APRIL 30, 2026

Happy last day of April to everyone but Brendan Carr, and welcome back to Buffering. If you’re looking for some uplifting TV to take your mind off the gloomy headlines, I recommend David E. Kelley’s new Apple TV series Margo’s Got Money Troubles. I went into this one not knowing much, except that Kelley’s wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, is in it and that the rest of the cast (Nicole Kidman, Nick Offerman, and in the titular starring role, Elle Fanning) is aces, too. With those auspices, not to mention A24’s attachment, my expectations were reasonably high — but Margo blew past them, delivering a smart and unexpectedly sweet look at a very unconventional American family. Five episodes in, this is easily one of the best shows of 2026 and, if there’s any justice, a slam-dunk for a slew of Emmy nominations. (Though, for more informed awards-season prognosticating, I’d suggest subscribing to our Gold Rush newsletter.) 

As for this week’s issue, we’ve got thoughts on the aforementioned Mr. Carr’s assault on ABC (and the First Amendment), including a Q&A with FCC commissioner Anna Gomez. My colleague Chris Lee also has a fascinating look at how Saudi Arabia sank more than $150 million into a movie that almost nobody saw last weekend. But first, we kick things off with brief notes on Disney’s management, some ugly ratings for CBS news, Paramount’s streaming numbers, and the potential obstacles to the WBD merger. Thanks for reading.

— Joe Adalian, West Coast editor

In this edition: Jimmy Kimmel, Brendan Carr, Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Josh D’Amaro, Robert Corn-Revere, Anna Gomez, Tony Dokoupil, Bari Weiss, David Ellison, Anthony Mackie, Mohammed bin Salman, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Wyatt, Sharlto Copley, and David Zaslav’s latest insane salary numbers.

Compiled by Eric Vilas-Boas

The new CEO of Disney has been at his job barely six weeks, and he’s already got a Kimmelgate of his own. As our Q&A below makes clear, this situation is markedly different than the first — and not just because Ted Cruz is suddenly on Disney’s side against the FCC this time around. On Thursday morning, Trump again demanded that ABC fire Kimmel. This is another early leadership test for Disney’s longtime parks guy. After he oversaw his first mass layoff, we learned this week that he made the somewhat gutsy call of keeping ESPN. Does he have the guts to take on the FCC and Trump (in a fight he can likely win), or will he bend the knee? Hollywood and D.C. are watching.

Over three months later, this thing still isn’t working. Regular Buffering readers may recall what Joe wrote in January about what Bari Weiss’s choice to anchor Tony Dokoupil to CBS News’ flagship Evening News broadcast did to that show’s ratings: “Dokoupil’s debut was a dud right out of the gate.” One quarter later, the situation has not improved. The week beginning April 20 marked a new low for the anchor’s tenure according to Nielsen numbers obtained by Status. And it gets worse. “The broadcast has now logged three consecutive weeks under 4 million viewers, a prolonged slump that was once unimaginable,” Oliver Darcy writes. Elsewhere at CBS News, Weiss reportedly “ousted” respected London bureau chief Claire Day over Middle East coverage and replaced her with a recruit from The Wall Street Journal.

It’s unusual to see internal streaming metrics out in the world, which makes this leak of Paramount+ and Pluto’s audience numbers obtained by James Faris at Business Insider interesting to look at. Faris reports that slides displayed at a company town hall revealed Paramount+ drew 10.4 billion global viewing hours in 2025 (up 22 percent from 2024). Free streamer Pluto TV drew 9.5 billion in the same timeframe (up 21 percent year over year). Combined, those numbers would still represent a fraction of the 191 billion viewing hours in 2025 that competitor Netflix publicly shared, but the leaked numbers add some context to Paramount’s stated strategy to combine not just Paramount+ and Pluto but HBO Max once its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery goes through. Speaking of which …

The unholy union between Warner Bros. Discovery and David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance isn’t completely in the clear yet: There are still several potential regulatory and practical roadblocks that could stop it. We spoke with Alvaro Bedoya, former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, and Corey Martin, chair of Granderson Des Rochers, LLP’s entertainment finance practice, to understand the various hurdles that could still alter, delay, or prevent the deal from going through. —Hershal Pandya (Read the full story.)

By Josef Adalian

Photo: ABC

The White House’s war on free speech entered a new phase Tuesday as Donald Trump loyalist and Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr ordered an early review of broadcast licenses for Disney's eight ABC-branded television stations. While the FCC claimed its decision was part of a broader investigation into Disney’s DEI policies, Carr acted barely 24 hours after both Trump and his wife Melania demanded ABC fire late night host Jimmy Kimmel, making it pretty obvious to anyone outside of MAGA world what was really going on. As former FCC chief counsel Robert Corn-Revere put it, “The DEI angle is being used as a pretext to go after ABC because the president doesn't like Kimmel.” 

