions — he just needs to remember to do so. And I hope he is also the type to take his status here as the “son who does not know how to ask” as it is intended: not as a sign of any disrespect, but as an expression of my commitment to the bit.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

Last night marked the end of Passover.1 And while schedule-conscious American Jews who prioritize convenience over convention (like myself) might have held their seder on any of the holiday’s eight nights, the industry’s Jewish professionals would probably agree that this year’s Passover peaked on Saturday, when the WGA and AMPTP unexpectedly announced a tentative deal on a precedent-breaking four-year contract extension.

Only time will tell if the newfound sense of labor harmony around town — so welcome in an industry starved for any other kind — actually sticks. But for now, at least we can say that one of our industry’s triennial would-be Destroyers passed over all of our homes safely and peacefully this year.2 Special thanks to whoever remembered to put up the lamb’s blood on the studio gates!

My main reaction to Saturday’s news, after surprise, was relief — specifically, the relief of knowing that we apparently wouldn’t have to relive any of the frustration and misery of 2023. By July, over two months into the strike, the parties hadn’t even attempted direct talks for weeks, nor given any hint of what it would take to bring them back to the bargaining table. In the absence of productive dialogue, the vacuum was filled with a toxic Wall of Sound that would have made Phil Spector proud3 — blaming, kvetching, gossiping, trolling, and perhaps most of all, riffing.

Riffing on Twitter and in text threads! Riffing in protest chants and on picket signs! Friendly competitively riffing with friends, and hostile competitive riffing toward foes. A never-ending game of one-upmanship to determine who could make the funniest joke4, land the sickest burn5, or best project all of their own miseries, frustrations, and anxieties onto the other side.6 A cacophony of statements intended to energize allies, antagonize foes, and above all, gratify the speakers; but almost never to promote common interests or persuade anyone who didn’t already agree.

I wanted to try to contribute something useful to the public conversation, if only as a salve for my own frustration, anxiety, and (increasingly) boredom. I believed I had ideas that could be interesting and entertaining for the right audience — and, depending on how far those ideas traveled, maybe even valuable to the ongoing negotiations. But I also knew that, in the so-called “marketplace of ideas” of the Very Online crowd, nuance, compromise, and conciliation were all trading way down, while purity tests, adolescent trolling, and presumptions of bad faith were at all-time highs. In that environment, I was as wary of adding my name to the debate as I was eager to add my ideas.

My first contribution to the public conversation, published by the Ankler on July 12, 2023, was a wonky exploration of the origins of the much-maligned “mini-room” (and the role played by studio business affairs executives in its creation and institutionalization). The piece’s somewhat cringe/clickbait-y title — “Confessions of a Business Affairs Exec” — was selected by the Ankler’s editors (as is typical). But the choice of byline was mine.

The “Anonymous Business Affairs Exec” entered the chat.

I ultimately published three pieces under that byline, each of which seemed to be reasonably widely read and well-received. I occasionally heard second- or thirdhand that people actively involved in the negotiations on both sides had read and discussed the piece, though I have no idea if that’s true (and never tried to find out).

I never promoted my authorship, though I never denied it either. I received several calls and emails from friends and acquaintances asking if I was behind the pieces (and several more that simply assumed so and responded accordingly). And anytime someone asked me if I wrote the articles (or knew who did), I answered honestly. I simply never brought up the subject myself, and if people didn’t ask, I didn’t tell.

But the Anonymous Business Affairs Exec was a product of the unique (and uniquely miserable) environment of 2023. Another lesson I can take from Saturday? He isn’t needed in 2026.

That is why I’m rerunning “Confessions of a Business Affairs Exec” today, under my own name.7 Well, that and the fact that it makes a nice (low[ish]-effort) companion to Monday’s post — a celebration, as we look back, of how far we’ve come; and a reminder, as we look ahead, that the biggest problems of our present are often the unintended byproducts of our well-meaning solutions to the biggest problems of our past.

Another good reason to check it out? Because on Monday, I’ll be kicking off my long-promised Ask the Author series with a special follow-up to “Confessions of a Business Affairs Exec.” And, for the first time ever, I’m going to break my #1 rule for life on the Internet: I will publicly respond to anonymous Internet comments on my own no-longer-anonymous post.

Hope to see you then.

