• Join Puck

    Directly Supporting Authors

    A new economic model in which writers are also partners in the business.

    Personalized Subscriptions

    Customize your settings to receive the newsletters you want from the authors you follow.

    Stay in the Know

    Connect directly with Puck talent through email and exclusive events.

  • What is puck? Newsletters Authors Podcasts Events Gift Puck Careers

Shari Redstone

Shari Redstone

The Righteous Redstone

Amid Trump’s legal torture of CBS, Shari Redstone has played the role of a spineless placater—a desperate seller eager to settle and liquidate her position in the family heirloom. But her annoyance over CBS News’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict seems to be real—and so are her attempts to meddle with the newsroom’s independence.
Dylan Byers • April 30, 2025
Eriq Gardner & Matthew Belloni • April 29, 2025
Will Trump Kill the Paramount Deal?
donald trump brendan carr
An insider debate over how the Paramount-Skydance sale actually plays out: Will Shari settle the ‘60 Minutes’ suit? Is Trump pulling Brendan Carr’s strings? Can the president be flattered into approving the deal? And what’s the future of CBS if its owners bend the knee?
Dylan Byers • April 25, 2025
Scott Pelley’s Cri de Coeur & Owens Exit Theories
Bill Owens
News and notes on the aftermath of the ‘60 Minutes’ saga.
Wendy McMahon
Dylan Byers • April 16, 2025
Wendy’s Double Jeopardy
CBS News C.E.O. Wendy McMahon’s tenure was already beset by controversies that have antagonized both the network’s current owner, Shari Redstone, and its future owner, David Ellison. Now, she’s taking heat for a ‘Wheel of Fortune’/‘Jeopardy!’ miscalculation that could cost Paramount eight-figure annual profits.
Pat Sajak Alex Trebek
Eriq Gardner • March 4, 2025
Final Jeopardy!
The fight over the streaming future of Sony’s long-running quiz show and Wheel of Fortune represents a full-scale, high-stakes, and final deconstruction of a half-century of TV dealmaking, and an industry model that has been in decline for years.
David Ellison, Dana Goldberg
Matthew Belloni • February 7, 2025
Paramount in the Political Firestorm
As Shari Redstone decides whether to pay off Trump to settle a CBS News lawsuit, and a fiery F.C.C. chair raises a potential new obstacle to the Skydance merger, David Ellison can only watch and plan for the day when—or maybe if—he finally takes control of the languishing studio.
Shari Redstone
Dylan Byers • February 6, 2025
60 Minutes to Midnight
Inside the agony and finger-pointing at CBS News, where executives and journalists are protesting Shari Redstone’s eagerness to settle Trump’s suit, countenancing their diminishing place in the firmament, and girding for the F.C.C. to extract maximum political pain.
Shari Redstone
Dylan Byers • February 1, 2025
Shari Shrugged
Apparently, Shari Redstone has waited too long and stands to make too much on the sale of her declining family business to get tripped up in a journalistic ethics debate or public spat with the new president. Why not just cave? These days, everybody’s doing it.
Shari Redstone
Matthew Belloni • December 31, 2024
Hollywood’s Hero of the Year… Is Bailing on Hollywood
In a year when thousands were fired or fled the ever-contracting entertainment business, Paramount owner Shari Redstone finally recognized she couldn’t compete and shrewdly sold the company to a Silicon Valley heir with the means to save the studio, not consolidate it out of existence.
david ellison
William D. Cohan • November 6, 2024
The Secret History of the Paramount Deal
What the merger’s 600-page proxy filing reveals about who wanted Paramount (Zaz! Apollo! The mysterious “Party F”!) and how they managed to lose to David Ellison’s Skydance.