Well, dear reader, the world found out this week what I’ve been faithfully telling you all along—there was never any real chance that David Zaslav’s imperiled Warner Bros. Discovery was going to swallow up Shari Redstone’s incredible shrinking Paramount Global. There was no way—as I wrote last December, the moment word leaked that Zaz had lunch with Paramount Global C.E.O. Bob Bakish—that the two sides were going to strike a deal. 

To wit: The market would never countenance combining one overleveraged entity (WBD, with $40 billion of net debt) with another (Paramount, with $14 billion of net debt) and just roll the dice and hope that the subsequent years of accounting ambiguity covers up a multitude of sins. Both companies are perched on the edge of the BBB cliff; combining them, along with their money-losing streaming businesses (or barely breakeven, in the case of WBD) would send the combined company into the roiling morass of junk-bond hell. I know that WBD executives were quietly contemplating this fantasy for some time, as my partner Dylan Byers had noted, but it was never going to become a reality.