Confessions of a Business Affairs Exec

A top suit on how we got here, mistakes made and how we can help fix them

Published July 12, 2023

Like many of you, I have obsessively consumed news and analysis about this year’s (terribly-named) “Hot Labor Summer.” And as a longtime senior business affairs executive in Hollywood, my attention was especially piqued by a recent newsletter from The Ankler’s anonymous Entertainment Strategy Guy, titled “Business Affairs: Good Cop/Bad Cop of the Streaming Wars.” His thesis was pretty well captured in the lede: “The back engine that led us to a standoff also can get us out of it.” The back engine being… me. Us. The BA people.

I’m often a fan of ESG’s work, but my reaction to this particular piece can be summed up in two wistful words: I wish. That’s because, while ESG clearly has a solid general idea of what business affairs is and does, his analysis fundamentally (though flatteringly) misunderstands BA’s role in the industry generally, and its role in the collective bargaining process specifically. He gives us both more and less credit than we deserve. The road to the writers’ strike was paved with good intentions, but Business Affairs is neither the hero nor the villain of the story.

To my surprise, I found myself thinking about this article for days, and eventually, I realized why: because in this chaotic moment of upheaval and frustration in Hollywood, people are desperate to understand how we got into this mess and how we get out of it. They want to know who the villains are, and who might turn out to be heroes. And I believe ESG was right about at least one thing: understanding the role of business affairs in our ongoing industry-wide soap opera can teach us some valuable lessons about how we got here, and where we go from here.

In my piece, I want to offer the view from within the back engine about:

• What power BA does (and doesn’t) have to make consequential decisions.

• How BA created the mini-room — but not its unintended consequences.

• How the industry solved the last structural crisis facing TV writers: pay dilution.

• How BA works with showrunners to stretch a finite budget.

• The role of BA in collective bargaining.

• How span protection backfired.

• What I think it will take to find a deal to get Hollywood back to work.

Whose Call Is It Anyway?

As ESG said, we make deals. That is absolutely true — and, for many BA executives, it is the thing they love most about their jobs. But I prefer a more abstract description that better captures what I love most about the job: we solve problems. Deals are our primary, but not exclusive, tool for doing so. And, as with many jobs, moving up the corporate ladder means going from the person who does the thing, to the person who decides how it gets done, to the person who decides what gets done in the first place.

But even the most senior and empowered business affairs executives do not set strategy and policy in a vacuum.8 Rather, our job is to find business solutions that deliver on the creative and strategic priorities of our creative leaders within the company. In the best circumstances, we work as a team with our creative counterparts, marrying our independent perspectives to arrive at good decisions. But at the end of the day, we know this partnership has its limits — to put it in the language of deals, even when we have mutual approval with our creative leaders, they get the tiebreaker.9

Beyond working to realize our creative leaders’ visions, BA executives also craft deals to satisfy the needs and demands of counter-parties (both talent and other companies) and to navigate the constraints of the marketplace. Many of us love to innovate, but when we do, it’s seldom to drive a vision of where we think the industry should go. (What a luxury that would be!) More often than not, we’re just doing our best to solve problems that are right in front of us.

Consequently, many of the business practices that are now at the heart of the WGA’s grievances were not (as ESG writes) “decisions” by business affairs executives so much as they were “reactions” — constrained by outside forces, more iterative than inventive, made in good faith to solve real problems, and often inadvertently giving rise to new ones. I could give you that backstory for every entry on ESG’s list of “most influential” BA-designed disruptions, but perhaps nowhere is it clearer than for the one that has most dominated the ongoing conflict between the studios and the WGA: mini-rooms.

The Rise of Mini-Rooms (or the Law of Unintended Consequences)

Of mini-rooms, ESG writes: “I can’t definitively say this is the brainchild of BA executives, but my gut is the rise of mini-rooms comes from business affairs executives pushing for cost cuts.” I can confirm that sentence is literally true; but it misses the real story entirely.

From 2014 to 2017, the biggest structural challenge to the TV writing profession wasn’t mini-rooms; it was pay dilution. Traditional writing deals, devised for the old world of 22-to-26-episode broadcast seasons, were based on episodic fees that were guaranteed for all episodes produced during a given production season.10 The only limitation on how long writers could be required to work for those fees was that their total compensation, divided over their total number of work weeks, had to exceed applicable WGA scale; the predictability of the broadcast calendar made further guardrails unnecessary. The rise of original programming on cable, which typically involved 13-episode seasons, put some strain on this system, but it remained essentially functional.

