THB #587: La Montaña Está En Erupción

It’s kind of like a romantic break-up.

You may know it is coming… it is inevitable… you know it will hurt even if you know there is no real choice…. but when it happens, it is still devastating.

I knew that most of what Paramount TV once was is now a part of CBS. And now, a bit more.

As Aussie Dan Barrett - whose Substack Always Be Watching is one of my daily reads, along with American Rick Ellis’ Too Much TV, The Ankler, the ever-hopeful Ted Hope, and more… - wrote up the history:

The former TV arm of Paramount, Paramount Television (the iconic studio which began as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu), fell victim to the decision in 2005 by parent company Viacom to split into two companies - Viacom (which would handle the cable TV side of the business) and CBS Corporation. Paramount Television was bundled in with CBS. By 2007, the Paramount Television name was no more, with operations subsumed by CBS Television Studios.

But still… 500 people will be facing unemployment in an industry in contraction. Some of those folks will find jobs quickly and enjoy a bit of a bonus by way of their serverance deals. Many others will go back to their hometowns.

And this is just the first 500 of 2000 Paramount employees headed out the door this month.

The sky isn’t falling any faster today than it was before the write-downs or the layoffs starting or this announcement. But it feels bad. And it feels like something has shifted. This is a bad moment. The morbidly obese business of the last 5 years is taking its Ozempic - double-doses - and we are all rooting for the fat… because we are - most of us are - that fat. Or we care about “the fat.” Or we spent months picketing with “the fat” and fought the bosses with “the fat” and after feeling like we won, “the fat” is more under assault (a salt?) than before the strikes.

There are also a lot of unanswered questions that are still sitting out there about what the future of Paramount is going to be under David Ellison and Skydance.