Ankler Agenda

Just how much longer can the Netflix vs. Paramount merger madness go on? (Cue the eye rolls.) Paramount made a fresh $31-per-share offer to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and WBD’s response — which can be boiled down to “We’re getting there, maybe” — is about as close to coquettish as a corporation can get. Meanwhile, Netflix is not-so-patiently waiting in the wings, as co-CEO Ted Sarandos wraps a weeklong press tour to convince Wall Street and Hollywood that his company’s offer for WBD (which, as he’ll remind you, was already accepted in December) is superior. So what happens now? Elaine Low, Natalie Jarvey and Sean McNulty answer your burning questions about the whole saga and read between the lines of Sarandos’ press offensive.
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What are the odds of another Hollywood strike in 2026? The answer to who has more leverage — the guilds or the studios — may surprise you. With AI, healthcare and streaming again on the bargaining table just three short years after the writers and actors strikes shuttered the town — Elaine Low, Sean McNulty, Natalie Jarvey and Dealmakers columnist Ashley Cullins discuss the talks between SAG-AFTRA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. Plus, who might buy Casey Wasserman’s namesake agency after his tawdry email exchanges with Ghislaine Maxwell came to light and blew up his empire? The team has some ideas.
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Nearly 20 years ago, Spencer Pratt became reality TV infamous on the cover of Us Weekly. In this bonus episode, he sat down with Ankler Media CEO and editor-in-chief Janice Min — the editor who once put him there — to talk about his run for mayor of Los Angeles. Pratt calls Gavin Newsom a “demon” and a “reality star in charge of everything failing.” He slams the city’s response to the 2025 wildfires, argues L.A. isn’t ready for the Olympics — “not even ready for a USC game," claims he already has a Day One “blacklist” of city officials he’d fire and has sharp words for Hollywood unions and the CEOs who run the studios. It’s classic Pratt for those who first met him on MTV's The Hills: provocative, theatrical, and strategically aware of the spotlight. But it’s also a reminder that the machinery of fame and the machinery of politics are now fully intertwined.
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“So what do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?” Casey Wasserman — founder of the Wasserman Agency, chair of the LA28 Olympic Committee, and grandson of Hollywood founding father Lew Wasserman — wrote in a 2003 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, later convicted of sex trafficking minors. The message is one of several exchanges included in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department as part of the Epstein files — and it has thrown one of the industry’s most connected executives into crisis. Chappell Roan and Abby Wambach publicly cut ties with Wasserman this week, with others threatening to follow.

But he’s not the only major player to appear in the Epstein email archive, as journalist and author Allen Salkin found out. Still, the bigger story may be what the cache reveals about the clubby worlds of media and entertainment, industries built on proximity — who gets invited to the dinner, who makes the introduction, who vouches for whom. Salkin joins Elaine Low and Natalie Jarvey to unpack the boldface names surfacing in the files and what their presence — whether incidental, transactional, or something more — says about the networks that drive the entertainment business. Plus, Sean McNulty breaks down the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics ratings, and Paramount’s latest sweetened bid for Warner Bros.
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Bell Media President Sean Cohan tells The Ankler’s Elaine Low onstage at NATPE Global/Realscreen Summit in Miami about the pitch process for ‘Heated Rivalry,’ how the show’s creators protected its Canadian authenticity and why so many viewers are “reheating” (aka rewatching) the gay hockey drama. He also charts the growth of Bell-owned Canadian streamer Crave and takes a contrarian view on Hollywood consolidation, including the Netflix-Warner Bros. tie-up. “We run as an industry to a ‘sky is falling’ kind of a place,” Cohan says. While big mergers have undeniably harsh consequences, they also open “lanes of opportunity.” He adds. “It'll be a great time for entrepreneurship, because these distracted, big, lumbering giants are going to get a little slower.”
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