Zaslav walks away with 606 million dollars and your Carrie remake

David Zaslav walked away from the Paramount sale with $606 million. Six hundred and six million dollars. For what. For renaming HBO Max to Max and then back to HBO Max and spending four years explaining the difference to his own employees. Four of his deputies cleared a hundred mil each. That's $1.1 billion for five guys whose main contribution to American culture was quietly shelving a finished Batgirl movie for tax purposes. And in the same week, per Variety, Netflix is lining up to lay off 5% of its workforce because the stock's languishing. The executives cash the check. The people who actually make the shows get a Slack message. This is the business.

Anyway. Here's what dropped.

Carrie (Prime Video)

Mike Flanagan took the Stephen King novel every tenth-grader has read and stretched it into a full series about telekinesis and viral bullying and whatever Instagram is called this year. Flanagan's good. He made Midnight Mass, he knows how to shoot a dark hallway. The pitch — bullied girl, mother is a maniac, prom goes poorly — is already a two-hour movie that works. Making it eight episodes is a flex and we'll see if it earns the runtime. Early buzz says yes. Summer H. Howell is the Carrie, Samantha Sloyan is the mother, and if you've seen a Flanagan show you know Sloyan is going to be unhinged in a very controlled way, which is her whole thing.

✅ WORTH IT

WAR (HBO Max)

Dominic West and Sienna Miller as rival London barristers in a show called WAR, in all caps, because "Lawyers" was taken. It's an anthology — new case every season — created by George Kay, the guy who wrote Lupin. Decider's episode-two recap called it "truths are lies and lies are truths," which is the kind of sentence a show writes about itself when it's trying very hard. The wigs are on. The accents are on. Dominic West is doing the Dominic West thing where he looks tired and smokes. If you need a prestige British legal drama to pretend to pay attention to on Sunday night, congratulations.

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Lanterns (HBO Max)

The DC Green Lantern show that nobody asked for turned out to be the one quietly getting great. Damon Lindelof and Tom King running a buddy-cop sci-fi mystery in rural America, Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre doing the heavy lifting. Episode five dropped this week and it's sitting at an 8.3 on TMDb with 674 people voting, which in this ratings environment is a miracle. People love it. The budget is on screen. Nobody's being lectured, nobody's winking. It's a weird, patient, grown-up superhero show, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2026.

🏆 DROP EVERYTHING

Matchbox the Movie (Apple TV+)

John Cena stars in a 127-minute action comedy based on the tiny toy cars. Based on the tiny toy cars. Jessica Biel is in it. Sam Hargrave directed. The plot involves an international plot and reconnecting childhood friends and saving the world. I'm begging you to read that sentence twice. We are now adapting the die-cast metal objects your dentist gave you as a kid into cinematic universes. Barbie worked, so now every object in your garage is a franchise. Next year it's Weed Whacker: The Movie starring The Rock. Book it.

🐍 SLOP

Doing Life (Netflix)

Tyler Perry made a movie about a single mother and an incarcerated man who fall in love through letters. It is 112 minutes long. If you are the target audience for this, you already have it queued up, and nothing I say will change your evening. Enjoy.

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I Would Rather Die (Prime Video)

Mexican zombie comedy on Prime about a guy who gets bitten and goes looking for a cure with his crush. It's got 16 TMDb votes which means nobody has watched it yet, but at a 7.9 the people who did liked it. Lower stakes than most of the swing-for-the-fence prestige dreck this week. Worth a flyer if you want something that isn't about lawyers or wizards.

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Quickly

The Simpsons season 38 aired an episode called "Diary of a Chimpy Kid" because the show is now a looping screensaver of its own corpse. 🐍 SLOP

SVU hit season 28. Mariska is still there. God bless her. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

Law & Order season 26 on Netflix now, if you want to watch Tony Goldwyn frown at a prosecutor. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

NCIS season 24. Submarines. Still. 🛋️ BACKGROUND TV

The Schumacher '94 doc on Netflix is actually a sharp little F1 piece if you're into that. ✅ WORTH IT

Africa: Earth's Wild Home on Hulu — Nat Geo narrated by Wunmi Mosaku, which is a nice flex. Great for a Sunday. ✅ WORTH IT

Pick of the Week

Lanterns, HBO Max. Not the show on paper you'd expect. Nobody wanted another DC property. Lindelof and King made it good anyway. Start at episode one, give it two episodes, and if Kyle Chandler squinting at dirt in Nebraska doesn't do it for you, you were never going to make it. For the rest of us this is the best thing airing right now and it's going to end before most people even hear about it.

Meanwhile Zaslav is on a yacht somewhere spending the GDP of a small country. Snips, the vertical-video company, just announced it's chopping up Succession and Game of Thrones into TikTok-sized microdramas for Sarah Snook and Kit Harington. That's where we are. We're grinding Logan Roy into 60-second clips so you can watch him scream at Shiv between ads for weight loss gummies. Enjoy the fall.