Congratulations! You’ve made it to the end of another week in summer! Hopefully, you are not sweltering too much wherever you are, and you will do something fun this weekend. Before we let you get to that, a few things we wanted to share with you at the end of another week in the television biz.

The long road to merge Paramount and Skydance is finally at an end.

If you had the under bet on your favorite sports betting app that Brendan Carr's FCC would finally approve the union of Paramount and Skydance so Shari Redstone could get her billions and David Ellison could be the only Neo-baby with his own Movie Studio, Broadcast Network, TV Station Group and Cable Channel for the Resistance—then you were a winner! Last night, Carr announced that all those concessions offered up by Paramount would be adequate to assure a certain someone that it was OK to let the long “suffering” deal finally go through.

The lone Democrat sitting on the FCC, Commissioner Anna Gomez, pulled no punches in her withering dissent on the action: "Despite this regrettable outcome, this Administration is not done with its assault on the First Amendment. In fact, it may only be beginning."

Yet somehow, “South Park” is still on the air and continues to skewer pretty much everyone.

It remains to be seen if “New Paramount" does anything to reel in Comedy Central, the home to “The Daily Show” and “South Park”, but if last night’s season 27 premiere was any indication, the answer so far is seemingly not so much. We admit that it has been a few years since we watched the antics of Cartman, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny. But watching the first episode of the delayed new season, titled “Sermon on the Mount,” made us laugh out loud--more than once. The show remains as irreverent, profane, and shocking as it has always been. Maybe even a bit more than we remembered. We warn anyone easily offended by very satirical material on politics, religion, and the state of the nation to avoid watching (it streams on Paramount+). Everyone else should find some time over the weekend to sit down and laugh at ourselves.

The company that is dumping Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” next May somehow found an estimated 1.5 Billion to do five more years of new “South Park” episodes (10 new ones per year), plus bring all of the previous 26 seasons back to Paramount+ this August (they had been available on HBO Max) and make show creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone considerably wealthier dudes, with an extension of their “first look” deal with Paramount. (For you not fully plugged into Hollywood’s jargon, a "first-look deal” basically means that any new show is presented to the studio that holds those rights, and they can choose to acquire the show before anyone else can see or bid on it. It is a way to hold on to creatives who have successful shows or movies to their credit.)

Not bad for what the White House called a “fourth-rate show…that has been relevant for over 20 years."

TEGNA is looking for a few good…news leaders.

We noticed a posting in our LinkedIn feed this week from a recruiter at TEGNA about hiring five leaders for newsrooms of their various stations. Four of those positions were for News Directors and one was for a Director of Content. (Don’t ask us, we don’t know what the difference is either.) The post was titled with this pitch line: “We’re not just hiring, we’re rebuilding the future of local journalism.” We’ll resist the temptation to point out that they wouldn’t have to rebuild if the company hadn’t pretty much deconstructed itself in the last half-dozen years or so.

Speaking of rebuilding at TEGNA.

KARE 11, TEGNA’s NBC affiliate in the Twin Cities, was forced out of its studios and offices in Golden Valley, MN, earlier this week by a nasty electrical transformer fire that filled the place with the kind of noxious black smoke that is not conducive to normal breathing.. To its credit, the station only lost one 5 pm newscast on the day of the fire. It quickly got a temporary operation going at the station’s transmitter site at the “Telefarm" complex in Shoreview, MN, which is home to most of the market’s TV station transmitters. The station dispatched an anchor and meteorologist down to sister TEGNA station, WXIA-TV in Atlanta, where the duo fronted the station’s newscasts for a few days, while repairs were being made back in Golden Valley.

KARE has job postings available for both a “Head of Technology & Operations” and a News Director (which notably was not part of the five newsroom leader openings mentioned in the earlier referenced recruiter’s post on LinkedIn). Looks like both of those jobs will have a lot on the “To-do” list for whoever fills them.

Let that be an important reminder that your station needs a viable, up-to-date disaster plan.

The problem with situations like the one that hit KARE is that you never know when they will happen or how severe they will be. Disaster recovery plans are crucial and should be updated regularly. (Imagine if the fire at KARE had forced them out of the building during a January in Minnesota! There would be no standing outside of the transmitter building to anchor the newscast.) Our experience over the years is that these plans don’t get the regular reviews and changes that they really need. Start with the simple premise: If a fire forced everyone out of the building your station is in, how would it stay on the air? Continue to do newscasts? Yes, this is the kind of thing that the technological leadership (aka the Chief Engineer) of any station takes the lead on, but it impacts everyone. Much easier to practice this plan when it isn’t needed in real time.

And finally, something fun to read this weekend.

Yes, we know that Stephen Colbert’s name has been in the news a bit lately. (As well as in this space.) But we’d point you to the piece Colbert recently penned for The New Yorker magazine, as part of that publication’s 100th anniversary. During their centennial celebration, they are having people re-read some of the magazine’s seminal articles and write retrospective looks back. Colbert was asked to write his take on a 1978 profile of late-night legend Johnny Carson. Both the original article and Colbert’s current-day take on it are well worth a few minutes of your time before the new work week begins, when we hope to see you right back here again. (A small reminder before we go that you can subscribe for free to this newsletter by clicking the subscribe button at the top of the page. Thanks so much if you already do so.)

Cheers, everyone.

-30-