Unraveled

Around the middle of last month, my laptop computer gave up the ghost. That sent the writer-slash-programmer me scrambling to find a replacement, which I did, and its new desktop replacement is sitting within arm's reach as I write this. It is the most powerful computer I have ever owned, bar none. And it is the size of a fast-food cheeseburger. The whole of it is smaller than the box the attached mouse came from; next to its full-sized keyboard, it spans from about Q to Y.

So technology continues to advance, at least we know that much. And at the same time it sits stagnant in strange and conspiratorial ways: For as long as I live, it seems one of the first steps of any new programming project will be stitching the languages in which lowercase letters exist to the languages that are still not, here in the far-future year of twenty twenty damn five, entirely convinced of it.

Touché, progress.

But that is neither here nor there. The more relevant part of the story is that my new cheeseburger-sized computer came with a three month free trial of Apple TV+, the entertainment network attached to the technology conglomerate, because that is how things work and because everyone from the geeks behind database design to presidential failsons are all convinced, at some point, that their real forte is in television. So we gave that a try, and watched one of their series from beginning to end since it'd been recommended to us by friends, and it was ... fine, I guess?

Yeah. It was fine. It was nothing special, in other words. I had long been under the impression, all of it brand-inflicted, that since Apple was a premium-experience-focused artisan group making phones smaller than wallets and computers the size of cheeseburgers, everything designed within an inch of some poor sleepless bastard's Cupertino-homed life, that the network would also be a hoity-toity premium experience meant for viewers who wanted a little plus with their TV.

So we watched a sci-fi show based on a series of subversive and catty little books, and it was fine. It was "I am glad we watched this" fine, but maybe not "I would pay to see more of this" fine, and it borrowed heavily from modern filmmaking trends in which everything is green-screened to hell and back, and it shared the usual not-premium, half-century old budget tricks of having only a handful of real sets, a few location shots shot so tightly that you can practically hear the grinding sounds as the camera frame hits and snags perilously close to showing the Starbucks just to the left of the scene and the city bus stop a few feet to the right, and the same three trees showing up, like stoic woody stunt doubles, here and there across an entire imagined planet.

Also in the usual fashion, it was not too hung up on following the source material that invented a world worth exploring on television. At multiple points my wife grumbled "that part isn't in the book," and after the third time there seemed to be a theme to the changes; they seemed mostly a way to wedge in extra penis references and other halfhearted titillations, which itself is the too-obvious cliche of a television heritage that has long presumed blood-spattering violence to be plausible network fare, but considered the word penis to be something you had to pay a monthly fee for. You'd know you were watching HBO, back when HBO ruled the cableways, because on HBO they'd say penis, even as everyone on the antenna-broadcast network shows made damn sure they didn't.

So there was a very odd cadence to those scenes, as if the screenwriters fought on it and concluded that nobody's going to believe this is a premium-tier show unless somebody says penis, and if that isn't the truth of how that all went down I can't imagine the real version being all too different.

It was fine, mind you. It was entertaining enough, probably enough to watch ads in exchange but not quite enough to be worth yet another subscription to yet another megacorporation's scheme to starve out all the other megacorporations in the ever-more-pitched battle to own and operate all of our eyeballs. It was a bit disappointing at the same time, though. Fresh off the amazement of a new professional-caliber computer the size of a decent cheeseburger, I had been expecting something equally flashy and premium—but, as it turns out, today's premium isn't noticeably different from what the BBC was churning out in lower-budget versions a quarter century ago. Green screens, and kitbashed props, and a lonely, lonely, lonely world in which no humans exist unless the plot needs them to, and even then they are rushed offscreen again like somebody's worried the checks will bounce.

And, to be honest, I am beginning to seriously wonder if there is something wrong with me. I know a great many people who have a great many things to say about shows like Severance and Andor and Game of Thrones and The Sopranos before that, people who can tell me all the ways in which they are wicked and subversive and more clever than you can catch on first watch, and I used to be like that too. Gladly so, in fact.

And then something happened and I wasn't. I couldn't watch anything new without wondering about all the out-of-frame parts that are so carefully edited out.

Ah, this part. It's clearly a botanical garden of some sort. I wonder where.

Ah, a brutalist concrete edifice, close-shot so that the curb cuts don't show. You could probably pin down the exact building just from the position of that one ramp. I'm guessing at least this part was shot in Vancouver.