Corn-Revere, who is now chief counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is not alone in his assessment of Carr’s intentions. FCC commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat at the agency, tells Buffering that Tuesday’s action represents “the most egregious assault on the First Amendment that we have seen this agency take” and that the way it moved up the date of Disney’s license renewals — which in some cases weren’t due to expire for five years — hadn’t been done in decades. 

But in what Gomez and Corn-Revere both said was a hopeful sign, Disney’s response to the FCC’s actions, while moderate in tone, suggested it isn’t about to simply roll over for Carr. Indeed, the fact that Kimmel has been on TV this week as normal, despite the pressure to remove him — and that he didn’t offer an apology for his joke about Trump’s poor health and age relative to his wife’s — also seemed to indicate new Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro was not looking to immediately fold in face of blowback from the White House. (Disney reps did not respond to requests for comment beyond the company’s initial statement.) 

My Tuesday story for Vulture about all this included a Q&A with Corn-Revere, who talked at about why he thinks Carr’s moves will backfire, the reason he has been willing to take on threats to the First Amendment from both the left and right, and how everything Carr did this week can be summed up in two words: “batshit crazy.”

I also had the chance to speak to Gomez, who has been sounding the alarm about Carr and Trump’s moves against free speech from the moment Trump returned to the White House last year. As a sitting commissioner, she obviously is a bit more careful about her choice of words: When I asked her what it was like to work with a radical like Carr, she politely told me she doesn’t discuss her personal conversations with the chairman. And yet, she did not hold back when it came to laying out the stakes involved with the FCC’s most recent action: “This is clearly motivated by this administration's desire to retaliate against critics and to control how the media portrays this administration.”

Thanks for taking the time to talk, Commissioner Gomez. What’s your reaction to Chairman Carr’s move?

So let's start with the fact that this is the most egregious assault on the First Amendment that we have seen this agency take. This action is highly unusual. It's been decades since the commission took action like this. At least one of the licenses is not due for renewal for five years. And then targeting the local licenses in order to punish a broadcast network, in order to silence critics, and in order to retaliate against a couple of talents at the network? It’s outrageous.

It also just goes to show that media companies cannot assume that if they capitulate that they will be protected from future demands from this administration that violate their First Amendment rights. But if the agency takes action against Disney with this process, I look forward to watching it play out, because the FCC will lose the fight. 

I had one expert tell me that Trump’s term would be over before it would all be settled. Do you agree that this won’t be over anytime soon?

This is a lengthy process that the agency has just embarked on. The very first shot across the bow is this order for the Disney local broadcast stations — and it's only the owned and operated ones, not anyone else — to demonstrate that they should have their licenses renewed. Disney will respond to that. Then there's a whole other process that, if the agency decides to take adverse action against them, the agency will have to engage with, and that would take years. And after it goes through that lengthy process, then Disney can actually challenge the FCC's actions. The litigation would also take years. 

Do you agree that this action is more about the Trump White House loathing Jimmy Kimmel versus the fig leaf it presented of DEI?

Oh, this is clearly motivated by this administration's desire to retaliate against critics, against comics, and to control how the media portrays this administration. It's both about retaliating against Disney proper as well as sending a message to other broadcasters. And that's been the goal from day one, when the administration began its campaign of censorship and control in order to ensure that broadcasters and reporters only show content and report on issues in a way that favors this administration. DEI is absolutely a pretext. 

Are you worried that Carr and his allies will try to find some sort of loophole in the Communications Act’s Section 236 by claiming they’re acting in the best interests of the public?

So, first and foremost, the First Amendment is paramount in protecting against the overreach that this FCC and this administration have been demonstrating. Section 326 is basically just implementing in statute the First Amendment protections. There's no way to get around First Amendment protections, and the First Amendment protections are pretty broad. 

Now, what this FCC has done is, it's tried to use this public-interest standard in a very vague way that allows them to simply go after content that they don't like. That's a violation of our constitutional rights, and it's also a violation of viewers and listeners' constitutional rights to receive and to watch information and content of their choosing. I'm confident that this will fail.  

Of course, even if the FCC were to prevail and revoke Disney’s broadcast licenses, the ABC network would still exist and be able to distribute its programs to the majority of the country where it doesn’t own stations, right? And in the markets where it did lose stations, it could either affiliate with the new owners or just let viewers watch live on Hulu, yes?

You’re correct. For all the pretext of serving local communities and that this is all about making sure that the public interest is served for local communities, this is punishing the local broadcast stations over the national network's content. This won't stop Disney. It will only hurt the local stations and the communities that they serve.