Does Chris Licht Beat the Tom Wambsgans Allegations?
Executive level drama redux.
🪩 New Yorkers! I’m guesting on a pop culture comedy show Monday night at 9:30 pm! You can buy tickets here. 🪩
What is filling the Succession1-sized hole in your heart? I’m talking about internecine C-suite drama, corporate backstabbing, unflattering business casual outfits. If I were in the hospital today, the doctor would say “Get me 100 CCs of nasty looking clinical glass boardrooms, screaming matches, and screaming matches inside of nasty looking clinical glass boardrooms STAT!” (And then, the perfunctory “I can't operate on this boy; he is my son!”)
God’s timing … baby it’s always right …: Just as Succession ended, the season finale of the CNN CEO’s career began. Have you been following Chris Licht’s no good, terrible, horrible, no good very bad week? The man tasked with making CNN more “centrist” — whatever that means2 — has been defenestrated in slow motion with a loud, televised “splat.” In the spirit of Executive Level Drama, a timeline of everything that’s gone down.
April 8, 2022: AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit and Discovery Inc. complete their merger. (Upon the deal’s announcement, The New York Times calls the union “Succession meets 90 Day Fiancé.”) The new company is Warner Bros. Discovery, lead by Discovery CEO David Zaslav.
February 26, 2022: Less than a month after the dismissal of Jeff Zucker, Zaslav chooses Chris Licht, executive producer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, as CNN’s new CEO. Previously, Licht launched Morning Joe on MSNBC and remade CBS This Morning; “Licht may not be Zucker, but he is undeniably the wunderkind producer of his generation with an ability to win over talent and see value where others don’t,” Puck observes.
Variety notes how big a promotion this really is: “While Licht has run sizable TV operations, he has never commanded a structure as big as CNN, a WarnerMedia unit that has in recent years generated over $1 billion in profit and has become as key to the financials of WarnerMedia as Fox News has to its own parent, Fox Corporation.”
April 20, 2022: CNN+, CNN’s direct-to-consumer streaming subscription service touted as “the most important launch for CNN since Ted Turner launched the network in June of 1980,” is abruptly killed. Zaslav was skeptical of the CNN+ operation (and its low viewership) ahead of the merger; before the WarnerMedia deal even directed executives to kill its marketing budget. Incoming CEO Chris Licht — an alum of MSNBC and Stephen Colbert’s late night show — is charged with delivering the news, a few weeks before he even begins the CNN CEO gig.
“This is not easy news, and I don’t want to minimize that,” Licht told CNN+ staff announcing the shutdown, according to a Times report. In a recording shared with the paper, Licht compared the situation — buying something and then abruptly bulldozing it — to a home that had been built without the input of its eventual owner: “Then the new owner came in and said: ‘What a beautiful house! But I need an apartment.’ And that doesn’t take anything away from this beautiful house you built. I am proud of it, and I am proud of this team, and I am gutted by what this means for you.” That’s really what he said! A team of professional communicators at his disposal and that’s the best he could do!
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