To repeat: I didn't think like that, twenty years ago. Or forty. Back during the heyday of cheap, one-set sitcoms neither I nor anyone else thought much about the horrible irreality of it all. The visual language was borrowed from stage plays; it seemed to make enough sense that every room was wide and tall-ceilinged and had between two to three walls but never all four. The stage whispers, the roomful of people deep in conversation with each other but none of them with their backs to us, the interlopers. It was the language of the art. It was fine. From the time a particular Star Trek came on the scene to the time it came back off, I couldn't get enough of it, even though the whole damn show consisted of nothing but matte paintings, indoor sets, and the galaxy's most well-traveled botanical garden. When a certain Joss Whedon show was on, it was must-see television every week.

And then, at some point turn-of-the-century-ish or so, people began to wonder where all the famous young actresses the 80's and 90's had gone off to—and it turned out that almost to a person, all of those people gave up because what we thought was fame had been predicated, the whole time, on enduring never-ending abuse by industry predators who thought, not without reason, that they were invincible.

And, at some point, the twentieth or so midrank star was exposed to be an absolutely gawdawful human being, someone whose public persona had been glued on for the explicit purpose of tricking us all into admiring them rather than jailing them. And then another. And then more.

And, at some point, the third reboot or fifth sequel to a franchise that was not allowed to die became a clockwork affair, not so much a celebration of artistic vision as a visible, miserable chore for all involved. And it became the future, the promised one where you could watch anything you wanted, anytime you wanted, except for not that one because that one is on a plus service, not that plus service, the other one, no the other other one, because a century of America's social fabric is now only content and because every executive wants to be declared god-emperor of their own little content conclave while producing as little as possible of it themselves.

There were a lot of things I could believe back then that now all fall far too squarely in the uncanny valley.

This is what I'm talking about, then. When I say I can't watch these damn things anymore because I'm too preoccupied with the blocking, and with green screens screening to hell and back, and with the very corners of the frames, wondering what is hiding just a foot to the right or left, this is what I mean. I could believe in matte paintings, even knowing they were matte paintings. But that was many years ago, and there were a lot of things I could believe back then that now all fall far too squarely in the uncanny valley.

There is too great a disparity, now, in the stuff that's happening off the screen and the stuff that's happening on it. What was once suspension of disbelief now seems quantum-linked with plausible deniability, now that we know too well how our indulgence in one was weaponized, decade after decade, to grant the other.

So there may be something wrong with me. Or it may be a contagion; the core of it may be that nearly all of us at this point have lived long enough to see our own childhood exposed as a lie. No matter what you believed about America back then, whenever back then happens to be, it is the memories of a matte painting, something hand-drawn to make you believe in things that the painters themselves never did. You cannot claim, in 2025, to believe in half of it, because none of the people with the guns ever believed any of it, and it turns out that few of the people with the lenses, or the microphones, or the pens did either.

America itself now lives in an uncanny valley of its own creation, shadowed in the fog of its own failures, and there must be something wrong with me, I can only think, because I look at the green-screened chaos in each new superhero film and the green-screened stars and stripes on the CNN sets and they both look the same, to me. It is all artifice, meant to cover up the now with the what-if, and you cannot watch too much of the first without beginning to see the same tricks deployed in the second.

Perhaps ... I wonder. Perhaps I came down with something, and never got better.

But all of that is also neither here nor there, because what I really wanted to note, at least almost, was this.

This time next year, the corporate entity known as Warner Bros. Discovery will be no more, and the two companies it’s splitting into have some very inspired names.

Today, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that “Warner Bros.” and “Discovery Global” are the names of the two new businesses that will exist after it completes its restructuring plan sometime in mid-2026. Warner Bros. will oversee Warner Bros. Television, Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, DC Studios, HBO, HBO Max, and Warner Bros. Gaming Studios. And Discovery Global will be responsible for CNN, TNT’s sports offerings in the US, Discovery, Discovery Plus, and Bleacher Report.

WBD president and CEO David Zaslav will continue to lead the executive team at Warner Bros., while WBD’s current chief financial officer, Gunnar Wiedenfels, will act as president and CEO for Discovery Global.

The short version of the move is that it undoes, in quite humiliating fashion, the catastrophic merger of Warner and Discovery just three years back. Zazlav spent nearly all of the time from then until now smashing things in oft-incoherent fashion. It was this corporate management that decided that one of the most recognizable brands in the world, HBO, would be renamed "Max" in an apparent attempt to confuse everyone getting billed for it. This was akin to seizing control of Target and renaming every store "Steve," and the same captains of industry that heralded the move would two later announce that they were tacking the HBO part back on; presumably every executive involved got a fat bonus for championing both moves. Zazlav is also the media genius that pressured CNN into becoming even more a vehicle of hollow toadying-to-power than it had managed beforehand—a true feat, if not a praiseworthy one.

