Three years ago, Netflix turned a vanquished enemy into a forgettable TV series. Bluntly titled Blockbuster, the show follows the exploits of employees tasked with keeping the last iconic video rental store in business. In addition to being a waste of Randall Park’s considerable screen presence, it was a meta, self-indulgent stab at a cosmic irony; the streaming platform that had once offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50 million (or 10 late fees) was now streaming the video store’s existential funeral. Netflix began a similar subversion when it proposed a deal to buy Warner Bros. for $82.7 billion in December. While Paramount has stepped in with its own hostile counter-bid, Netflix's attempted power move is a signpost for a new era—a microcosm of a world in which Hollywood isn’t pretending to be creative, Netflix isn’t pretending it won’t swallow the world, and the government isn’t pretending to be ethical. For 2025, the Netflix-Warner deal was an accentuation point. For 2026, it’s a definition.
Before Netflix had not-so-hidden monopoly ambitions, it was an upstart mail-in video rental service that became a cure for expensive cable prices. But as it licensed more properties and grew more influence, it earned competitors like HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney+, which only made Netflix more expensive. And more powerful. With each brand trying to keep more of their own Stranger Thingses and Squid Gameses, and as ESPN became Disney, and Disney became Hulu, copping multiple streaming services became the norm. People wanted to cut cable cords, but wound up with an entangled group of them. But that doesn’t mean things haven’t been getting severed. Specifically, dissenting ideas.
As networks have done the fusion dance, conflicting interests have compounded, and the Bad Guys™ have stopped pretending they’re anything but. Last July, Stephen Colbert quipped that Trump’s $16 million settlement with Paramount, one rooted in a 60 Minutes Kamala Harris interview Trump said was misleadingly edited, was a “big fat bribe.” Three days later, CBS announced that Colbert’s The Late Show would be coming to an end. It could have been a coincidence; Paramount cited high production costs and low viewership as reasons the show was ending. But then there’s not-even-so-figurative elephant in the room: As part of the 2025 Skydance and Paramount merger—one that hinged on approval from the FCC (and, by proxy, Trump himself)—Paramount had to agree to commit to “fact-based reporting, unbiased journalism.” In the Trump administration, that’s usually meant systemic capitulation. And when Paramount made Free Press founder Bari Weiss the editor-in-chief of CBS News, it looked like it capitulated.