Then came streaming, which, at first, looked a lot like cable — 13-episode seasons on a regular annualized calendar. But as the streamers learned more about their audiences, they began to abandon many longstanding TV norms that they had initially respected. When the data showed that seasons with fewer episodes (which cost more per episode but less per season) were as effective as those with more episodes at attracting and retaining subscribers, orders began to shrink — from 13 to 12, to 10, to 8, and now to as few as 6 episodes per season. When House of Cards established complex serialized drama as the preeminent streaming genre, streamers — to the initial delight of creators and filmmakers — embraced longer writing and production periods that allowed for more ambitious shows, but made neatly annualized production and releasing nearly impossible. When customers went wild for Netflix’s binge releases, that became the new orthodoxy in streaming, even if it functionally extended unpaid hiatus periods between production seasons (and thus decisively made annualized production and releasing impossible).11 And as the Streaming Wars began to heat up, the streamers, unconstrained by programming calendars, came to dominate series production by virtually every measure.

Writers still received the same episodic fees they always had, but they received fewer and fewer of those fees, amortized over longer and longer work periods, with longer and longer unpaid breaks between seasons (during which they remained contractually on hold for a potential subsequent season). Because the only guardrail on the classic system of episodic fee deals was the weekly scale floor, within a few years, virtually all writers, from Co-Producers to Co-Executive Producers, were usually working for the same pay, regardless of their title or “on paper” compensation — weekly scale.12 Only the highest-paid creators and showrunners had fees large enough to remain north of scale when amortized over extended writing and production periods.

This became the dominant problem-to-be-solved of the 2017 negotiation between the AMPTP and WGA, which almost devolved into a strike until the AMPTP and WGA found their solution — “span protection.” For any deal made after May 2, 2018, an episodic fee would buy out no more than 2.4 weeks of work. Additional work time would be compensated at the rate of one additional episodic fee for every additional 2.4 weeks of work (prorated for lesser periods).

The problem of pay dilution was solved. The problem of mini-rooms was born.

The functional cost of employing a writer for as long as the studios typically had prior to May 2018 went up dramatically — indeed, that was the point of span protection. But the basic underlying economics of TV production and distribution hadn’t changed. Costs were already rapidly ballooning as streamers increasingly sought to outdo one another for star power and spectacle in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Shorter orders obviously required fewer scripts, and as shows grew more complex, they increasingly demanded more singular authorship than the episodic sitcoms and procedural cop/lawyer/doctor dramas of yore.

In this creative context, the streamers essentially decided that, while the cost per writer on a show might have gone up, the cost of writers on a show would not. Showrunners were often given discretion to decide how to deploy their finite writing budget — across how many writers, for how many weeks per writer — but the budgets were finite, and had not expanded in proportion to per-writer costs. This is where the business affairs executives came in, working with showrunners to figure out how to best stretch those finite budgets.

The deals themselves actually didn’t change much at first,13 but the way they were used did, in predictable ways — writers rooms got smaller and work periods got shorter.14 And because every network’s customary approval rights cover virtually all aspects of even an independent studio’s production plan and budget, down to the line-item level, streamers could enforce these new norms on licensed productions just as they did on their self-produced series.

Studios and streamers compensated in part by relaxing once-standard requirements around options and exclusivity, which had restricted writers from taking other jobs, but the burden still fell upon the writers themselves to find more jobs — each of which was structured to these same new norms — to make the kinds of livings that they had before.

And as the years passed, the broader systemic consequences of these changes became clear. Junior and mid-level writers, working shorter periods on lengthier productions, lost the opportunity to develop experience as producers as well as writers. Writers jumping from job to job still got title bumps from season to season and deal to deal, but those bumps no longer reflected meaningful additional skills. As the skill sets of mid-level writers degraded, so did their ability to fully contribute to the creative and production process, further reinforcing and accelerating these trends. The fewer writers left to cover the entire production season worked to burnout levels to pick up the slack.

Which brings us to the mess we’re in today.

So yes, in a narrow sense, mini-rooms were invented “for cost cuts.” But they were not, as some especially aggrieved writers seem to believe, a nefarious plot to starve writers and undermine their profession. They were the unintended15 self-reinforcing backfire of studios trying in good faith to operationalize well-meaning new protections for writers, under heavy constraint from increasingly dominant streamers, who were themselves rapidly evolving the medium in response to new insights about viewer preferences.

Business Affairs in Collective Bargaining

It would be natural to assume that the folks that Hollywood generally entrusts with dealmaking would be leading the charge on negotiations that are as complex and consequential as the ones taking place between the AMPTP and the entertainment unions, especially given that they’ll also have to operationalize the new rules once these deals are finally done. But in reality — and much to the chagrin of many business affairs executives — BA has a surprisingly peripheral role in collective bargaining season, which is instead the triennial “time to shine” for the industry’s heads of labor relations.

