The never-ending, nerve-racking, periodically entertaining saga of Shari Redstone reluctantly selling off Paramount Global will go on a little longer. Last night, the company’s special committee extended its “go-shop” deadline to September 5 to evaluate Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s 13th-hour bid for National Amusements Inc., a sign that they are taking Bronfman at least somewhat seriously—or at least conducting the proper due diligence. Of course, the success or failure of Bronfman’s bid will ultimately come down to the single variable that has driven this tortured sales process from the beginning: Does Shari want it?

It was a little over a month ago, after all, that Redstone interrupted the East Hampton, Montana, and Saint-Tropez holiday weekends of Hollywood’s executive class by announcing she’d finally accepted an $8 billion deal from David Ellison’s Skydance Media and Gerry Cardinale’s RedBird Capital, under which Paramount would be merged with Skydance, elevating the 41-year-old Ellison to the Hollywood mogul status he’d always dreamed of. He’d install RedBird’s operating partner Jeff Shell, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, to actually operate the company, and perhaps bring in Jeff Zucker to fix CBS.