‘East of Eden’ Series Premiere, ‘Slow Horses’ S6E3, and Cindy Holland Leaves Paramount. Plus, Best TV of the Century Honorable Mentions.

Key takeaways

• Cindy Holland, who spent just over a year at Paramount Skydance as chair of Direct-to-Consumer after building Netflix's original programming slate, is leaving the company. Her exit email framed the move as David Ellison "optimizing for HBO stability," effectively ceding streaming leadership to Casey Bloys, chairman and CEO of HBO and HBO Max content.
• Bloys is positioned as the obvious choice because he's already proven he can run multiple content lanes at once: he maintained HBO's prestige identity while absorbing DC shows, Harry Potter, and genre IP into the Max umbrella, and he personally greenlit The Pit. The hosts argue this "do your homework before enrolling in grad school" track record makes him uniquely suited to oversee Paramount's library too.
• The hosts remain skeptical of the merger itself even as the outcome looks stable for viewers—HBO isn't disappearing and Paramount Plus isn't being gutted overnight. Their bigger worry is structural: fewer buyers in the marketplace means less competitive bidding for projects (they cite Station Eleven and Hacks, which HBO Max bought partly because it operated as a separate buyer from HBO proper).
• Paramount's actual identity is murky beyond Taylor Sheridan content (who is departing for Universal) and Star Trek; a lot of its subscriber base likely sticks around for sports, Nickelodeon kids' programming, and CBS comedies rather than prestige drama, raising questions about what Holland's 40 greenlit shows and overall deals will become under new leadership.
• Two new shows get strong recommendations: HBO's "War," a slick British legal drama from Lupin creator George Kay pitting two law firms against each other in a billionaire divorce case (Dominic West, Sienna Miller), praised for its aspirational gloss but questioned for whether it will lean into its soapy premise or get bogged down in subplots; and Netflix's "East of Eden," Zoe Kazan's adaptation of Steinbeck starring Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, and Mike Faist, praised for gorgeous magic-hour cinematography from Stuart Dryburgh and a naturalistic, lived-in tone the hosts compare to Kenneth Lonergan's "Howard's End."
• "Slow Horses" season six is singled out as a major return to form after two seasons of comfortable consistency; the hosts highlight Diana's unraveling, a surprise reveal about Flight's backbone in a confrontation scene, and the long-awaited reunion of River and Sid (Jack Lowden and Olivia Cooke), calling it some of the best writing the show has done precisely because a minor character's arc shifts the entire power balance.

Notable moments

• "This guy has been getting ready to program beyond cocktail parties in New York and Los Angeles for a very long time"; on Casey Bloys's years-long positioning for this role.
• "Fewer buyers sucks"; Andy's blunt assessment of industry consolidation regardless of how stable the transition looks.
• On "War": "It is so slick that you can barely hold on to it, and there's a chance you'd just slide right off the building."
• On "East of Eden": "This is almost like the nourishment you get from reading a good book."
• A lengthy bit imagining Tracy Letts's character revealed as the Beyonder and East of Eden secretly launching Marvel's Battleworld.
• "This show fucking rips again"; Andy on Slow Horses season three episodes in, after feeling it had plateaued.
• "We used to eat good in this country, man"; lamenting the loss of ambitious one-season shows like Soderbergh's "The Nick."
• Closing argument for snubbed shows: "It's fucking Bluey, man," plus shoutouts to Industry, Dark, Rectify, Top of the Lake, and Fargo season two as glaring omissions from the New York Times top 100 TV list.

Time saved: 1 hour, 9 minutes.