Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, where I’m officially starting the Larry David Emmy campaign for the final Curb season. Twelve seasons, 24 years, and zero Emmys for Larry? That can’t happen. Plus, so far this week he’s repeatedly insulted a Variety reporter on the red carpet, declared he “doesn’t give a shit” about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, and attacked Elmo on the Today show. What else can he do?

I’ll be out this weekend at the Clive Davis party and the Grammys, where I’m told Joni Mitchell will indeed be singing “Both Sides Now.” Meryl Streep is presenting with her son-in-law, producer Mark Ronson (a.k.a., Mr. Grace Gummer), but mostly I’m interested in whether any artists will dare criticize TikTok for causing Universal Music to yank its catalog amid the money fight. Of course, I’m also watching how far they seat Swift from fellow nominee and UMG star Olivia Rodrigo, who’s either a Swift plagiarist or a victim of songwriting credit extortion, depending on who you believe. (I’m Team Olivia on this one.)

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Let’s begin…

• Restoring Disney magic… with Netflix?: While we’re all waiting anxiously for the Nelson Peltz white paper that will lay out the One True Path toward salvation for The Walt Disney Co., Bloomberg provided a tease of the investor’s big proposal, and… excuse me?? Peltz’s innovative idea is for Disney to bundle ESPN+ with… drumroll… Netflix?!

  Okay… more scale for Disney’s digital sports offering might help the economics of what is now a small service. But that doesn’t solve the actual issue plaguing Disney—namely, how to replace revenue from the withering cable bundle for the main ESPN channel, not ESPN+. Plus, bundling is not a new idea. Disney has Disney+/Hulu/ESPN+, and D+ is now bundled with other Spectrum channels. Also, has Peltz checked with Netflix co-C.E.O.s Greg Peters or Ted Sarandos? Netflix has generally resisted bundling, unless Peltz is proposing to give ESPN+ away for free. He wouldn’t suggest that, would he?

• Speaking of Netflix…: I showed up at chief content officer Bela Bajaria’s big 2024 content reveal yesterday at the Netflix HQ in Hollywood, and it was… very Netflix. A numbing barrage of new shows and movies, some of them intriguing, some of them head-shakers. The Beverly Hills Cop 4 footage of Eddie Murphy attempting to do his Axel Foley laugh while driving a stolen snowplow through the streets of Detroit just made me sad. Bajaria and outgoing film chief Scott Stuber were keeping up friendly appearances, and Stuber told me he’s gonna help Bela put together a list for his potential replacement. (She hasn’t started the process yet.)

• And speaking of Disney…: Congrats to Marielle Heller, whose comedy/horror film Nightbitch—with Amy Adams as a woman who believes she’s turning into a dog—was dated for this fall by Searchlight. It is now the first Disney release in its 100-year history with the word “bitch” in the title.

• And also speaking of Peltz…: A Max rep tells me they still haven’t set a U.S. release for Peltz Beckhams vs The Wedding Planners, the docuseries that debuted overseas a couple months ago about the legal fallout from the wedding of Nelson’s actress daughter, Nicola Peltz, to Brooklyn Beckham in 2022. At this point, I’m beginning to think Warner Discovery C.E.O. David Zaslav shelved the project to prevent Nelson from buying a bunch of WBD stock and pushing for Zaz’s removal.

• Box office over/under: No, Argylle shouldn’t have cost $200 million, even with major Covid overages. But, Apple. Tracking is at about $20 million for the weekend release via Universal, and I’ll take the under. Those awful reviews and the lack of a must-see star really hurt here.

Allen, the stand-up comic turned talk show host turned owner of the Weather Channel and a bunch of television stations, had heard that I was calling around about him and his most recent gambit—a $14.3 billion offer for Paramount Global, which he texted directly to Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder. (I’d like to report that Redstone responded with the praying hands emoji, or maybe the flamenco dancer, but alas, Allen told me he hadn’t received a response yet.)

As the auction for Paramount and its parent company, National Amusements, continues with interest from quiet suitors such as David Ellison and Apollo Global Management, Allen is now loudly offering shareholders a 50 percent premium on the recent share price. By also taking over existing debt, the Allen Media Group offer amounts to $30 billion for the faltering home of Paramount, CBS, Paramount+, and a bunch of cable networks. Not bad!

The problem, of course, is that the overture comes just months after Allen publicly offered around $3 billion for Paramount’s BET Group, which was promptly rejected. Before that, he offered $10 billion to take ABC and other Disney cable networks off Bob Iger’s hands. (Also rejected, though Iger decided not to sell to anyone.) And before that, Allen reportedly pledged $18.5 billion for the same Paramount assets that he’s now pursuing. This is all in less than a year. Throw in a couple NFL football team bids and some rebuffed offers for TV stations, and Allen is either exceptionally aggressive or exceptionally desperate for people like you and me to think he’s aggressive. He’s basically turned into the media mogul equivalent of CarMax or AutoNation. Got a used television asset? I pay CASH.

Or does he? The other problem is, nobody seems to think Allen has the financing to back up his lofty offers. He’s not quite a billionaire, according to Forbes, and unlike David Ellison, his father is not worth $150 billion. Allen also is not exactly volunteering who would be financing these potential deals he’s pitching. In our 20-minute conversation, I asked him four or five different times to explain his financial backing. Some of the conversation was off the record, but in general, Allen was annoyed at the inquiry and dodgy with actual answers. Who is your banker? “You think there’s one bank? Dude, there’s a lot of banks in this one, buddy.” But really, who’s the money? “Let me just say, we have strategic partners, okay?”

