The media industry closes out 2024 in a landscape very different than a year ago and perhaps looking up as the biggest players begin to manage the confounding decline of linear television. Paramount Global’s sale to Skydance Media, followed by Comcast’s spin-off of its cable networks into a new company…

Keeping score in streaming – never an easy prospect given the amount of data hidden away in corporate black boxes – is about to get even tougher in 2025. Netflix will stop reporting subscriber numbers (for more than a decade the ultimate metric in streaming) as of the upcoming January-to-March…

The Broadway season doesn’t lend itself comfortably to Best of the Calendar Year Stories — my choices for the first six months of 2024 were made and announced last June in a Tony Award predictions column. So no need to reiterate my undying love for Stereophonic, Illinoise, Appropriate, et. al. Instead, let me bring…

Tennessee Williams sets Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, his 1955 play about sexual repression, at a cotton plantation on the Mississippi Delta. You can feel the heat in director Rebecca Frecknall's production at the Almeida Theatre starring a scorching Daisy Edgar-Jones (Twisters, Normal People) as Maggie, the cat…

It's been a weird year for the unscripted television business. Networks and streamers have been greenlighting fewer shows and producers are struggling, with numerous mid-size companies closing and layoffs across the sector and global outsourcing and budget issues becoming major talking points with…

Over the past 12 months, Elon Musk continued his streak of somehow finding a way into just about every social-political conversation, it seemed, something that was readily apparent in his midyear endorsement of Donald Trump. As the co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, a made-up…

In 2024, as the film and television industry looked to repair after the year of double labor strikes, comedy continued to explode. Emerging in recent years as the leader in the field, Netflix got the biz off to a good start with a second edition of its festival, Netflix Is a Joke, which expanded its scope…