Every damn weekend, Next TV writers Daniel Frankel and David Bloom engage in pointless arguments over SMS messaging. This time, the winner is you.
DAVID BLOOM: Happy late Southern California winter to you, Dan’l. Stay dry. I’m guessing you’re not the Coachella-raving sort of festival fellow these days, especially with sullen senior son/star pitcher mowin’ ’em down at Pali High and Stagecoach just a few weeks away. This week saw still more details about that impossibly complex plan to sell Paramount Global to David Ellison and some of his dad’s closest billionaire buds.
Also read: CEO Bob Bakish's Pay Slipped to $31.3 Million as Paramount Nears Takeover
Even better, multiple members of the Paramount board’s special committee to vet the deal are stepping down, while one of the board members who ’s staying behind used to be one of Larry Ellison’s senior Oracle executives. So much for arm’s-length and conflict avoidance. As I suggested last week, it’s a two-tier deal that gets Shari Redstone out of the media-decidin’ business, but somehow lets her keep a piece of the mess she made, removes (er, “delevers”) the company’s crippling debt, and makes even everyday owners of non-controlling shares such as Mario Gabelli and Warren Buffett delighted to tag along for the ride. The key to everything is a couple of billion dollars of hazily defined “synergies,” that magic term conjured by bullshit Wall Street M&A wizards every time they want to make an unlikely deal sound like, hey, it might work. Except it never does, and a bunch of people end up out of work while the wizards grab deal fees, payouts, vested stock and magically valuable options. Ellison promises to unlock big multiples of growth and opportunity with the sale and accompanying likely selloffs/shutdowns. Seems, ahem, optimistic. But hey, what could possibly go wrong?
DANIEL FRANKEL: If only Roman, Shiv and Kendall were around to sabotage Shari. Honestly, I hadn't personally thought out the implications of having another MAGA backer like Larry Ellison control another major U.S. media conglomerate. What happens to CBS News and 60 Minutes down the road? Does Nickelodeon become a propaganda tool for the far right, indoctrinating young ones into the cult? Think SpongeBob and Friends. I actually thought about going to Coachella this year. Then I thought about how much I hate being stuck in the boiling heat around a bunch of screaming people. Frankly, I've always been this old! Old like R.E.M.’s second studio album, the brooding, melancholy masterpiece Reckoning, which debuted 40 years ago this week. Moving on, since you mentioned the boy, I did witness his six-inning, 10-strikeout, zero-earned-run gem this afternoon against University High. I’m yet another sports parent basking in the dying light of what has been a blast of a youth and prep athletic career. Reece will be taking his arm talents north a hundred miles to Santa Barbara for college this fall … Interestingly, if you take the aggregate audience of everyone who has ever watched him pitch, multiply it by 1,000, quintuple it, and add 30, you still don't get close to the kind of audience Caitlin Clark has generated for women's basketball.
I mean, not that long ago, that boat was dead in the water. Now women’s hoop is the hottest item in sports. You and I have witnessed a few transformational athletes in our time. But have we seen one quite like Clark? She didn't transform the popularity of a league over five years, like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson did. She did it seemingly overnight.
BLOOM: Congrats on your son finding a fine school with which to ply his passion next year. My daughter is a UCSB Gaucho, loved the city, and loved attending one of America’s best public universities. I hope your boy remembers his main chance, though, getting a degree that will open doors for the rest of his life. As for opening doors, Caitlin Clark certainly has opened a bunch. I loved how South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley, celebrating her third title in five years, stopped to mark Clark’s contributions to their sport, and the heavy burden of constant attention that she seemed to bear so lightly.
Now comes the next big step: on Monday, the WNBA has its draft. Clark will almost certainly be the Indiana Fever's No. 1 overall pick, joining last year’s No. 1 pick, South Carolina alum Aliyah Boston. I expect Clark will open up the women’s game in the exact way Steph Curry’s stratospheric three-pointers, constant motion, and laser passing opened up a sludgy, isolation-heavy men’s game. To quote musician John Stewart’s 1979 album, Bombs Away Dream Babies (fun Stewart trivia — he was both part of the Kingston Trio and wrote 600 songs over four decades, including Daydream Believer, a No. 1 hit for the Monkees).
But with the tremendous interest in the women’s college Final Four, can the WNBA take the ball and score? Can it grab a bigger role in the daily sports conversation? That’s the big sports question of the summer. One other tidbit: Jennifer Kashdan, one of the very smart regulars in my Friday morning Clubhouse conversation, noted that advertisers showed up in a big way for the women’s Final Four. Not only were ads pitched to a broader audience than the usual beer-pizza-wings-insurance-trucks cabal on major men’s sports ‘casts, they did smart, funny, bespoke and original spots that suggest the brands came to play, too. Now let’s see the brands show up for the WNBA when its new season opens May 3, and for next year’s college women’s sports too. The Indiana Fever play in the first game of the new season by the way, against Dallas.
FRANKEL: Well, the WNBA and ESPN announced the league's TV schedule last week. And let's just say that a third of the time that the WNBA is on Disney-owned television networks this spring and summer, Clark and the Fever will be featured.
