Good morning,

Thanks for reading The Backstory, our weekly guide to the best new work from Puck.

It was another great week here at Puck, as usual: Lauren Sherman contemplated Jeff Bezos’s luxury ambitions; Julia Ioffe got the White House readout on a Biden-Putin hostage chess match; Dylan Byers interrogated the new era at The Washington Post; Bill Cohan articulated the private equity play for the Redstone kingdom; Matt Belloni examined the body slams inside Netflix; and Teddy Schleifer scooped the lingering deadline for Republican billionaires looking for an anti-Trump option.

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

P.S.: Before we dig in, a quick programming note: Puck and Netflix are hosting a special Valentine’s Day event in New York. Starting at 8 p.m. on February 14, The New York Philharmonic will play select songs from Bradley Cooper’s Maestro at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. The event is free for Puck subscribers, but tickets are almost gone—you can click here to grab the few remaining, or to secure a spot on the waitlist.

WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan sees how Apollo could land Paramount.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers has the readout from the Washington Post panic room.
and…
Eriq Gardner explicates a Times leaker legal saga.

HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni offers a talmudic reading of the latest Netflix shakeup.

SILICON VALLEY:
Julia Alexander analyzes Apple’s newest platform play.

WASHINGTON:
Teddy Schleifer reports on the G.O.P. megadonor crisis du jour, as Tara Palmeri scoops the Trump effort to place a campaign lackey atop the R.N.C.
and…
Peter Hamby combs the crosstabs on Biden’s prospects with exclusive data from Echelon Insights.
and…
Julia Ioffe investigates a White House prisoner dilemma while Tina Nguyen gets the dish on the G.O.P.’s Mike Johnson compromise.

PODCASTS:
Matt chats with Sundance C.E.O. Joana Vicente about the future of the indie market on The Town.
and…
Tara and Teddy share New Hampshire war stories on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Peter and Baratunde Thurston weigh in on Wall Street’s D.E.I. boomerang on The Powers That Be.

Meanwhile, I also encourage you to take advantage of our article gifting feature. You can share our work with your colleagues, friends, and family. Subscribers are entitled to 5 article gifts per month.

When I started my career as an intern at Vanity Fair, more than 20 years ago, I cut my teeth compiling research dossiers for the magazine’s top writers. The other interns—many of whom were the children of movie stars, world famous rockers, or descendant of the archduke of mitteleuropean potentates—were given fake projects to research, and left to their devices so that they didn’t distract anyone or screw the pooch, but could still tell their friends that they had a cool job over dinner at Da Silvano or Pastis.

On some level, that correlates to the Nikki Haley campaign—a quixotic political affair and consultant class make-work project that is living on borrowed time. In The Trump Donors Come in From the Cold, my partner Teddy Schleifer reported on the confounding challenge facing top Republican donors who know better than to throw good money after bad to support Haley. In Hit and Ronna, the fearless Tara Palmeri previews the first victim of the Trump ascent.

Similarly, loyal Puck readers know that Bill Cohan has been the culture’s chief chronicler of the long and slow descent of the Redstone empire, which is currently in the throes of due diligence with David Ellison’s bankers and lawyers. But Bill sees another looming opportunity over the horizon, in case there is a slip between cup and lip, as he often notes. In The Apollo Vultures Are Circling Shari, the former M&A banker lays out the strategic case for how Leon Black’s old firm might get its mitts on this media heirloom if Ellison can’t close. “It’s the beginning of the end, not the end of the beginning,” as one very senior banker told him, confirming the aforementioned leitmotif.

Obviously, the changes appear most acute in media, our own industry. If you only have time to read one piece this weekend, I’d urge you to curl up with Dylan Byers’ excellent A Tale of Two City Papers, which details the descent of the L.A. Times. It’s a powerful reminder that even the most powerful, trusted brands can’t count on a future just because they have a storied past. It’s a sad story, to be sure, but also instructive regarding the blinding power of nostalgia in an industry deeply in need of reinvention. Perhaps 2024 will be the year this industry finally figures it out. Indeed, that’s the story of our time, and exactly what you should expect from Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon