Read This: The Good Place’s Mike Schur says the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger creates bad place for creatives

A Hollywood Reporter column from the veteran TV creator calls the pending merger 'bad for everyone except those at the very top."

By Dennis Perkins  |  August 24, 2026 | 2:20pm
Screenshot: Good Hang/YouTube
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Read This: The Good Place’s Mike Schur says the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger creates bad place for creatives

In a guest column penned for the Hollywood Reporter, writer, showrunner, and all-around creative force for good Mike Schur warns that the currently on-hold merger between media giants Paramount and Warner Bros. would spell disaster—even for people who’ve brought to life classics like The Good Place, The Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Parks and Recreation.

As Schur puts it:

To be clear, I personally have had about as good a professional run as anyone over the last twenty years. I write this only to point out the obvious: if someone in my position has witnessed, and been affected by, the harms of unchecked media consolidation, that means everyone has. And many to a far worse degree.

Schur makes only passing reference to the various controversies surrounding the right-wing billionaire Ellison family gaining further control over an increasingly consolidated media landscape. The TV veteran focuses mainly on how the creation of yet another media conglomerate will necessarily eliminate everything from industry jobs to opportunities for daring programming like the Schur-produced Hacks to get picked up in a shrunken buyer’s market. 

Says Schur:

Again, we don’t have to theorize any of these outcomes. Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019 put them all on full display. After the merger, Fox’s television development operation was folded into Disney’s. Their studio’s priorities continued, Fox’s did not. Writers who had built relationships at Fox found themselves adrift. On the theatrical side, the Disney-Fox merger all but eliminated Fox from the feature business and the combined company cut its output of wide-release films in half.  More than 4,000 Fox employees lost their jobs.

It’s a passionate, unsurprisingly well-written insider’s view of the already beleaguered marketplace for bold creative voices to get their projects bought, produced and distributed, with Schur lauding the actions by the Writers Guild and 12 state attorneys general to challenge the merger. He also took a swipe at Paramount CEO David Ellison’s threat to pick up his toys and flee California for less regulated pastures should the deal not succeed and sent out a concluding call for others in the industry to join in objecting to the merger, noting:

It’s up to us to bolster those arguments, and to fight tooth and nail to sustain what is left of our struggling — but still breathing — creative industry.

You can read Mike Schur’s complete column here.

 
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