Mostly, though, the Warner-Discovery merger was a debt-crushed shitshow from the moment it was inked, and lest you think anyone involved learned any lessons here you will be pleased to know that a great number of industry-watchers believe the split to be based not on industry trends or streamlined synergies or any of that nonsense, but is a division between the parts of the companies David Zazlav gives a vague damn about and the "linear" television bits that will get most of the failed current company's debts tied to their necks before being pushed into the Atlantic Ocean as sacrifice.

Leadership, baby. This is why the people in charge of our green-screened lives have three homes each, and you probably have less than one.

What does this really mean for Discovery and its increasingly odd menu of pseudo-reality shows? What does it mean for CNN, the once-giant force of news remodeled as retirement home for the most prolific liars of politics? Who knows. In that long list of company names to be divvied, there is not one that America would still feign heartbreak over losing. There is not one that seems like it could watch your pets or babysit your kids without stealing pills from the bathroom cabinet, either.

It's hard to get worked up over whether the entity sometimes known as "HBO," or "Max," or "HBO Max" lives or dies once you've begun to suspect that the people actually running the thing care less than you do. It's hard to say "Oh no, this massive debt burden is sure to kill the struggling CNN, thus depriving income and publicity for an ending, churning list of gleefully dishonest hacks and war crime apologists," because everybody knows that the hacks will land in front of other green screens before security has finished escorting ex-CNN staffers out of their offices.

It is very hard to give a shit, because the rich-as-sin people at the top were known from the first chapter to be careless people who smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and their carelessness. We knew, from the first chapter, how the story would go; it is how every modern American story goes. There is only the one. In all of America, there is only one story ever told in earnest, and it is that one.

And that is not quite here nor there, but it is close to it. Because there is also this.

In the first half of July, media giant Paramount announced that it had settled with adjudicated rapist and multifelon Donald Trump over a very, very stupid lawsuit by the seditionist hebephile claiming the CBS production 60 Minutes wronged him by editing an interview with 2024 election opponent Kamala Harris to make her look better. It cannot be enough emphasized that even the complaint itself is demonstrative of a special, nearly historical level of preening stupidity, but for Donald Trump, the human who has gained more benefit from flattering news edits than any other American in history, the extra stupidity of pretending it to be a legal battle is, in any reasonable nation, the sort of thing you ought to be laughed out of public life for. It is masterfully stupid, a special kind of colon-licking arrogance that only the human personification of narcissism could think of or pull off, and because we live in times only slightly stupider than the man himself Paramount bent the knee and actually paid the barely-lucid con artist a whopping $16 million in an effort to placate him.

The reason the babyman needed placating is simple: corruption. Teapot Dome levels of corruption piled up three or four times over itself, that special blazing kind of corruption that the Republican Party now bathes itself in at every moment rather than daring to piss off his royal goofiness.

Paramount is seeking a merger with Skydance Media, the same sort of merger that will no doubt wreck most of what Paramount know owns because that is how mergers work these days, and the Trump administration was the final arbiter of whether the deal would live or would die. So the mergees forked over $16 million in bribe money, one of CBS's top stars called it a bribe in front of a live studio audience and broadcast to the nation, and within 72 hours Late Show host Stephen Colbert learned his show was going to be cancelled in what Paramount/CBS insists is just one of uncountably many coincidences that keep popping up among the many companies competing to earn the stupid manchild's crooked favor, but which nearly everyone else believes to be a clear-cut case of executive pissiness syndrome.

And then, to nobody's surprise, the Trump administration announced that the merger could go forward, because nobody's even trying to pretend all of this isn't crooked and Trump FCC chairman Brendon Carr has quickly made a name for himself as the most openly crooked stooge of them all.

The mergee, Paramount, is out $16 million and would have instantly made a new name for itself as the most toadying supporter of new fascism in corporatedom, if seemingly half of America's corporate giants and hallowed universities were not locked in pitched battle to claim that title for themselves. The suitor, the Ellison family-backed Skydance, made it look not so much like a bribe as just the first party favor handed out in a much larger bid to become the crook-in-chief's most valuable media partner and foot-licker.

On the July 14 episode of his late-night talk show, Stephen Colbert condemned Paramount for settling what First Amendment advocates have called a “frivolous” lawsuit from Donald Trump—while the Federal Communications Commission just happened to be deliberating Paramount’s upcoming merger with Skydance. Specifically, Colbert called the move a “big, fat bribe.”

A day later, Skydance CEO David Ellison met with FCC leaders as the company’s proposed merger with Paramount hung in the balance. Two days after that, Paramount announced that Colbert’s Late Show would end next May, at the close of the broadcast season. On Thursday, the FCC approved the merger.

