Paramount is billing the states $1.88 billion for the crime of suing it

Paramount got sued for trying to buy Warner Bros., and its response, filed Monday in a real court by real lawyers who bill by the hour, is to demand that the dozen states suing it post a $1.88 billion bond to cover Paramount's own costs of being sued. You block my merger, you write me a check for one-point-eight-eight billion dollars, because starting September 30 I have to pay Warner shareholders an extra twenty-five cents a share every quarter, roughly six hundred and fifty million dollars a pop, for the sin of the deal sitting there not closing. Paramount's filing calls the number "a straightforward calculation." That's the phrase. A straightforward calculation of how much your government owes me for the inconvenience of being questioned.

David Ellison has also let it be known that if California's attorney general Rob Bonta won't sit down and negotiate, he starts moving the whole company out of California on October 1 — Texas, or Tennessee, or wherever the tax code loves him back. Bonta called it "another attempt to blackmail the state," which is a strong sentence to have said out loud about a guy whose dad owns Oracle. The two sides met Monday to talk settlement, and then Bonta went on CNBC and said Paramount wanted to talk about everything except the actual case. The trial's in March. Of 2027. And the unions can't even agree on which side to be on: the directors and the crews are begging Bonta to cut a deal, the writers are helping him march to trial. Nobody in this business likes anybody, and the show hasn't started.

Anyway. The actual television.

The Drops

Conan O'Brien Must Go, Season 3 (HBO Max)

Conan's back doing the only genuinely good idea of his post-couch life: fly to another country and personally ambush the people who listen to his podcast. Season three dropped Friday, four episodes this time instead of three, and he's off to India, the Netherlands, Morocco, and the Philippines to be a nuisance to fans who did nothing wrong except subscribe to Conan O'Brien Needs a Fan. It's the rare travel show where the host is actively trying to make the trip worse for the locals. Two Emmys, and it earns them. New one every Friday through September 11.

✅ WORTH IT

Mother Mary (HBO Max)

David Lowery — the guy who made a whole movie where Casey Affleck stands under a bedsheet — wrote and directed a film where Anne Hathaway is a globally famous pop star staging a comeback and Michaela Coel is the costume-designer best friend she wrecked on the way up. A24 put it in theaters, where it made three million dollars against a twenty-million-dollar budget, which in Hollywood accounting is filed under "a learning experience." Now it drifts onto HBO Max, where it'll do the thing these movies do: get found by four hundred thousand people who'll swear it was robbed. Reviews landed somewhere around "interesting." Hathaway's good. She's always good. The movie is the part that's up for debate.

🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

The Vampire Lestat: One Night Only LIVE (AMC+)

AMC filmed Sam Reid, in full vampire, fronting a live band at the Beacon Theatre and playing forty-five minutes of original songs written for a show about Anne Rice's brat prince, and now you can stream the whole thing. One of the songs is called, and I want to be clear I did not make this up, "All Fall Down." Twenty-nine hundred people bought tickets to watch a fictional vampire play a concert. That's not a knock. That's the most alive anyone connected to AMC has looked in years. Sunday.

✅ WORTH IT

Abbott Elementary (HBO Max)

Now streaming on HBO Max as well as Hulu, a co-exclusive deal, which means the best comedy on network television is sitting on two rival services at once because the licensing lawyers won a fight nobody else in America was having. It remains the funniest thing on broadcast by a distance. Start anywhere.

Pick of the Week

Conan O'Brien Must Go (HBO Max). In a week where the biggest entertainment story is a billion-dollar bond demand and a threat to flee to Texas, the most human thing on offer is a lanky redhead flying to Manila to bother a guy whose crime was liking his podcast. Start with the India episode. It's only four. You'll be done before Ellison finishes writing his invoice.

The Closer

Next Friday Netflix drops The Whisper Man, where a widowed crime writer's kid vanishes and he turns to his estranged father, a retired detective played by Robert De Niro, with Adam Scott and Michelle Monaghan filling out the rest. It's the sixth movie the Russo brothers' company has made for Netflix, so you already know it'll look like it cost a fortune and land like it cost nothing.

A hundred and ten billion dollars, two studios, a March 2027 trial date, and the actual output of the whole apparatus this week is a vampire concert, an A24 movie that already flopped once, and Conan being rude to strangers in four time zones. The machine is enormous and it is making almost nothing — and the one real thing it did make got built by a guy who quit the machine years ago and started a podcast. Draw your own conclusion. I'm going to go watch a fake vampire sing "All Fall Down" and reflect. See you next week.