‘Show Wall St. the Blood’: A Biz Affairs Exec on the Brutal Paramount-Warners Math Ahead
Veteran Ken Basin predicts dealmaking shakeups and, of course, layoffs
I host the Ankler Agenda podcast, and my new series “The Disappearing Ladder” covers how Gen Zs to boomers are navigating Hollywood’s narrowing path. I interviewed Heated Rivalry’s casting directors about how they found Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams and wrote about thes show’s effect on TV’s romance market. I’m at elaine@theankler.com
If Ken Basin were still teaching entertainment law at Harvard, he says his first week’s syllabus would be simple.
“Week one would be: Why you shouldn’t go into this business. Week two would be: Why you shouldn’t go into this business.” And the final week would be the same: Why you shouldn’t go into this business.
It’s a bleak joke, but Basin has a point. As I wrote last week in the first installment of my generational series, The Disappearing Ladder, Hollywood’s traditional career path is breaking down. Promotions are rarer, mentorship is harder to find and executives up and down the hierarchy are increasingly focused on simply keeping their own jobs.
Few people have watched that shift more closely than Basin, a longtime business affairs executive who previously ran BA at Paramount Television, served as co-head of the department at Amazon Studios, and was most recently global head of business operations at Riot Games until mid-2024. The USC and Harvard Law grad (and onetime contestant on both Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire) is also the author of 2018’s The Business of Television, a book I rely upon frequently to understand the nitty-gritty of the industry. Now consulting across entertainment, he’s increasingly been hired as something of an outsourced mentor for junior lawyers and dealmakers who can’t always get guidance from overstretched bosses.
That experience has led Basin to a new project. Today I can exclusively tell you he’s launching The Business of Television Max (named with tongue fully in cheek), a Substack meant to offer advice, resources and industry analysis for entertainment professionals navigating a shrinking job market.
Basin, 41, isn’t especially optimistic about the business’s trajectory. But he says the goal of the newsletter is to help the people already inside the system make the most of it.
“The part I miss most about being an in-house executive is teaching and mentoring,” he tells me. “Watching people develop confidence in what they do — that’s what makes them more creative and effective.”
His Substack’s basic subscription costs $20 a month or $200 a year, with a premium tier that goes for $500 a year — for later this year, he’s planning an AI-fueled chatbot named TBOT that has been trained on The Business of Television.
He’s also offering a coaching and consulting service called The Business of Television Prime (ha ha), which bears a testimonial from MRC Television pres Jenna Santoianni, whom I spoke to last spring; and the site has resources like scale cheat sheets for most-used guild minimums.
He kicks off his Substack with a four-part series about Paramount’s pending $111 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and today, Basin — who lived through one merger already at Paramount — shares his brutal assessment with me of what’s coming now and other hot topics including:
Paramount-Warner Bros.’ immediate impact on the day-to-day TV business
Why this particular merger will likely mean very fast layoffs
Why insecurity — not greed — is the real driver of Hollywood’s worst decisions
How streaming’s one-size-fits-all deal model vs. a diversified deal portfolio is hurting creativity
The real reasons deals are taking longer than ever to close
The unexplained backstory behind Fifth Season selling Severance to Apple