Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Monday, June 21st, 2021

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Monday, June 21st, 2021. I'm writing this from the Twin Cities suburbs, where AllYourScreens HQ is powered by iced tea and a PB&J.

A BIT OF HOUSEKEEPING
I'm tweaking the newsletter a bit in response to feedback and as I see how and when people are reading it. Over the past few weeks, I've been sending this out progressively later during the day. That's due to a couple of factors. One, doing it later just allows me to include more things from throughout the day. And secondly, it just takes a long time to assemble and write these newsletters. The average newsletter comes in at somewhere between 2 and 3,000 words. And given that I'm balancing the newsletter on top of the "normal" work I'm doing for my web site, it's just difficult to get it out consistently earlier in the day.

So the plan now is to get it out to you every day between 3-5 pm CT. So it should hit your mailboxes in between the morning/early afternoon email rush and before CNN sends out their daily "Reliable Sources" email. Based on the open rates for this newsletter, that seems to be the sweet spot for the biggest slice of the just-over 15,000 users. 

Also, since the newsletter is going out later in the day, I will be switching up the "premieres tonight" section so that it features the programming that premieres the following day instead of the same day. Which should make it more helpful for those of you will find the listings helpful (and there appear to be quite a few of you)

Secondly, despite regular questions about the decision (including from my wife), I still have no plans to make any of this subscription-based. There are more advantages to the viral aspects of a free newsletter than I would get from a smaller base of paid subscribers. That being said, I do get regular questions about how best to support this and the web site. So what I am going to do is turn on the option tomorrow for anyone who wants to subscribe. There won't be subscriber-only options for now, but it will provide a way for you to support my work if you are interested. But this daily email newsletter will always be free, so you won't have to do anything to continue receiving them each day.

THE CHALLENGE FOR ANY TV CRITIC OR MEDIA ANALYST
I don't spend a lot of time talking about my process behind being a TV/media critic and analyst. Despite what you might think after reading today's newsletter. I have strong feelings about it, but discussing the process in public just feel self-indulgent and the epitome of inside baseball. But I wanted to highlight this piece from music critic Ted Gioia. He talks about his realization that he needed to be one of the "honest brokers" in the industry. And for what it's worth, it tracks pretty closely with what I believe:

This was a whole new consideration, one that had never dawned on me before. And I could tell by consulting various cutting edge critics, that this issue hadn’t got on their radar screens either. They didn’t give a rat’s ass for the reader’s musical pleasure. Or, if they did, they made sure to hide it at every pass. I started reading  music reviews just looking for the words: enjoyment, pleasure, delight. They had gone missing in action. Why didn’t anyone talk about them? Shouldn’t enjoyment be a make-or-break part of the deal? Yes, a critic expands the readers’ horizons, informs and educates, but also guide them to pleasure. After all, wasn’t that why I listened to music? Wasn’t that what brought me to my vocation in the first place?

Lost in this maze, I started recognizing all the other priorities that people had who wrote about music. And the more I mulled over the ecosystem, the more polluted it seemed. I saw smart people who wrote entire books about music with the aim of securing tenure from their elder colleagues in a college music department. I saw others twisting themselves into all sorts of contortions in order to win a grant or please an editor or curry favor with some institutional power broker. I even read reviewers who wrote with the apparent goal of ingratiating themselves with other reviewers. Talk about the blind leading the blind!

Above all, I noticed a whole syndrome that I came to call the Clement Greenberg problem—named after the art critic who achieved enormous success (and very large paydays) by heralding the work of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionists. Greenberg had made it clear that the single most lucrative move for a modern-day critic was to announce the newest new thing, the coming revolution that would sweep everything else aside. And he had proven so influential that, by the time I came of age as a critic, a revolution in music was getting announced every few weeks. I couldn’t pick up a newspaper or magazine without reading about some futuristic, world-beating sound that had altered all the rules—and then a few weeks later it would be forgotten, replaced by something just as ephemeral. The whole thing was a joke to anyone who looked at it from the outside, but within the feverish world of music journalism, no one could figure out any better way to operate.

You should read the entire piece, which talks more about the idea of the Honest Broker. But I really like that framing and it's really what I try and do on a daily basis. Write pieces for the viewers, not to show off for other critics or please a specific publicist or network. And I try and approach this newsletter the same way. I'm not giving investment advice or writing things that I don't quite believe because it will convince people to subscribe. Not every journalist operates that way, but enough do that I decided the best way I can stand apart is just be what I realize now is an "honest broker."

THE REAL CULPRITS OF THE AT&T/WARNER MESS
I missed this late last week, but here is a really smart explanation of what has been going on at AT&T and how M&A bankers have often been driving the decision-making at the company:

The Wall Street banker view of the world also highlights the deal’s masterful financial engineering. Nowadays, AT&T’s world-beating debt is down to around $145 billion, from about $180 billion at the time that the TimeWarner deal closed in 2018; its credit rating remains a manageable BBB, according to S&P. This new deal is structured as a “Reverse Morris Trust,” which allows it to be tax-free to AT&T shareholders, despite the sale—a veritable fantasy for investment bankers, for whom matters of tax avoidance border on legit erotica. The Financial Times estimated the combined WarnerDiscovery could be worth around $150 billion, giving AT&T a stake in the company, which will be run by Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav, one of the smarter executives in the industry, worth $106 billion. So AT&T sheds the responsibility of running WarnerMedia, along with billions of debt, and retains the possibility of recouping its initial investment if Zaslav continues to work his magic. That’s the kind of deal Wall Street loves.

And there is the point that AT&T has managed to reward its executives richly for continuing to make bad decisions:

But if it doesn’t, and soon, shouldn’t Stephenson and Stankey regurgitate a portion of the hundreds of millions of dollars in collective compensation they took out of the company they have run so poorly? AT&T’s stock was trading around $35 a share on the announcement of the DirecTV acquisition. Seven or so years later, it’s around $27 a share, a decline of 16.4 percent, during a time period when the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased some 108 percent. It is a mystery how the board of directors at AT&T, which includes buyout mogul Glenn Hutchins and Samuel De Piazza Jr., the retired C.E.O. of PricewaterhouseCoopers, justifies paying these two men so much money for such mediocre financial performance. Shouldn’t there be some accountability for poor management decisions over a long period of time? (AT&T did not respond to a request for comment on the compensation paid to its two top executives.)

This all comes from a new newsletter by M&A lawyer William D. Cohan called "Dry Powder" and you can subscribe to it here.

ODDS AND SODS
* Netflix has signed a deal with Steven Spielberg that will apparently provide the streamer with multiple new films per year.

* HBO announced the premiere of the 6-episode documentary series 100-Foot Wave, which premieres July 18th. The series "captures the decade-long odyssey of surfing pioneer Garrett McNamara, who, after visiting Nazaré, Portugal in hopes of conquering a 100-foot wave, pushed the sport to ever-greater heights and alongside locals helped transform the small fishing village into the world’s preeminent big-wave surfing destination. "

* Fox is premiering a TMZ-produced special entitled TMZ Investigates: UFOs-The Pentagon Proof on Tuesday, June 29th.

* Cable operators Comcast and Charter Communications are partnering with Dish and Vizio in hopes of solving their addressable advertising problems.

* Nexstar Media's cable network NewsNation says it has hired Cherie Grzech, previously VP of Fox News, as VP of news, managing editor.

I'll be back with another one on Monday. If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.