Wow. Go figure, and so forth.

A special word here must be said about the blurring lines of off-screen and on-screen villainy, but only because it seems, on the part of the otherwise unseeing and uncaring universe, to be an intentional bit. Skydance CEO David Ellison is—and you will find this story uncannily familiar, when it comes to the careless people that smash the things you care about before retreating back into their money—the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, co-founder of tech giant Oracle. He was born a cherubic blob of money, blobbed his way through his early life on a bouncing ball of the same, dropped out of film school but nonetheless became a Hollywood film-remora attached to a bunch of projects you have likely heard of because having a rich dad will always be the ultimate and most-respected artistic talent.

If we are to be honest, the man even looks like a bee-stung Biff Tannen, and even more uncannily like the rich Aspen son who challenges you to a ski race that will decide whether his dad gets to raze the local community center. And there is reason for the comparison, because pa Ellison has been part of the hardline pro-Trump right that looked to overturn Trump's 2020 election loss and otherwise an instrument of creepy billionaire evil.

If there was a particular family that you could count on to convince top media conspirator Brandon Carr that the meddling CBS would be reined in good and hard on the family watch—which appears to be the message Carr, never shy about his corruption, came away with—and if you couldn't find a spare Murdoch to handle the job, you wouldn't go wrong handing it to the Ellisons.

Not Elon Musk, mind you, but the Ellisons. I say that because while Musk has enough money to ruin anything and the talent to ruin it ten times faster than anyone else, you will note I said family. Musk does not have a family; he is self-contained. He breeds like a drug-fueled rabbit, to be sure, but that does not automatically gain you a family. And besides, he does not seem the sort of father to gift his son a media company for funsies; he seems more the kind of father who would hold that son up as his personal meat shield during public appearances, just as an extra lump of insurance in case the worst might happen.

In any event, our newest media merger will put CBS and Paramount as the abusable children of the Ellison family, and it seems unlikely that Money Jr. will never need to dirty his hands dealing with the network's most popular moral voice because the suits already in the building seem to want to prove their tongue-to-foot bonafides considerably sooner than that.

“He's daring us to fire him. And honestly? We’re close to doing it. He’s been warned. What he said was unacceptable. There are real consequences this time.”

Colbert, if you can believe the gossip rags, is now on even thinner ice than before.

On his first show after the cancellation of The Late Show was announced, Colbert labeled himself “a martyr” when slamming Trump’s social media posts celebrating the cancellation and warning other “untalented” talk show hosts that they could be next. During the same show, Colbert told Trump to “Go f-ck yourself.”

While the studio audience – and many viewers - clearly agreed with the eloquent sentiment, the show’s bosses did not. Now it looks like Colbert may not even make it to the end of the series next year, as, according to journalist Rob Shuter, there have been words had with Colbert, and they have come “very close” to pulling him off-air. After reportedly calling a emergency meeting the morning after Colbert’s show aired, two senior executives reportedly said:“He's daring us to fire him. And honestly? We’re close to doing it. He’s been warned. What he said was unacceptable. There are real consequences this time.”

An emergency meeting, you say. Unacceptable, you say. Consequences, you say.

And here, finally, is where I get to the point.

There is something in here that all of the Paramounts and Discoveries need to keep in mind. All of the CBS mid-tier suck-ups, and the HBOs, and the HBO Maxes, and the superhero-of-the-month studios, and the CNNs, and all of the companies with long enough histories to count themselves more a part of the American fabric than the likes of you or I will ever be. There is a lesson that the American public has fairly been drilling into major media heads, one railroad spike after another, as ratings collapse and markets fragment and trade papers fret and the public turns from the ambitious premium incest of Game of Thrones to the one-camera no-script zero-fucks of YouTubers daring each other to do their worst with the culinary neutron bombs of the hot sauce world.

The lesson to all of those companies is this: America doesn't need you. Not really. Not as much as the smash-and-grabbers like to tell themselves, as they reinvent new ways to break things once thought unbreakable.

America does not need Paramount or CBS. It does not need HBO, or Warner Bros. Losing the giants of past eras and childhoods might seem a heavy blow, but it is the sort of emotional jangle that hits hard for a moment, then is all but forgotten a few weeks on.

O captains of the screens, o deciders of culture who are eternally swimming in culture's wake even as they pretend to steer the ships: America doesn't need you. We will, in the end, move on. We will look at different screens, and listen to different voices—or the same voices, speaking into different microphones—and it will not be the imposition in our lives you imagine it will be.

