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Discussed in today’s email: Adam McKay, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dr. Oz, Mel Gibson, Keith Redmon, Peggy Siegal, Norah O’Donnell, Peter Chernin, Jimmy Miller, and a prosthetic penis.

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Who Won the Week: Susan Arnold

The longtime Disney board member scores the chairman role as Bob Iger exits, becoming the first openly gay leader in the company’s 98 years. 

Before we begin…

Who’s getting Chris Cuomo’s 9 p.m. perch? How about: Who cares? In all likelihood, the CNN talent shuffle is only temporary until Discovery closes on the spinoff of parent WarnerMedia. Warner Bros. Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav is known to want changes at CNN, and it’s hard not to see the recent comments from John Malone, an influential Discovery board member, as being meant for an audience of one: CNN chief Jeff Zucker. “I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with” means fewer political talking-head shout-fests and a shift away from the anti-Trump content strategy.  

My Puck colleague Dylan Byers has a good run-down of the talent sweepstakes here, but there’s another wildcard: Norah O’Donnell. The CBS Evening News anchor’s deal is coming up for renewal, and there’s chatter at CBS that she might not be a priority. CNN doesn’t have a major female primetime host, and O’Donnell’s down-the-middle brand might be just what Malone—er, Zucker—prefers as the face of New CNN. 

More: I discuss the Cuomo/CNN situation with my Puck colleague Peter Hamby on this week’s The Powers That Be podcast, and with Kim Masters on The Business. We recorded before Cuomo was fired on Saturday, but the points are the same. 

Quote of the Week

 “I should have called him and I didn’t.”

–Adam McKay, explaining to Vanity Fair how his refusal to cast long-time partner Will Ferrell in the upcoming HBO series about the 1980s Lakers, and his failure to let Ferrell know he had instead cast Ferrell’s friend John C. Reilly, led to the implosion of their company, Gary Sanchez Productions. 

I’ve got more on this below...

The Truth Behind the McKay-Ferrell Split

As with most public breakups, there’s more to this story of bruised egos—including a botched timeline and the threat of blowback from Lakers greats like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

“What an asshole!” I’m pretty sure that text I received this week, from a young writer-producer, was at least somewhat representative of the response around Hollywood to Adam McKay’s profile in Vanity Fair, where he finally explained the real reason for the 2019 demise of his 25-year creative partnership with comedy legend and universally-recognized nice guy Will Ferrell.   

If you didn’t see it, writer Joe Hagan lays out an explosive timeline of the end of the duo’s friendship and their Gary Sanchez Productions, purveyor of everything from Step Brothers to Succession: McKay and Ferrell had been drifting apart creatively, but “the final straw,” according to the story, was when McKay cast Ferrell as L.A. Lakers owner Jerry Buss in the upcoming HBO series about the 1980s team—and then abruptly recast the role with John C. Reilly, Ferrell’s best friend, failing to let Ferrell know before Reilly did. “I should have called him and I didn’t,” McKay says. “And Reilly did, of course, because Reilly, he’s a stand-up guy.” Ferrell and McKay then released a pleasant divorce statement to the media, but “it wasn’t true,” Hagan writes, with McKay saying, “I’m like, ‘Fuck, Ferrell’s never going to talk to me again. So it ended not well.’”

Pretty dramatic. I—like many others, I suspect—cringed when I read the story, and not just because Ferrell is probably my favorite comedic actor. (My Elf Halloween costume is still a reliable crowd-pleaser.) The Ferrell-McKay partnership, via Gary Sanchez and Funny or Die, had always struck me as one of the rare drama-free meldings of huge and complementary talents, dating back to their SNL days. But here, even as McKay was ostensibly issuing a mea culpa for mistreating his friend, he was also revealing that friend’s embarrassing rejection, while simultaneously claiming that said friend had such a thin skin that he cut personal and professional ties over a measly casting decision—all in the service of promoting McKay’s latest movie, Don’t Look Up.

The whole thing felt patronizing and passive-aggressive, especially considering that McKay’s post-SNL career got huge boosts thanks to his connection to Ferrell—and, if we’re honest, their divergent trajectories lately. It wasn’t lost on insiders that McKay is doing Oscar-level movie work with actors like Leo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence (I’ve seen Don’t Look Up; it’s fantastic), and Ferrell is starring in dreck like Eurovision and the Apple misfire The Shrink Next Door. McKay even seemed to twist the knife in recounting that Ferrell took the Buss recasting “as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for.”

Yuck. But as with most public breakups, there’s more to this story. I talked to a bunch of people around the situation, and it feels much different (and more complicated) than V.F. reported.

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