To be clear, having these labor relations leaders (who generally report to the CEOs or general counsels, and not the heads of business affairs) at the center of the process is essential. The collectively bargained Master Basic Agreements (or “MBAs”) for SAG, WGA and DGA are barely comprehensible Frankenstein’s monsters, patched together with side-letters, popsicle sticks and bubblegum over decades of iterative revisions. Even the savviest business affairs executives typically know the MBAs only well enough to apply them in day-to-day dealmaking and/or production management. When faced with a novel or ambiguous situation that requires identifying and interpreting an MBA’s relevant provisions, BA executives tend to substantially rely on and defer to their colleagues in labor relations.

And it’s not that business affairs leaders don’t get any say in these negotiations. The AMPTP holds occasional conference calls in which the lead negotiators — again, the heads of labor relations — update their BA colleagues on the course of negotiations and get feedback on potential negotiating positions. Some heads of BA also cultivate close and collaborative working relationships with their counterparts in labor relations that afford them greater visibility and voice during collective bargaining season.

But at the very least, the impact of business affairs leaders on Hollywood’s triennial union negotiations is considerably smaller than most of the industry understands (and than most heads of business affairs would prefer). The heads of business affairs at the AMPTP companies negotiate high-stakes deals under often combative circumstances. They are responsible for applying the requirements of the MBAs in day-to-day dealmaking, and for devising new deal structures to adapt to changes arising out of each renewal. They spend their careers cultivating relationships and building trust with the industry’s community of agents and lawyers, as well as with key talent — especially showrunners. The best among them possess some of the industry’s finest business minds, and understand the deals they make and the context in which they make them on a deeply sophisticated level. Yet their role in setting the AMPTP’s negotiating strategy and devising specific proposed changes to the MBAs is secondary at best.

So What Now?

To offer a take that will anger everyone and satisfy no one: the grievances that have sent the writers to the picket lines (and that will probably send the actors out to join them as early as tomorrow) are real. So too are the financial pressures and existential uncertainties facing the AMPTP studios (especially the legacy ones). And both sides seem to have abandoned any presumption of good faith for the other, which makes finding common ground impossible. At least for now, everyone seems much more interested in making a point than in making a deal.

But there is a deal to be made here, because there are solutions to these very real problems. Finding them will require empathy, with both sides looking past each other’s positions to try to understand and address the concerns underlying them. It will require restoring a mutual presumption of good faith, and recognizing that we are ultimately all on the same team because we will all ultimately thrive together or wither together. It will require a whole lot of creativity, born out of a whole lot of practical experience, because these challenges are too big and too structural to fix with a silver bullet or with incremental tweaks at the margins. And it will require some humility, because as the story of mini-rooms demonstrates, even the best-intentioned efforts to solve major problems can accidentally give rise to new ones.

With all respect to our sometimes brilliant heads of labor relations, I wouldn’t say that all of the above is exactly their bread and butter. And I don’t expect the writers — who, to my endless frustration, have insisted on acting as their own negotiators (and as their own press agents too, unfortunately) — to independently crack those complexities any more than I expect studio executives to write great pilot scripts. I may be far from unbiased on the matter, but that all sounds to me like a job for business affairs.

Maybe I didn’t disagree with ESG quite as much as I thought.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

In the hours following Saturday’s surprise announcement — which arrived nearly two months before the WGA’s hard-fought 2023–26 collective bargaining agreement was set to expire, on May 30 — that the WGA and AMPTP had reached a tentative deal on a new union contract, I saw two reactions that struck me as especially representative of how the unexpected news was being received around town.

The first was a text message I received at 4:28 p.m. on Saturday, from a close friend in a senior business affairs position at a major studio, who observed, “Our labor guys haven’t emailed us so they must be getting blacked out drunk.”

The second was an anonymous comment on Deadline’s announcement, posted at 6:05 p.m. that day by someone calling themselves “WGA Member,” which asked “Why hasn’t the Guild notified members about this? Why am I finding this out from Deadline?”

What a difference three years can make.

Few people expected the 2026 collective bargaining season to be a repeat of the fire-and-brimstone “Hot Labor Summer” of 2023, during which overlapping WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes paralyzed the industry for nearly four months.1 In a column I published in the Ankler a few days before the WGA’s full membership voted to ratify the new deal, I opined that, based on the deal’s final terms, the process of making it had been far longer and more painful than was necessary — not just for the writers, but for the industry as a whole. Because of that bungled process, I argued, the WGA had “spent two collective bargaining cycles’ worth of negotiating fuel” on the 2023 contract, and that “a still-financially and emotionally exhausted talent community will likely have little appetite for another major work stoppage” in 2026.