As Christopher Walken might say, I've got a fever! But it's not for more cowbell. While we're on the subject of sports, did you see Dish Network made the wise move of hiring Deion Sanders as a Boost Mobile pitchman? Now, this is a guy who is 4-8 as an FBS-level college football coach, who lost his last six games last year. He chased off nearly the entire Colorado Buffalo roster when he took over, and replaced them with mercenaries from the transfer portal.
Sanders’s most recent recruiting class is ranked 84th, according to Rivals. Two of his starters are his sons, both good players, but beyond aggressive sports parenting, who knows if this man’s heart is truly into the very definitive “calling” which is coaching. I once happily drove around Los Angeles in an old Nissan Pathfinder filled with buckets of baseballs and fungo bats. Spent my weekday afternoons and evenings herding 11-year-olds to practice, my weekends driving to far-flung SoCal ballfields for travel ball tournaments, and even more of my off-hours cajoling entitled Hollywood producer parents and a petty, vindictive PONY league commissioner. Once my son entered high school, I was done with all that. “Coaching” is different when you don’ t have a dog in the hunt.
Yet, based mainly on Sanders’ performance art, we've bought into this notion that “Coach Prime” is somehow a leader and character-builder of young men. I mean, 60 Minutes did two segments on him in the span of a year. Insurance company Aflac has him co-starring in commercials alongside Nick Saban, as if Prime’s credentials are in any way remotely as bona fide as the retired Alabama ball coach, winner of an astounding seven national championships.
A country that has already bought into the notion of an oft-bankrupt reality television star as global statesman now thinks of Sanders as a modern, gold-adorned Knute Rockne. And now, for a limited time, you can get a special gold-adorned Motorola Razr handset, with Coach Prime’s signature on it. I see what Dish probably sees. If Coach Prime can sell … all this, imagine how many gold-colored smart phones he can move. And if you don't like the phone, you can just push it into the ol’ upgrade portal and get a new one!
BLOOM: As the brother of a (non-football-watching) CU grad, I’ve watched Sanders’ ascension at Colorado with slightly elevated interest. It’s fine to mock the outsized attention Sanders has received after leading the Buffs to a 4-8 first season, until you remember that the team he ran off won just one game and lost 11 the previous year. And he did turn around Jackson State, taking another overlooked program to an 11-win season in 2021 and its first conference championship in 14 years. He also brought a welcome spotlight to all the HBCU football programs, the historically Black colleges and universities that continue to have an important role in our nation’s higher education firmament. Sanders has proven he can coach at least a little bit. All the advertising spots, 60 Minutes segments and the rest are, however, a direct result of Sanders’ other important skill, his ability to grab the spotlight.
In our attention-driven economy, those who can grab it routinely and loudly are far more valuable than those who can’t. Sanders was a star in college, a star in both pro baseball and football, and a star broadcast personality before deciding to coach. He’s the only person to play in both a Super Bowl (winning two) and a World Series. TV loves stars. So do sports fans, and athletes (see also, Caitlin Clark). And for all your grumping, would anyone, including most of Colorado’s own alums, have paid this much attention to the school’s football program if Deion wasn’t shining neon bright, turning things upside down? Further, Sanders’ approach may not accord with your apparent nostalgia for a time when players were essentially indentured servants, largely stuck with a single school regardless of their success there, or whether the coach who recruited them stuck around. But Sanders” approach is nicely attuned to our chaotic present, where name/image/likeness and a hyperactive portal system turn all players into perpetual free agents, and coaches into perpetual recruiters. Saban is indeed the GOAT, but part of the reason he rather suddenly retired this year after an epic career was because he’s uncomfortable with today’s game behind the game. Sanders may never come close to winning even one national championship, but he’s already won big for Colorado.
FRANKEL: Sure, the stands are full in Boulder these days. CU is a proud, tailgate-crazy party place with a notable athletic history, and the football program has been kind of a smoking hole since those glory days of Kordell Stewart, Eric Bieniemy, Bill McCartney ... and those big Promise Keepers Evangelical stadium events. We’ll see how long the revival lasts. (I must admit the Stewart reference was partly included to anchor this painful reminder for Michigan fans ... who could use a little humility right now.)
And we'll see if you're still saying Colorado "won" when the Sanders boys head to sixth round of the NFL draft next year and Coach Prime carpet-bags his way out of Dodge. Again, coaching is 24/7 sleep-in-your-office grind. Beyond the obvious and much-needed diversity Sanders’ positioning implies, the transition from Saban to Prime says nothing good about where college athletics, Power 5 football in particular, are headed. Oh man, I am grumpy today. Tried to buy Excedrin at CVS this morning, and I had to spend five minutes remembering the old phone number tied to my store loyalty account. Can't I just give them eight bucks for headache pills and walk away? Does everything have to be tracked? I mean, Roku just got 576,000 more customer accounts compromised. I can’t even watch TV anywhere without worrying about being hacked. This gives me an idea. I'm thinking of launching a kind of “Anti-Telly.“
We’ll sell you the most encrypted, private viewing experience you’ve ever had. No one will ever know about your search history, if you have pets, and what your next car purchase will be. You can truly go off the grid, at least in your living room … while you try to watch Michael Douglas as Benjamin Franklin on Apple TV Plus.
