Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, Tuesday’s smarter, better-looking sister email to your Monday and Thursday editions of What I’m Hearing. Matt Belloni here, still reeling from today’s stunning twist in the Paramount saga. Nothing surprises when it comes to Shari Redstone, but to drag on talks with David Ellison and his Skydance backers for six months, fully negotiate an incredibly complex transaction that provides nearly $2 billion to National Amusements, plus the sweetened $4.5 billion to the non-Redstone A shareholders and the B shareholders of Paramount Global, plus $1.5 billion to pay down Paramount debt, only to veto the deal on the goal line with a kiss-off statement thanking Skydance “for their months of work in pursuing this potential transaction”? Amazing. Truly one of the all-time great fuck yous in the history of Hollywood.

Predictably, the Paramount stock tanked 8 percent on the news and is now below $11 a share in after-hours trading. Since none of the other suitors for National Amusements has even finished due diligence, this slow-moving car crash is poised to drag on and on. I’ll have more on the Paramount situation on Thursday, as well as on The Town, and Bill Cohan will go deeper on the financials that doomed the deal in Dry Powder tomorrow. But for now, here’s Eriq Gardner with a separate and very special alcohol-infused edition of WIH+...

• A little more on the latest Netflix suit: Color me unimpressed by the fresh Baby Reindeer “real Martha” defamation lawsuit against Netflix, which amounts to yet another entry in the growing canon of libel battles facing the streamer. Sure, as Matt noted last night, it was obviously dumb for Netflix to call it a “true story,” but the primary obstacle for Fiona Harvey is that the show never identified her as the inspiration for the stalker. Sleuthing fans may have uncovered similarities, but her resemblance to the character wasn’t so obvious until Harvey herself embarked on a round of media appearances.

  The case reminds me of a libel suit I covered a few years back, when Paramount prevailed against a real-life Stratton Oakmont executive who claimed that he was the basis of the much-abused, toupee-wearing character Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. (You may recall Jonah Hill’s character saying, “I can’t believe that fucking guy. I want to kill him,” to which Leo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort responds, “Swear to God, I want to choke him to death.”) In the Reindeer case, one has to wonder whether Harvey has simply ended up stalking herself.

• Trust fund horrors: The long-simmering feud between It producer Roy Lee and John Powers Middleton, heir to a tobacco fortune, is slated for a courtroom showdown this summer—though I wouldn’t hold my breath on the trial actually happening anytime soon. Middleton, who leveraged his financial clout to court Hollywood elite while forging lucrative alliances for Lee, asserts that he’s entitled to executive producer credits and millions of dollars in fees for projects including The Lego Batman Movie, Minecraft, and the Exorcist television series. But Middleton’s financial lifeline snapped when access to his trust fund was largely cut off, sending him into a spiral of multiple lawyers and delays in the case. Recently, yet another Middleton legal team, this one at Wolf Rifkin, signaled a desire to exit stage left, citing a breakdown in the client relationship, only to pivot to a new narrative: the need to delay the trial because of Middleton’s neglected business taxes. Lee’s camp at Bird Marella is urging the judge to dismiss the claims entirely.
• Oscars odds: Should it be legal to bet on the Oscars, as you can now do in eight U.S. states? That’s the question facing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is looking over a proposal to ban this kind of trading in U.S. derivatives markets, along with betting on political elections and sports. The agency has noted the burgeoning interest in these so-called prediction markets but bemoans the heavy lift required to police potential manipulations. Fancy placing a trade on the best picture odds of the A24 prison drama Sing Sing? You have until July 9 to make your voice heard, as the C.F.T.C. is now soliciting public comment.

As often happens, a legal case disgorged the goods. In 2020, Donaldson entered the “ghost kitchen” business with Planet Hollywood founder Robert Earl’s Virtual Dining Concepts. Before long, however, Donaldson sued, complaining that, among other things, the MrBeast Burger didn’t taste very good and was undermining his brand. V.D.C. countersued, saying Donaldson’s burger-bashing was just a calculated attempt to renegotiate the terms of his deal. The resulting battle raises the larger question: Just how valuable is the MrBeast brand?

Donaldson had hoped to keep his org chart and business plan out of the public eye. The wheels of justice, however, turn unpredictably, and New York Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Schecter has been making Team Beast jump through hoops to seal off the documents, which revealed Donaldson’s plan to expand the MrBeast empire to include e-commerce and Amazon Prime shows, plus energy drinks and mobile games in 2025, all while maintaining the YouTube channel that started it all.