Because, at some point, the stuff behind the screen bleeds into the stuff on the screen so thickly that the colors begin to change. It is like an old television tuned to one channel so long that the logos and other detritus burn themselves into the screen. A few decades on, you no longer see as much of the show Joss Whedon sent out into the world and that you were once riveted by because now it has the outline of Joss Whedon's head burned into every scene and it makes it all sit wrong. Paramount may have been the stuff of my childhood, but it will not be the stuff of my old age—not if the old scenes of Dr. Jones punching Nazis get knotted up with new scenes of billionaire heirs glad-handing the villains and doling out retribution to those that object.

It doesn't sit, which turns out to be important because there's not a brand in the world that can't be killed outright by one laboriously pompous goon. Time and time again that's been proven, and I have to imagine most of the raw malevolence that steams from top media offices is because the people in the biggest chairs know it too damn well, deep down, and it chews their innards every time another hundred million dollars vanishes despite their prior loud insistence that they have really got the hang of things this time around.

Politics and entertainment are the same in that respect: the absolute insistence, by those who have stuffed themselves into the top ranks, that America needs them, America cannot do without them, America would be a more desolate place without them, and it is not true. It is never true. America does not need a CBS, not if the C stands for Cowards, and it does not need a Warner Bros. if the new agenda of Warner Bros. is to produce art and then burn it for the tax write-off.

There are limits to these things, by God. There is a limit to how much stink our slovenly billionaires can let loose with before it fogs up camera lenses too much for even the most loyal fanboys to stomach. There is a limit to carelessness, and there is a limit to what can be smashed before a full retreat becomes impossible; the disintegrating Musk is evidence enough of that, and it is a useful example precisely because it does not come from a time when Americans pretended to have morals and values but from 2025, at least two decades after the nation gave up the pretense.

That is not to say that the art forms will vanish. Music, after all, has not vanished even after American predators stripped it down to the floorboards.

But in a world where every new film and effect can be reproduced well enough on a computer the size of a cheeseburger, there will never truly be a need for a David Zaslav. That is the part that can be done without, and the more the Zaslavs and Ellisons become the uncanny metallic taste that sticks on your tongue after anything you watch, the sooner the illusion of indispensability is cracked.

I have no true wisdom to share here. As I said, there is more than a passing chance that there is something wrong with me, and that the suspension of disbelief that came so easily to me when I was younger has now turned uncanny and suspicious only because I was bitten by some eight-legged something I shouldn't have been bitten by. I do not know how many other people watch the latest green-screened spectacle only to be ejected out of the story by the flatness of it all, or how many people watch the green-screened animated flags rippling behind the amoral government tragedy of the day and see the same insipid flatness in their sneer and in their eyes.

But whether I was bitten or wasn't, the feeling still persists. And the feeling is that America has come undone, every old slogan a lie and every statesman a Buckleyesque fraud and every company out to ream their own customers good and hard and with a new subscription fee attached to it, and I do not know how many Americans are fine with the fraud and how many are not. It seems like more than a few would already prefer to push the hucksters all down a steep hillside—if only for the giggles of filming it and uploading it to the billionaire's own kept sites.

The minor outrage of the day, as I write this, is that the sitting president, a felon, seditionist, rapist, and crook of the lowest and pettiest caliber, continues to defend himself from multiple accusations of past sex trafficking by hamhandedly admitting his complicity, and it seems that none of it will matter because everything you were ever told about America was, when push comes to shove, a flat lie. It was all children's story written to make us stupid and compliant, something to give us good dreams and not ask mommy and daddy questions they'd rather us not ask.

We know it was a lie—because everyone in charge of us now gleefully admits it. As far as they are concerned the game is over, they got what they needed to get and now it is time to smash things and boast of it.

And the Supreme Court gloats as it announces that all the old laws were lies, chiding us openly for thinking any different, and Congress chuckles as it does its damnedest to pretend that it doesn't matter whether the new god-emperor is a skeevy crooked child predator so long as he keeps breaking the laws and trust they want him to break, and the favor-seeking toe-suckers of this company and that one fork over millions and promise to rein in their news divisions and opinion-havers, rein them in good and hard and without mercy if that is what the man with the wettest toes in the kingdom wants to see happen.

For my part, I cannot watch television anymore because mine is broken, either broken or haunted, and it keeps showing me all the stuff that happens just outside the frame, just to the left and right and the up and down, and I am not going to pay an extra monthly fee to see all the things that once gave me a bit of solace all set on fire, one by one by one, by the same preening thugs who tore down the community center and laughed while they did it. Maybe I am broken, or maybe everything, everywhere all broke first.