BLOOM: Technically, you didn’t have to enter your old phone number for that CVS purchase. They would have happily sold you the painkillers without it. We have more chances to opt out of incessant marketing come-ons than ever; we just need to get into the habit of doing it. And given the Amazon conversion of tens of millions of Prime Video subscribers to an ad-supported tier, and the more general rise of connected TVs, we’re going to need to be more assertive than ever about drawing lines around this stuff, because it’s going to be wall-to-wall, I suspect. Don’t just hit the “accept all cookies” dialog box, for instance. Unsubscribe to newsletters you never asked for. Send junky emails to the junk folder. Speaking of junk, the Biden administration is cracking down on the proliferating junk fees that all kinds of companies ladle on everything from mortgage loans to video services. DirecTV, already seeing its business erode like sands in an hourglass, is now saying the Federal Communications Commission can’t force it to display “all-in pricing” that includes all those junky little charges that puff up a final bill. Given the Supreme Court’s problematic interest in possibly monkey-wrenching the entire legal foundation for federal regulatory agencies, I’m concerned that we won’t get this stuff stamped out any time soon. But I sure hope we can stop this death by a thousand fees experience that’s so crummy for consumers.
FRANKEL: Well, I'd have to pay an additional $5 for my headache medicine without loyalty club participation. That's not a gun to one’s head, but avoiding having to pay above-market rate for consumer goods presents its own kind of mandate. The Telly-fication of the world relies on this notion that basic privacy goeth before a good bargain. As for the junk fee bill, I think it has been to a large decree the straightforward pricing and easily cancellable nature of digital services like Netflix that have largely eaten DirecTV's lunch. I'm not one of these goofballs that constantly screams about getting big government into a bathtub, but the free market does seem to be solving this problem already. Speaking of cosmic injustices sorting themselves out, cancer finally succumbed to stage 4 O.J. Simpson this week. (That one was for the late, great Norm Macdonald.)
A notable celebrity death, for sure. Outside of the Super Bowl, this one “entertainer” is responsible for two of the top five biggest global television events — the time he tried to run away in his white Ford Bronco, and the reading of the jury verdict that belied seemingly airtight DNA evidence that put him at the scene of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman's gruesome murders. As Peter Kafka noted on X, partly due to platforms like the erstwhile Twitter, we'll probably never see that kind of non-Super Bowl audience coalescence again.
Hard to convey how much attention OJ Simpson commanded but here are some numbers: 95 million people watched the chase. 150 million watched the verdict.We’re never going to focus like that again - because of things like this app. pic.twitter.com/UQBENw2MeqApril 11, 2024
BLOOM: I was something of collateral damage to the O.J. circus, working in my newspaper’s bureau a block down the street from the downtown Los Angeles courthouse where it unfolded. My bureau mate was assigned to the trial (along with at least one more reporter from our modestly sized staff) while I picked up all the things he normally would have covered. And even then, I still had to pinch hit alongside Mark (now the editor of the Pulitzer-winning Tampa Bay Times) on a few O.J.-related bits. It’s impossible to convey how much oxygen the trial consumed in L.A.’s media ecosystem. And it’s not just those two peak viewing moments you mentioned. Observers have suggested the O.J. trial (and perhaps the Iran hostage crisis before it) shifted the very way news is covered, especially by the 24-hour news channels, which came into their own in that decade. Instead of CNN's previous practice of skipping around the globe checking in with far-flung correspondents about the day’s many sources of news, everything shifted to panels of in-studio commentators, breaking down in Talmudic detail the latest minute advance in The One Story That Matters. Audiences, it turned out, liked having just one main character in their news diet.
For much of the past decade, and in nearly as malign a fashion, that main character has been not O.J. Simpson, but D.J. Trump. I don’t know if Trump will end up in jail for his various and manifold misdeeds, but it could happen. His legal team isn’t as talented (or as reliably well paid) as Simpson’s was, and he’s facing a lot of charges in a lot of places, beginning with his first criminal trial, set for this week. It’s somehow fitting that the man accused in the trial of the last century has shuffled off this mortal coil just as the one at the center of what could be several trials of this century heads to the courtroom (maybe). And as an aside, late-era Michael Douglas may be much leaner physically than late-era B.Frank, but he brings Franklin’s gleam in the eye and world-weary wit to a true story of our nation’s perilous creation. Franklin is another fine addition to Apple TV Plus' growing catalog of originals, now beefed up with short-term licenses of crowd-pleasing movies you’ve actually heard of, like Inception, John Wick, and Transformers. It’s not quite the full Paramount (or Lionsgate) library acquisition I predicted at the start of the year, but it’s definitely a start, a useful riposte to the remaining major critique of Apple TV Plus, that it also has been too lean for the job.
