Mike Schur

And it has been passed around like a stinky plate of hors d'oeuvres at a crummy billionaire cocktail party for 30 years now.

AOL bought it with fake money in the late 90s, early 2000s.

And then it kind of chugged along and then Discovery bought it and saddled it with debt and stripped it for parts and buried a bunch of movies.

The Batgirl movie famously was just thrown in the garbage.

Other TV shows and movies

were made and then thrown in the garbage as tax write-offs.

And now it's being flipped to someone else.

And the crazy thing is, is that this whole time, what is the single best brand in television?

HBO.

HBO has managed through all of this stuff

to just plug along and make great TV shows and great movies and great miniseries and great documentaries against all odds while their parent company was just absolutely buffeted by various billionaire wins.

And to that extent, the answer is I don't want this to happen.

I hope that somehow it doesn't happen.

If you have Joe's job or my job

you know, you have an idea for a TV show or a movie, there's what, half a dozen places that can buy it.

And when two of them merge...

That means there's only five places who can buy it now.

There's 16% less opportunity to sell an idea you have.

Like wetsuits.

Where do we take wetsuits?