It’s unclear who will prevail in the MrBeast burger dispute, which is still very much undercooked. But the case is clearly making Donaldson uncomfortable. He attempted to extinguish the counterclaims by arguing that his tweets critiquing the burger’s quality were protected speech. The judge, forging ahead to discovery, responded that Donaldson wasn’t merely airing views of public interest but was, in essence, sprucing up his own brand. Since that February ruling, V.D.C. has unleashed a sweeping demand for documents, from financial records to efforts to manage negative press, and provocatively questioned in a New York courtroom, “What does Jimmy Donaldson have to hide?”

The DeSantis-appointed supervisors who now oversee the Disney World district will vote on the proposal tomorrow. A thumbs-up is expected, but Disney hasn’t shut the door on renewing a court challenge to what it perceived as retaliatory moves by Florida lawmakers. Disney has a Monday deadline to tell the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals whether it’s moving forward or not with its case against DeSantis.

And now for the main event… Bravo’s blotto suit…

But at the center of McSweeney’s 109-page complaint is the assertion that the show “weaponized” her alcoholism. She alleges that producers refused to support her sobriety, prodded her into drinking, and exploited her relapse for a salacious storyline during an infamous cast trip to Rhode Island. McSweeney says she regained her sobriety only to be mocked for past behavior and told she was becoming a bore. The relationship between producers and McSweeney deteriorated, leading to her exile from the Housewives clan. She now claims that producers violated both New York and federal law, including the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Bravo owner NBCUniversal is trying to sidestep protracted discovery by hoisting the First Amendment flag. On May 22, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss, presenting the provocative argument that encouraging boozing should be considered “creative expression.” Specifically, NBCU lawyers told a judge, “Under well-settled law, even if Defendants did want to use the Housewives franchise to feature inebriated cast members (which they do not), that message—achieved through casting and directing decisions—would be protected under the First Amendment.” In other words, according to NBCU’s definition, being an American includes the rights to life, liberty, and over-serving reality TV stars.

Notably, NBCUniversal has hired Adam Levin at Mitchell Silberberg, the same lawyer who represented the Bachelor producers, and he’s dusting off the old playbook. Meanwhile, Disney is citing the same precedent in a bid to beat a lawsuit over the firing of Gina Carano from The Mandalorian after the conservative actress made inflammatory comments on social media. (A key court hearing in that case comes Wednesday.) Similarly, CBS is invoking Claybooks in response to a writer, Brian Beneker, who sued claiming he wasn’t hired as a SEAL Team staffer because he’s a straight white man.

But something about this Housewives situation has tickled a nerve. Maybe it’s because alcohol has long been the third rail of the reality TV business, after high-profile incidents on shows like Bachelor in Paradise and Below Deck Down Under. Only this time, it’s being addressed head-on, and only a few months after NBCU adopted new standards for its unscripted shows that include the monitoring of alcohol consumption, and, when necessary, intervention. (Presumably not a filmed intervention for a subsequent broadcast, but I wouldn’t count it out.)

Despite the new guidelines, NBCU is maintaining that featuring tipsy talent is its prerogative. Naturally, this is a messy debate. No sensible soul, Cohen included, would argue that producers have carte blanche to push stars toward illegal drug use. Then again, if health concerns prevail over all else, what’s to stop a stuntman, suddenly realizing the dangers of his trade, from demanding rewrites to action scenes?

Bravo’s in a bind here, tasked with delivering the kind of jaw-dropping content its audience craves. But if McSweeney hitting rock bottom was just entertainment fodder for RHONY’s “Hurricane Leah” episode, or if her cast mates were indeed goaded into luring her back to the bar, would the network’s defense hold water (or wine) in court? Levin is betting that the show’s boozy charm is protected by the constitution.

Outstanding questions include whether NBCUniversal had a duty to modify filming schedules so that McSweeney could attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and, more significantly, how the company’s new policy against on-set drinking squares with its legal argument that guzzling pinot grigio is simply part of the show. The coming legal showdown may rewrite the playbook on what reality TV can—and should—stage for the sake of entertainment. After all, seasoned reality TV aficionados know that behind every slick edit is a story that’s been cut, spliced, and sometimes spiked.

Matt