Stop Waiting for Hollywood to Save You

Why this M&A moment is the time to make your move

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

The “table reading” of a script is the first time it’s heard out loud, read by the actors. It’s usually convened in a conference room on the studio lot on the first day of a production week, and it’s attended by the cast, the writers and producers, and a few representatives of the network and the studio. After the reading there are brief huddles among the constituents followed by a (nearly always) excruciating session where the executives (nearly always) attempt to get the writers to remove every single interesting and funny thing about the script. When all of the participants are suitably exhausted by the passive-aggressive hostility, the session is over and everyone goes back to their offices for lunch. This is the way the television business has worked since Dick van Dyke tripped over the ottoman, and if you don’t get that reference, congratulations on being a young person. And if you do, I’m so sorry.

Once, though, I walked into the table reading of a script to discover an unusually full room. Every seat was taken and there were people pressed against the wall. In addition to the expected complement of executives representing the studio and the network, the assembled group included the president of the network, the president of the studio, the chairman of the studio, a few senior vice presidents of current programming on the network and the studio side, the heads of on-air promotion and marketing for both groups, the managing partner of the management company representing one of the lead actors, about a dozen people I didn’t recognize and, for some reason, the head of the studio finance department and the lead attorney for the network’s Office of Business Affairs.

I took one look at the crowd and I knew that something big had happened, and that the news was either going to be very good or very bad.