Paramount wants the people suing it to post two billion dollars

Paramount Skydance spent the better part of a year and something like a hundred billion dollars getting its Warner Bros. Discovery merger blessed by regulators in nearly seventy countries, the DOJ included. And the whole thing is now frozen in place, because twelve state attorneys general and the Writers Guild filed an antitrust suit and a judge said sure, we'll sort this out at trial, in March, of 2027. The part I keep rereading: because the deal missed its closing date, Paramount now owes what the lawyers call a "ticking fee" of roughly seven million dollars a day for every day past September 30th the thing stays open, which per Variety adds up to something like $1.7 billion by next summer. David Ellison bought a company he isn't allowed to take possession of and started a meter that runs the cost of a suburban house every morning he wakes up.

So what did Paramount's lawyers do about it. They went into court and asked the judge to force the people suing them — the twelve states, the writers — to post a bond. For $1,884,726,092.73. They want the plaintiffs in an antitrust case to personally put up almost two billion dollars to cover Paramount's losses from a delay Paramount's own merger created. Sue us over the monopoly and we'll invoice you for the inconvenience. Rob Bonta, the California AG running this thing, presumably printed that number out and taped it above his desk.

Anyway. The shows.

Dark Matter, Season 2 (Apple TV+)

Joel Edgerton is still lost in the multiverse and Apple is still the only streamer making sci-fi that assumes you have a brain. Season two dropped Thursday, and here's the good kind of trouble: the writers have officially run out of Blake Crouch novel to adapt, so everything from here is them out on the wire with no book to catch them. Jennifer Connelly and Alice Braga are back, Jimmi Simpson's back, and it's one episode a week straight through Halloween — Apple politely informing you the subscription's staying whether the plot earns October or not. The first season was the tightest thriller on the service. Now we find out how much of that was Edgerton and how much was the guy who wrote the paperback.

✅ WORTH IT

The Whisper Man (Netflix)

Adam Scott plays a widower whose young son vanishes, so he drags in his estranged father, Robert De Niro's retired detective, who once put away the serial killer this new disappearance suddenly resembles. It's an Alex North airport paperback and it moves like one: under two hours, a fresh twist every fifteen minutes, De Niro delivering maybe forty percent of a performance because the material only asked for forty. Reviews split clean down the middle. The Hollywood Reporter called it a "twisty airport paperback serial-killer procedural," somehow both a pan and a perfect logline, while Roger Ebert's site declared it "about as bad as Netflix originals get." Land wherever your tolerance for De Niro coasting puts you.

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Betty La Fea: Uglier Than Ever, Season 3 (Prime Video)

The Colombian telenovela that spawned Ugly Betty and roughly nine other national remakes is back, all ten episodes at once, in 240-plus countries. Betty's returned to Bogotá, there's a love triangle involving an ex named Michel, and this season's engine is a corporate plagiarism scandal at the fashion house Ecomoda, which is the most relatable plotline on this whole list given the week Paramount's having. Amazon rebranded the season from "The Story Continues" to "Uglier Than Ever," a marketing team correctly noticing that cruelty moves product. If you grew up on this show you stopped reading two sentences ago.

✅ WORTH IT

Adults, Season 2 (Hulu)

FX's comedy about five broke friends sharing a house in Queens is back, all eight episodes, still built around the specific catastrophic decisions you make before your prefrontal cortex finishes installing. The guest list this year runs Susie Essman, Gaten Matarazzo, and Zosia Mamet, a lineup that could only be assembled by a writers' room raised on completely different television. Season one was funnier than a show about people this dumb had any business being. Liked it? Here's more of it.

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The Producer (HBO Max)

HBO slid out a twelve-episode Taiwanese drama about the Mandopop industry, where an aspiring producer claws her way into the orbit of a legendary one and everybody involved can genuinely sing. It won't trend on your feed, which is roughly why it might be worth your time. HBO Max putting real money into a Mandarin-language music show is either a sincere international bet or a budget line no Warner executive will remember once Paramount finishes eating them. Watch it before it becomes merger roadkill.

✅ WORTH IT

Pick of the Week

Dark Matter, Season 2. It's the one thing this week where the people making it seem nervous in the productive way. They burned through the source novel, they're improvising now, and improvising is where the best and the worst television both get made. Start season one if you skipped it; it climbs fast, and Edgerton genuinely sells a man being introduced to all the versions of himself who made the better call. You'll be caught up in time to watch this possibly come apart on Apple's dime, which is its own kind of appointment viewing.

One more thing

Netflix renewed Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen for a third season this week, eight more episodes, greenlit before season two has aired a single frame — a show renewed on the strength of a trailer, because the modern renewal has nothing to do with whether the last one was good and everything to do with a churn chart. Meanwhile E.W. Scripps, which runs local TV stations across the country, is cutting 268 jobs and rebuilding itself into what it calls an "AI-powered broadcast journalism company." Your local news is about to be read to you by a server rack to save a hundred million dollars, Paramount is bleeding seven million a day to own a company it legally cannot touch, and the biggest release of the week is a show whose writers ran out of book. It's all working exactly as designed. See you next week.