These views — already fairly common when I first published them in October 2023 — were largely incorporated into the prevailing “conventional wisdom” about the strike, as production volume and opportunities continued to decline industry-wide in the months that followed, and rank-and-file WGA members grew increasingly skeptical that the gains they achieved in 2023 had been worth the cost. They seemed even more prescient as, in the early months of 2026, rumors began to swirl that the WGA’s health fund, the financial wellspring of the guild’s much-celebrated health insurance plan for its members, was critically underfunded and at risk of imminent collapse without a major infusion of capital from the AMPTP, which quietly let it be known that it would be happy to oblige with a bailout — in exchange for a five-year term for the new deal, which would break decades of precedent for three-year renewals.

Still, I never thought (or heard anyone predict) that the first big piece of news to break about the WGA and AMPTP’s negotiations would be that the negotiations were already over.

Because details about the new deal (other than its four-year term) remain scarce, it’s too early to comment meaningfully about its substance, or about who “won” or “lost” in the process (not that various pundits and ideologues will be deterred from trying in the days ahead).

But there are already some valuable lessons we can draw from what we do know about this deal and how it was made and announced, and some interesting questions we can ask about what to expect (and not expect) as we learn more in the weeks ahead.

1. The WGA’s Health Fund Was Probably in Even Worse Shape Than We Thought

The experience of (and fallout from) the summer of 2023 certainly loomed large over the WGA and AMPTP’s negotiations for 2026. But I don’t think that context is enough, on its own, to explain this weekend’s surprise announcement. That includes, notably, the WGA’s consent to a template-breaking four-year term without any discernible show of public resistance — something that, I think, comes down to the factor that has dominated what little public discussion we’ve heard about these negotiations to date (even though it wasn’t on any of our radars three years ago): the looming insolvency of the WGA’s health fund.

The WGA’s “Cadillac” health plan has long been the envy of the other entertainment unions (whose own plans feature some combination of lesser benefits, greater members costs, higher income requirements, and tiered benefits at different income levels), as well as a thorn in the side of the AMPTP companies (many of whose executives have long regarded it as an unsustainable extravagance). Among other remarkable features of the WGA’s plan, members currently do not contribute anything from their own to pay toward their premiums; they only pay out of pocket to add eligible dependents to their plans. As the general unaffordability of health care has metastasized into a bona fide national crisis, the WGA’s health plan has stood out even more as one of the guild’s foremost achievements for its members. For most writers, there is perhaps no more potent or salient example of how the union has made their day-to-day lives better.2

In any era, that would make protecting the WGA health plan one of the union’s most crucial priorities. But this is not “any era” — this is an era that most writers would describe as one of systemic decline for their profession, defined by growing financial insecurity, deteriorating employment prospects, and the still-unresolved existential threat posed by generative AI.3 It’s also an era in which many WGA members have increasingly questioned whether their union’s signature initiatives of the last decade — not just the 2023 strike, but before that, the 2019–21 “Agency Campaign” that effectively ended the practice of agency packaging in scripted TV and drove the agencies out of the studio business — might have exacerbated rather than mitigated that systemic decline.

In this context, the collapse of the WGA’s health plan would not just have devastated its members — it would have inflicted a deep wound on the union’s credibility and effectiveness that could take a generation to heal. Both sides knew this, guaranteeing that negotiations would play out very differently in 2026 than they had in 2023. But the particular speed and quiet with which this deal was made suggests to me that the WGA knew that its health fund was in even more precarious condition than most of us realized, had little to no leverage to secure much of anything beyond the recapitalization of the fund, and understood that an extended term would be the price (but perhaps a not unwelcome one in this ongoing era of turbulence and unpleasant transformation).

2. It Helps to Have the Right People Sitting at the Negotiating Table

A lot of attention will be paid to the “speed” part of that last sentence, but I’m actually more interested in the “quiet.”

One could gently characterize the WGA’s style over the last decade as “pugnaciously adversarial.” Or, one could less gently characterize it as “constantly spoiling for a fight.” Not that I would give high marks to the AMPTP either, with its apparent focus on minimizing concessions rather than reaching meaningful understandings. The organizations coming back to the table in 2026 are the same ones that mucked it up so badly last time (and frankly didn’t have a great track record before then either).

