Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, Tuesday’s smarter, better-looking sister email to your Monday and Thursday editions of What I’m Hearing. Matt Belloni here, still reeling from today’s stunning twist in the Paramount saga. Nothing surprises when it comes to Shari Redstone, but to drag on talks with David Ellison and his Skydance backers for six months, fully negotiate an incredibly complex transaction that provides nearly $2 billion to National Amusements, plus the sweetened $4.5 billion to the non-Redstone A shareholders and the B shareholders of Paramount Global, plus $1.5 billion to pay down Paramount debt, only to veto the deal on the goal line with a kiss-off statement thanking Skydance “for their months of work in pursuing this potential transaction”? Amazing. Truly one of the all-time great fuck yous in the history of Hollywood.

Predictably, the Paramount stock tanked 8 percent on the news and is now below $11 a share in after-hours trading. Since none of the other suitors for National Amusements has even finished due diligence, this slow-moving car crash is poised to drag on and on. I’ll have more on the Paramount situation on Thursday, as well as on The Town, and Bill Cohan will go deeper on the financials that doomed the deal in Dry Powder tomorrow. But for now, here’s Eriq Gardner with a separate and very special alcohol-infused edition of WIH+...

• A little more on the latest Netflix suit: Color me unimpressed by the fresh Baby Reindeer “real Martha” defamation lawsuit against Netflix, which amounts to yet another entry in the growing canon of libel battles facing the streamer. Sure, as Matt noted last night, it was obviously dumb for Netflix to call it a “true story,” but the primary obstacle for Fiona Harvey is that the show never...