I’m not saying he doesn’t have money and partners lined up. For all I know, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos is standing in the shadows ready to pay a fortune for the Paramount lot when Allen acquires it. But I’m skeptical, and Mario Gabelli, the second-largest National Amusements investor, seems to be getting the same vibes. “I like the fact Byron is offering all Paramount shareholders a premium,” Gabelli told the New York Post yesterday. “But show me the money. You don’t know where Byron is getting the money from.”

Exactly. Allen certainly doesn’t have to tell me or Mario Gabelli (yet) anything, but if he proceeds with his offer, he will eventually have to tell Paramount. According to one company source, the ability to actually consummate a deal with Allen was a concern in the BET talks. For that reason, I chuckled a little when Allen told me, essentially, not to worry about the money—that the money didn’t matter anyway because the plan paid for itself.

Notably, Allen has one major advantage over Paramount’s other suitors: Unlike Ellison, and seemingly anyone else who has looked at the company, including your mother and mine, Allen actually wants the troubled yet profitable linear TV assets. He doesn’t want the so-called crown jewels of the Redstone empire: the 65-acre studio lot in Hollywood, which Allen thinks he can get $3 billion for based on the $1.85 billion sale of the 55-acre CBS Radford lot in 2021. Nor is he interested in the 110-year-old film library and I.P. trove, which might fetch as much as $10 billion based on MGM’s $8.5 billion sale to Amazon in 2022. He also doesn’t care much for the money-losing Par+ streamer, which he would sell, downsize, or manage to “stop the bleeding,” in his words. The debt would be portable, he said, and raising money for the rest of the assets would be a “cakewalk.”

Maybe? My Puck partner Bill Cohan is much more skeptical on the issue of Paramount’s debt. He’s noted that $11.2 billion in senior notes could come due upon a change of ownership. But Allen seems to be making a lot of assumptions about the assets and his ability to wheel and deal them, especially since he has apparently not done any due diligence on the state of these assets. Plus, while Allen Media is private, its 2028 notes trade at 52 cents on the dollar, per a Morgan Stanley note today to clients. Not a lot of confidence there.

For those reasons, it’s easy to be skeptical about Allen, even if he is very fun to talk to. That might explain why the analysts are all over the place on him. KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brandon Nispel wrote that Paramount should “immediately take this deal,” but Raymond James’ Ric Prentiss wrote, “We believe there is little to suggest Allen could finance and complete a deal for all of PARA, or that PARA would take his offer seriously without some reasonable form of committed financing.”

The Paramount stock spiked about 12 percent at one point yesterday, to about $15 (big and yet not close to the $21 or $22 offer), but then gave about half those gains back today, similar to what happened when I first reported in December that Ellison was interested in National Amusements. This latest pop doesn’t mean the market is particularly excited about an Allen transaction. It’s just that Paramount is serious about selling—and hey, at least one person actually wants the linear assets. To that end, Paramount now has a special committee set up to evaluate offers like the Allen overture, and Redstone isn’t on it, likely because she’s being super careful in advance of a possible shareholder suit over how the deal, or deals, unfold. Given the complexities and competing agendas at Paramount and NAI, if I were her, I’d be super careful here too.

Apollo is now one of the Paramount suitors, and the Ellison group includes KKR and RedBird Capital, two private equity firms that could give regulators similar pause. In addition, Larry Ellison, when he’s not sunning himself on Lanai, has supported potential Donald Trump running mate Tim Scott, which could also become an issue, especially if someone is whispering in the ear of F.C.C. chair Jessica Rosenworcel. Probably not, but the Dems don’t even need to vote the proposed deal down, they just need to maim it by designating the issue for a hearing. Speaking with a couple F.C.C. experts this week, they agreed that the agency could become an impediment to the Paramount sale and that Allen might be a factor. “I could see Byron Allen causing them to slow-walk this,” one said. So the irony might be that while the Ellison group doesn’t care much about CBS, buying it could put the entire deal in jeopardy.

Those issues potentially go away with an Allen bid, assuming one of his supposed “strategic partners” doesn’t raise similar concerns. In turn, Byron doesn’t care about Paramount; he wants the stuff the other suitors don’t. For that reason, a team-up or offloading of assets seems at least possible. If so, Allen’s real motive here in going public with his bid could be to angle for a seat at the table with Ellison, Apollo, or another potential buyer—not Shari or Paramount C.E.O. Bob Bakish.

They do have a little history. Allen told me he’s never met David Ellison, but a while back he sold Larry a house in the Bird Streets above Hollywood, that his daughter, Megan Ellison, used as her home and office for Annapurna Pictures. So there’s that.

For Redstone, however, “this whole process looks like a clown show,” Rich Greenfield, the LightShed media analyst and frequent critic of both Allen and Redstone, told me today. “This is a media circus and not a traditional auction.” Maybe not, but that ship has sailed. Every little detail of this sale process is now public, and Byron Trott, Shari’s banker and investor, seems to be churning the waters to help juice interest. One conspiracy-minded source even suggested that one Byron (Trott) might have put the other (Allen) up to going public with the offer in a ploy to boost the stock. In exchange, maybe Allen gets his coveted BET Group when this all shakes out.

We’ll see. For now, Allen just seems to want to be taken seriously. “What they should be saying is not that he doesn’t have the money or that he’s crying wolf,” he told me. “What they should be saying is, ‘Oh my God, thank you for this offer. Let’s give him a room with your bankers and your strategic partners and figure out if we can make this happen because that is what’s in the best interest of each and every stockholder.” Revealing his backers would be a great first step toward that end.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or a favorite Byron Allen segment from Real People? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.