But they aren’t all the same people that were at the table last time, and that counts for a lot. I haven’t personally paid attention to labor relations long enough to know whether the AMPTP’s Carol Lombardini or WGA’s David Goodman were at one point strategic or effective as negotiators, but suffice it to say that neither is missed by the institutions they once faced (nor, as far as I can tell, do they seem to be much missed by their own old organizations).4

The AMPTP’s negotiating team is now led by Greg Hessinger, a respected labor lawyer and former CEO of SAG (pre-AFTRA), who has worked to rebuild the kind of collaborative and trust-based process with the WGA that was absent from Lombardini’s later years. On the other side returns the WGA’s chief negotiator, Ellen Stutzman, now free of Goodman’s often inflammatory and corrosive influence, and obviously receptive to (and probably pretty refreshed by) the change in the AMPTP’s approach and tone.

It’s amazing what people can accomplish when they actually talk to each other and engage on the underlying substance of shared problems, with a mutually-held realistic understanding of prevailing circumstances and a shared commitment to working things out without further disrupting an already fragile industry. Rather than, for example, scornfully and performatively sassing one another from a distance according to their respective constructed narratives, fueled by a decade or more of scarcely forgiven and certainly not forgotten slights (real and perceived).

3. Negotiating in Public Should Be Your Last Resort, Not Your First

The distinguishing feature of the WGA’s 2026 deal is not merely the absence of apparent conflict, but the absence of public discussion altogether. That’s because this deal was negotiated where it belongs: in private.

Several of the last collective bargaining cycles opened with some perfunctory initial “negotiations” that seemed intended to quickly stall, followed by far more protracted public and semi-public lobbying of constituents to build (and demonstrate) solidarity for an adversarial process ahead. The people running the WGA would say it was necessary to muster the member awareness, sentiment, and solidarity required to negotiate with leverage. The people at the AMPTP would say the WGA started it. I’d say it reflects both sides’ total lack of seriousness in those years about just making a deal (rather than putting on a show).

For the 2026 negotiations, both the AMPTP and the WGA deployed the most effective public communications strategy possible: none at all.

That’s not to say that collective bargaining should never be carried out in the press, or that the WGA’s argument about the necessity of at least member-facing communications is without merit. But the press is a forum for the debate of conflicts that have defied resolution in the negotiating room. Communication with members (and some measure of transparency) is important, but so is a negotiator’s ability to maintain confidences, build quiet consensus, and represent their constituency’s position with clear and confident authority.

Negotiating in the press and publicly rallying the troops are part of the collective bargaining process, and always will be. But they’re not usually a sign that it’s going very well. And as Saturday showed, when the parties are serious about making a deal, they don’t have to be part of the process at all.

4. So Are We Actually Going to Do Something About This Health Fund Problem?

I know this article starts with the premise that doing something about this health fund problem is what this whole deal is pretty much about. And with a contribution likely well into the nine figures, I’m certainly not minimizing what the AMPTP is doing (and what the WGA is getting) to restore the health fund to solvency.

But it’s going to deplete again.

If there’s a plan for how to preserve the solvency of the plan well into the future, consider me surprised, pleased, and eager to hear about it. The WGA regularly diverts increases to scale minimums, which would be immediately felt in its members’ pockets, for the benefit of its pension and health plans. That’s smart, responsible decision-making, and I’m sure it will continue. Writing employment numbers will probably stabilize and may even tick upward, and the steady climb in scale minimums will float a lot of boats.

But the WGA’s health insurance plan is probably just too good for a world as flawed as ours. It’s not in duress because of the pandemic or tariffs or energy costs or any number of other macroeconomic factors. It’s in duress because, as the WGA’s plan is currently built, too many members take too much money out of the system for how much money goes into it. It’s as simple as that.

Letting the health fund fail (and the chips fall chaotically where they may) would be an unnecessary and self-inflicted catastrophe. Recapitalizing it without addressing the underlying structural problems merely defers the crisis. And we’ve yet to see how durable this newfound goodwill will prove to be.

Which brings us back to the same old list of ugly-sounding “reforms”: increasing eligibility requirements, increasing deductibles and co-payments, decreasing benefits, or increasing premiums. They all suck. So do a lot of things right now.

It would be a waste of this rare moment of apparent labor relations harmony (and of the giant check about to be cut by the studios) not to engage in serious and open-minded discussion about at least incremental changes in the structure and economics of the WGA’s health benefits.

