Good morning,

It was another incredible week: Matt Belloni exposed the various scandals and bad blood swirling around the Golden Globes; Dylan Byers offered a clairvoyant reading of David Zaslav’s recent restructuring; Lauren Sherman detailed the cascading designer dominoes stemming from Matthieu Blazy’s move to Chanel; Eriq Gardner provided an update on a CNN legal headache; Rachel Strugatz checked in on Hailey Bieber’s growing beauty empire; Marion Maneker analyzed a Sotheby’s bloodletting; Bill Cohan presaged a BuzzFeed fire sale; and John Ourand evaluated ESPN’s new Belichick strategy. Meanwhile, John Heilemann sat down with Hakeem Jeffries, Tara Palmeri read the latest tea leaves on Hegseth’s confirmation chances; Abby Livingston surveyed Hill Democrats’ appointment strategy; and Peter Hamby chatted with Ro Khanna.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

FASHION:
Lauren Sherman measures the Blazy aftershocks and checks in on the future of some mall brands.
and…
Rachel Strugatz examines Hailey Bieber’s surprising Kardashian playbook.

ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker chronicles Sotheby’s Black Tuesday.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni investigates a multipronged, and potentially existential, Golden Globes scandal.
and…
Eriq Gardner weighs in on the TikTokalypse.
meanwhile…
Scott Mendelson laments a box office scheduling snafu.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan tabulates BuzzFeed’s “going concern” concern.

SILICON VALLEY:
Baratunde Thurston and Eriq Gardner discuss how A.I. is upending the entertainment industry, presented by Meta.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers dissects Zaz’s own SpinCo prelude and Politico’s mini-Maggie.
and…
John Ourand reveals how ESPN is preparing to go full-blown Coach Prime with Bill Belichick’s UNC team.

WASHINGTON:
Peter Hamby ponders the future of the Democratic Party with Rep. Ro Khanna, and John Heilemann rings up Hakeem Jeffries.
and…
Tara Palmeri delivers a Hegseth character study.
meanwhile…
Abby Livingston digests some fresh Hill kremlinology.

PODCASTS:
🎧 Dylan and Barry Diller talk SpinCo, Paramount, the Beast and more on The Grill Room.
and…
John Ourand and former CBS Sports president Sean McManus recount the NFL bid that revived the network on The Varsity.
and…
John Heilemann gets the readout on Trump 2.0 from Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 vet Pete Wehner on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and Lucas Shaw pick the streaming winners and losers of the year on The Town.
and…
Tara and Dylan decode Trump’s media games on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Lauren covers Kardashians and collabs with Skims C.E.O. Jens Grede on Fashion People.
and…
Peter and Eriq get into the Murdoch succession shocker on The Powers That Be.

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I’d come to town for a brief jaunt—first to celebrate my friends at Bully Pulpit International on their 15th anniversary, and then for an important breakfast meeting at one of those soulless downtown hotels, the type that host convention after convention, a real staple of the town. As I was processing the outputs of that morning meeting, and watching some texts arrive over the transom recounting moments from the previous night, I received the sort of email that I instantly knew was going to change the rest of my week. It turned out that David Zaslav, the C.E.O. of Warner Bros. Discovery and ubiquitous Puck Zelig of sorts, was reorganizing his company—in particular, Zaz was cleaving his profitable but declining cable networks from his studio and streaming business. It seemed, in many ways, like a simulacrum of Comcast C.E.O. Brian Roberts’ recent decision to spin off his own fading cable empire into a new company.

Zaz’s move was a total non-surprise surprise. Months earlier, he’d lost a bidding war for NBA rights, which seemed to diminish the long-term viability of the portfolio. Then he’d taken a $9 billion impairment charge on the cable networks. Now, he was repositioning them for a potential future as the core of a newco, catnip for the Ellisons after the Paramount deal closes, or perhaps an enticing idea for a private equity partner, or for Roberts’ SpinCo boss Mark Lazarus.

As I was taking this all in, contemplating the various possibilities, my partner Bill Cohan texted me that he was already on the case. Naturally, I’d been badgering Bill to take a little vacation at the end of the year, but the lure of this late-stage twist in the Zaz storyline was too enticing. Bill, after all, has been one of the great bards of the Zaz telenovela. And his own decades of experience as an M&A banker have informed his suspicions that the WBD journey is still a deal or two away from full realization. Indeed, it seems, Zaz may have just previewed that next stage in the form of this re-org. Zaz in Wonderland, Bill’s analysis of the restructuring and deal hypothesizing, drops tomorrow. Sign up here to make sure you don’t miss it.

Bill intimated a flavor of his thinking on The Grill Room, our partner Dylan Byers’ excellent new podcast. As he noted on the show, the entire cable industry continues to alight to a paradigm that TPG, the private equity behemoth with nearly $250 billion AUM, created via its investment in DirecTV—a new model for hyper-monetizing a legacy asset’s downslope. Dylan and I chatted more about it on a special Media Monday edition of The Powers That Be, which will be in your feed soon enough.

Whatever the outcome, the fate of Zaz’s cable nets will likely inform the strategy of his peers, all of whom are looking for novel ways to unwind their positions in the legacy TV business in a careful, cash flow–optimizing manner that draws investor attention toward the future prospects of their streaming businesses. After all, they don’t have any other choice. That’s the story of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read about, as ever, from Puck.

Have a great weekend,