Kassan’s Report Card, Art Market Mysteries, Paramount’s Endgame

Welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon bulletin featuring Puck’s best new reporting.

First up today, Eriq Gardner digs into Netflix’s mysterious eleventh-hour settlement in a defamation case brought by former prosecutor Linda Fairstein over her portrayal in Ava Duvernay’s docudrama about the Central Park Five. Why did Fairstein, who had so much leverage over Netflix, walk away?

Plus, below the fold: Julia Ioffe reveals the harried mind state of Biden’s N.S.C. Marion Maneker illuminates how Basquiat became the art market’s new Picasso. Eriq games out the NFL’s $20 billion legal existential crisis. On The Town, Matt Belloni and Michael Kassan unsparingly assess Netflix’s push into the ad space. On Fashion People, Lauren Sherman and Jacob Gallagher evaluate French Open fashion faux pas and consider the green shoots at Gap Inc. And on The Powers That Be, Bill Cohan joins Dylan Byers to envision the Skydance-Paramount arranged marriage and its ripple effects.

ERIQ GARDNER

After a decade of twists and turns, the league is facing down a 10-figure lawsuit that could also allow teams to cut their own deals with streamers, reshaping the business forever. Can the NFL afford to take that risk?

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JULIA IOFFE

Biden’s national security team has been unusually loyal, with all the key players sticking around and working through one grueling cataclysmic geopolitical challenge after another—Afghanistan, Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, etcetera. Why aren’t they turning over or cashing out? “There’s a sense that we’re standing at the precipice right now,” said one senior administration official.

MARION MANEKER

In both New York and Hong Kong last month, Jean-Michel displaced the Spanish master as the new benchmark for the art world. For years, the artist’s market—driven via headline-inducing purchases by the likes of Ken Griffin and Jho Low—seemed to have exceeded real collector demand. Now that’s all changing.

ERIQ GARDNER

A last-minute deal made perfect sense for the streamer, which will donate $1 million to avoid a trial over Ava DuVernay’s “When They See Us.” But why did Linda Fairstein, who had so much leverage over Netflix, walk away?