At a minimum, it seems obvious that the WGA will need to adopt a version of the DGA’s tiered benefits. Directors with at least $41,215 in DGA-covered earnings for the year qualify for the DGA Choice Plan, while those earning at least $133,670 get the DGA Premier Choice Plan (which offers lower out-of-pocket maximums and better coverage for non-network providers). In addition, WGA members will likely have to start contributing something from their own pay toward premiums/costs, something that SAG-AFTRA members already have to do for their insurance, currently considered the weakest of the plans for the three major guilds (whereas WGA and DGA members currently only pay out-of-pocket to add dependents to their coverage). I have neither the data nor the actuarial skills to say this with any certainty, but I suspect those two tweaks alone would make a huge dent in the problem, and the need for (and scale of) other changes could be evaluated from there.

5. Is Four Years the New Three Years?

If you know anything about collective bargaining in the entertainment industry, your first thought upon hearing this deal (after “huh, already?”) was probably “Are SAG-AFTRA and the DGA going to agree to four years now?”5

I’m guessing yes. And I’m all for it.

The guilds have long resented the way the AMPTP tends to treat whatever major conceptual ground is broken in the first closed agreement of each triennial collective bargaining season — typically with the DGA — as both floor and ceiling for each deal that follows. Relatedly, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA have long resented the DGA’s focus on creative rights (and continuing its exclusive hold over the coveted “film by” credit), its apparent coziness with and amiability toward the studios, and the way that the structure of directing compensation has largely insulated its members from much of the squeeze felt by writers and actors as a result of changes in production norms during the streaming era.

But they wouldn’t resent it if it didn’t work, and the AMPTP will surely insist that although — or even because — the norm of three-year terms has been broken, the norm of aligning all three major union contracts on the same negotiating cadence must be respected.

Even so, I don’t think it’s just a precedent-and-leverage game here. The WGA got something extraordinary in exchange for opening the door to a four-year deal, and SAG-AFTRA and the DGA will likely look for some signature wins uniquely relevant to their own members to tack onto the basic framework established by the WGA’s new contract. If the AMPTP’s handling of the WGA deal is any indication, they’ll probably get something to show for it too (and they should).

But negotiating dynamics aside, just looking back on the years we’ve just lived through (and forward to the years ahead), a little long-term certainty, security, and stability sounds pretty good right now. The world is still changing very fast, and an extra year will no doubt expose even more holes in the existing system that call out for further reform. But as I wrote in the early days of the 2023 strike, the central problem of every CBA negotiation is often the unintended consequence of how the parties solved the central problem of the last one.

Even without that track record, though, it would be foolish to believe that we really know what generative AI will do to the industry, or what that industry will look like when there is no one left who can merge with anyone else. And it would be downright deluded to think that we’re ready, today, to come up with ambitious, durable, and externality-free solutions to the business’s greatest problems.

An extra year to figure some of that out sounds pretty good right now.

This post is always free, one of a handful that will never go behind the paywall. Share it with anyone.

When people ask me what a business affairs executive does for a living, I usually give them the same answer that most anyone else would: we make deals.

It’s a fine response. It’s easy for laypeople to understand, representative of how we spend most of our time at work, and consistent with how we’re viewed by most of the industry. I once had a boss who proudly referred to his team of business affairs executives as “The Negotiators.” I thought it sounded like the title of a procedural drama on CBS that I would never watch (but would quietly run for seven seasons). But it made him happy, and it spoke to how central the role of “dealmaker” can become to the professional identity of many people who do this work.

Even so, I’ve always quietly preferred a different answer: we solve problems.

That framing reflects my own biases — in particular, my perhaps surprisingly limited love for the negotiation process itself. But it also reminds me that deals don’t exist in a vacuum; they exist to help large groups of people come together to bring something new and valuable into the world. Making a movie or television series is incredibly difficult. Making money on it is even harder. On the long road from nascent idea to successful production, every closed deal is an obstacle overcome — and the best dealmaking tools are the ones that help you clear as many obstacles as possible, as efficiently as possible.

Which brings me, for the fourth and final time, to the 50/50 pools waterfall.

I didn’t set out to write 10,000 words about a revenue sharing structure (especially one that is still found mostly outside of television). But the 50/50 pools waterfall turns out to be one of those rare dealmaking tools that genuinely solves problems — not just one problem, but several of the most fundamental challenges facing any new business that needs to unite the people with the money and the people with the talent. Today I want to show you what those problems look like in the specific context of indie TV, and why this particular tool is so well-suited to solving them.

Indie TV 1.0: Graveyard of Spec Pilots

Although the 50/50 pools waterfall has been a mainstay of the independent film world for decades, it has historically had little presence in the television business. That’s largely because, for most of the medium’s history, there really hasn’t been any such thing as “independent television.”

