Hello and welcome back to What I’m Hearing. My inbox is still buzzing about last week’s executive shakeup at Disney, ahead of the board of directors meeting later this month. So today we’re taking a look at the company’s new TV boss, Dana Walden.

But first…

• DOJ-Day is coming for CAA-ICM: It had to be a bummer for ICM Partners agents to watch as rival UTA gobbled up the U.K.’s well-respected Curtis Brown Group this week. ICM had long coveted that agency and its literary business. But ICM is still in limbo nine months after CAA agreed to buy the agency. What’s going on there? I’m told the Department of Justice has informed both sides it will determine before the end of this month whether it will sue to block the combination of the two “Big 4” agencies. In the run-up, CAA has begun informing ICM staff who will be welcomed and who won’t, and even telegraphing what deals with specific agents might look like. Surprise: Many ICM people aren’t thrilled with the salary offers (stock and non-guaranteed bonuses may make up some of that ground), and the target of their anger is Chris Silbermann, the ICM leader who orchestrated the sale and is set to join CAA’s management team. Meanwhile, ICM continues to hemorrhage people, though CAA isn’t necessarily bummed about most of them.

• More agencies in play?: The Curtis Brown sale likely increases the chances that the other two big U.K. agencies—Independent Talent Group and United Agents—might be in play. Investor and dealmaker Ron Burkle has a key stake in Independent, but given the market chaos these days, I wonder what a valuation would look like.

• Box office over-under: The tracking for Pixar’s Lightyear is about $75 million domestic (Disney is lowballing at $70 million), so I’m gonna take the over. It won’t get anywhere near the $120 million debut for Toy Story 4 in 2019, of course, but a spinoff of Pixar’s biggest franchise has got to play broader than one of its originals, right?

That’s not Walden’s fault, of course. There’s the usual sexism at play here. But she can mostly thank her new boss, Bob Chapek, for abruptly firing Rice nine months after renewing his $20 million-a-year contract, then allowing the news to leak before a Disney press release could spin the move. So instead of a fantastic creative executive scoring a job that she’s clearly qualified to occupy, the story was Chapek sacking a potential rival without notice, likely forcing Disney to cough up about $50 million in severance when the same decision last summer would have cost nothing, and botching the kind of executive transition that his predecessor, Bob Iger, had handled relatively smoothly, with everyone from Rich Ross to Anne Sweeney to Tom Staggs. The situation left Walden—one of the smartest and toughest executives in TV, as well as one of the most diligent curators of her own image—to watch as a bystander at her own party while the story spun out of Disney’s control. It had to drive her nuts.

Who knows for sure (she declined to speak for this column, as did Disney), but I doubt Walden would undermine Rice like that—or at least not in an overt, him-or-me way. They’re actual friends (cue the cynical narrator: “Nobody in Hollywood is actually friends”), she knows his stellar reputation, and, more tangibly, she proved her loyalty to Newman at Fox, serving as a co-leader long after it would have been appropriate to ask for only one key to that kingdom. And if she did grease the transition? Would we all be talking about it if Rice and Walden were both men?

Walden is politically savvy enough to read the room, recognize that Chapek and his mini-me, Kareem Daniel, would eventually not vibe with Rice—especially after Rice’s role was diminished in favor of Daniel’s group—and just let it play out. This may not seem like a compliment, but I mean it as one: Walden was basically genetically engineered to be a modern TV executive. She’s smart, buttoned-up, a little icy, a stickler for rules in a business where people are easily schmoozed, cordial and chatty at a lunch, but not too chatty. (The old pitch to creators used to be that if you want hugs, you sign with Peter Roth at Warner Bros. Television, but if you want a killer who will fight for your show, you go to Walden at 20th.)

Walden was also raised in L.A.’s Westside shark tank and programmed with all the relevant experience: Creative taste, marketing and promotion instincts (she started as a publicist), friendships with the right people, no enemies who matter, an inability to hear “no” when she wants a “yes,” and, perhaps most important, an effective manager of her own bosses. I ribbed her a little last week about her penchant for ostentatious personal press, but since she arrived at Disney in 2019, she’s actually kept the spotlight mostly off herself, undoubtedly knowing that Disney frowns on that stuff in a way that Fox didn’t. (Though Walden is still one of only a handful of Hollywood executives who employs her own personal publicist, despite the existence of a very competent Disney communications executive whose job is to manage her press.) Whatever Walden does, it works, and it’s easy to see why the talent and the top agents generally like working with her.

But “friendliness” can often go beyond money. For instance, there’s the story of what happened, in 2017, when NBC announced at its upfront that the breakout hit This Is Us, a 20th TV production, would shift nights from Tuesdays to Thursdays, opposite the N.F.L. Fogelman freaked, so 10 days later, Walden got in her car and drove to NBC—keep in mind, she was the president of the Fox network at the time—and personally lobbied Bob Greenblatt and his team to reverse the move, which happened. There’s also the fact that while the Warner Bros. and CBS executives were making billions on mostly lowest-common-denominator sitcoms, teen dramas and procedurals, Walden was trying to do the same with a more elevated product. That’s ultimately what makes you talent friendly.

In conversations this week, several insiders mentioned to me that Walden is both loved “and feared.” That means if you have an overall deal with her, and she wants you to do something, you should probably do it—and her way. If not, she’s got a long memory, and your deal will be up soon. To me, that’s not unreasonable; that’s just smart business, especially these days, lest you end up in a J.J. Abrams situation at Warner Bros., where a $250 million deal and slow output can make you a potential victim of a newly cost-conscious regime.

There’s been some anxiety at Searchlight, which was Rice’s pet because he ran it for many years, but the Searchlight TV division seems safe for now. And ABC News, which is outside Walden’s wheelhouse and endures some media scandal every few months, has a new-ish chief in Kim Godwin, and is No. 1 in mornings (Good Morning America) and evenings (World News Tonight). So Walden’s biggest challenge there might just be helping Godwin chart a long term course for GMA if ever Robin Roberts and George Stephanopoulos decide to step down—and managing David Muir’s ego, of course.

So while we can quibble about whether various shows are hits or misses, the mandate of increased production and differentiating content for Disney+, Hulu, ABC and the other platforms will play out as planned. Walden needs more Disney-branded hits for Disney+, and fewer debacles like the scrapped Beauty and the Beast series. She has to figure out whether any scripted dramas can work on broadcast anymore. But from my eyes, the content on Disney platforms is getting better. And if The Dropout, Only Murders in the Building, and Dopesick perform as expected, Hulu will have three major Emmys contenders next month that are all owned by a Disney studio. And Only Murders, from Fogelman and showrunner John Hoffman, could run for several seasons. (Interestingly, that show is not on an S.B.E. formula, because Fogelman’s deal predates it.)

These people all thrive on being part of the insular TV community; they speak one language; they protect each other’s jobs and stature; and they come to each other’s defenses when challenged. Walden, who has still been in contact with Rice since his firing, is the consummate insider, for better and worse; that’s what Chapek, a Hollywood outsider, got when he promoted her, however much he is losing in Rice. Now Walden must tread carefully around her new boss. He’s gonna hate the inevitable stories that pop up suggesting she might become Disney’s first female C.E.O. And if Walden isn’t careful, she’ll be tossed just like Rice was, insider or not. But something tells me she’ll read the room well.

See you Sunday,
Matt

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a nice summer punch recipe? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.