As I explained last Monday, the bifurcation of financing/production from distribution (with the latter secured only after the former is complete) is what puts the “independent” in “independent film.” But television has long been rooted firmly in the “commission” model, in which pilot or series production commences only after an anchor network has “ordered” it (and committed to pay negotiated license fees, irrespective of how well it comes out). Traditionally, the notion of “independent television” has been regarded by most industry insiders almost as a contradiction in terms, fundamentally at odds with how shows are actually picked and produced in the real world. Not that that stopped people from trying.

The rest of this post is for Paid and Premium subscribers. A subscription to The Business of Television Max opens the full site archives, as well as special articles and other professional resources available only to paying subscribers.

Read more

The best deals — the ones that close relatively quickly and smoothly, and leave both sides feeling equally happy (rather than equally unhappy) at the end — often have one key thing in common: a smart eight-year-old could understand why they make sense.

I call this the “playground fairness” rule: when faced with a range of reasonable positions I could take in a negotiation, none of which seems obviously superior to any other, I generally favor whichever option is easiest to explain and defend — initially to my counterpart, but implicitly to the client they represent — as being intuitively fair and equitable.

Among the many problems with pure “positional bargaining” is that it can go on pretty much forever, limited only by the patience, stamina, and shamelessness of the parties and their representatives.1 The parties know they’re done when they’ve run out of middle ground or are simply too exhausted to continue. But when presented with a position that is well-grounded in basic fairness and intuitive justice, countering it implicitly requires (1) a persuasive argument for why it isn’t actually fair, (2) a specific alternative that can be presented as “more” fair, and/or (3) the willingness to openly violate a powerful and near-universal social norm (that is recognized by, and imposes social pressure upon, even those who don’t personally subscribe to it). If the other side can’t muster any of those three things, then they have little choice but to accept the outcome and move on.

The point here isn’t to be nice (or lazy), even if it means “leaving value on the table” or “giving away the store” — it’s to expedite closing the deal by trying to box my counterpart into an outcome that I know I can be comfortable with, when considering the deal holistically. Allow me to illustrate with an example from just last month:

An indie film producer I work with sought my advice on a deal with a buzzy writer/producer, who my client wanted to partner with on a proposed feature, but who was insisting upon a 75/25 split (in the writer’s favor) of the TBD total available producing fees and backend for the project.2 My client acknowledged that the writer’s name recognition and “cool factor” would be essential to the project’s success. But he didn’t feel great about accepting a minority share of the fees, given how accommodating he had been about paying out-of-pocket for a script — at 200% of normal scale, thanks to the writer working with two of his (non-famous) friends, who would also piggyback on the writer as producers — rather than pushing them to work on spec as so many other indie producers are wont to do. And it didn’t help that my client would have to split his fees and backend 50/50 with a silent partner (who was putting up the money for the writing deal).

But after a few rounds, my client was ready to begrudgingly concede that the deal would never close with the pure 50/50 split that he had contemplated, and now wanted my feedback on his plan to go back with an offer of a 55/45 split. I suggested he should instead offer a more generous 60/40 split. Why? There were actually five parties at the table, not two — my client had his silent partner, and the buzzy writer had his two friends. A “60/40” split was, in reality, a 20/20/20/20/20 split. Kind of hard to argue with that. But I also suggested he limit that 60/40 split to the (higher upside, but much more speculative) backend compensation only, and hold at a 50/50 split of the front-end fees (which would be more meaningful and satisfying to my client and his partner, and could be justified exactly as it had been explained to me).

At this point, you may be wondering…

Isn’t This Supposed to Be About the 50/50 Pools Waterfall We Learned About on Monday?

Yes, I’m getting there. It’s easy to look at the 50/50 Pools Waterfall and just see a complicated accounting construct that only a lawyer could love:

But you can start to appreciate how it passes the “playground fairness” test if you simplify it to six brief statements:

1. Money goes in.

2. Distributors take their fees and expenses off the top.

3. Loans are repaid to lenders with interest.

4. Equity investors recoup their investments with a reasonable premium.

5. Once those who risked money have been taken care of, those who agreed to be badly “underpaid” to get the project produced are made closer to whole.

6. Whatever remains goes half to the equity investors whose money made the project possible, and half to the people whose effort and talent made it worthwhile.

Why Does the 50/50 Pools Waterfall Feel Intuitively Fair?

At this point, you’re probably starting to feel the basic logic and equity there, even if you can’t yet put your finger on exactly why you’re feeling it. So let’s look at exactly what makes this model so appealing.

The rest of this post is for Paid and Premium subscribers. A subscription to The Business of Television Max opens the full site archives, as well as special articles and other professional resources available only to paying subscribers.

Read more