FEBRUARY 5, 2026

The biggest entertainment industry story this week was the announcement that Josh D’Amaro will replace Bob Iger as the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. It got a ton of coverage, including, of course, on Disney’s own ABC network. It wasn’t shocking that D’Amaro and Iger gave World News Tonight an exclusive joint interview, or even that David Muir’s questions were far from hard-hitting. But what did surprise me was the decision to devote nearly half the runtime, minus ads, to what one YouTube commenter rightly called a “nine-minute infomercial.” It did a disservice to viewers and, quite honestly, was just depressing to see from a broadcast that, most evenings, is light years ahead of its competition. 

This week’s Buffering does not have a warm and cuddly chat with Josh and Bob, but we do have a look at some of the big challenges facing D’Amaro as the company moves into the post-Iger world — plus some strong opinions from Rebecca Alter on D’Amaro’s record running the company’s parks business. We’ve also got some thoughts on Ted Sarandos’s big D.C. adventure, what’s at stake for Comcast as the Olympics and Super Bowl collide this weekend, and news about the first big streaming price hike of 2026. Thanks for reading!

— Joe Adalian, West Coast editor

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Comcast has spent billions snapping up sports rights over the past five years, so much so that NBC and Peacock can sometimes feel like spinoffs of ESPN (if ESPN also aired Dick Wolf dramas). It’s debatable whether this sports-centric strategy will pay off in the long run, but at least during the first half of February, Comcast’s platforms are going to dominate the war for attention: NBC and Peacock are home to the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics (which officially kick off tomorrow), Super Bowl LX (Sunday), and the NBA All-Star Game (February 15). While the All-Star Game hasn’t been a massive draw in recent years, there’s little doubt the Super Bowl and the Olympics will both be ratings blockbusters — at least relative to NBC and Peacock’s normal audience levels.

The bigger question is whether Comcast’s overall investment pays off. In years past, TV industry watchers would pore over the Nielsen numbers — particularly for the Olympics — and try to figure out whether NBC was delivering the viewership it had promised to advertisers and how that might affect profitability. Some of that will still happen obviously, as will scrutiny of how well NBC Sports covers the events in Milan. But the real test will be how many new subscribers this sports-a-palooza generates for Peacock — and, more crucially, how many of those new subs are still around in a few months time. Considering Peacock’s losses are once again growing rather than shrinking — the platform bled another half-billion dollars in red ink during 2025’s final quarter, thanks to all that sports spending — Comcast suits desperately need their “legendary February” to pay off. —Joe Adalian

…Goes to anime streamer Crunchyroll, on the heels of eliminating its free streaming plan at the end of 2025. Crunchyroll has more or less outpaced the category-specific competitors out there like HiDive and RetroCrush in terms of audience adoption. —Eric Vilas-Boas

And in the process the subscription software giant royally pissed off legions of animators, as well as professional studios, that rely on the industry-standard animation tool. Jamie Lang at Cartoon Brew had the best shutdown rundown and recap of the company’s U-turn in the wake of the backlash. Animate, the successor to Flash, has been used widely on popular productions, from Smiling Friends to Adventure Time to Inside Out 2. —E.V.B

By Joe Adalian

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos surely knew he’d be asked some stupid, blatantly partisan questions during his testimony before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee exploring his company’s planned acquisition of Warner Bros. But I’m not sure even someone as politically savvy as Sarandos could have been prepared for just how dumb things got during his roughly two-hour appearance Tuesday. Instead of an intelligent, reasonable exploration of the historic harms of corporate consolidation, the MAGA Republicans who dominated the panel opted to use their questions to try to create more content for the right-wing outrage machine. So we got Ted Cruz calling out Sarandos for not being willing to disagree with Billy Eilish’s factually correct statements about the U.S. being founded on “stolen land” and countless transphobic, factually incorrect diatribes about Netflix kids’ programming. (They’re still not over Cuties).  

But the award for most ridiculous performance by an elected official went to Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, who suggested the Warner Bros. deal should be blocked because, among other things, “99 percent of [Netflix] employees contribute to Democrats” (an amazing claim, given nearly 40 percent of the global giant’s staffers aren’t even Americans, and Netflix doesn’t have its own PAC or internal political donation programs) and former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice — or, as Schmitt called her, “the founder of Barack Obama’s DEI agenda” — is on Netflix’s board of directors. Does he know that Fox News has an actual Trump family member on its payroll? “It seems as though you have engaged in creating not only a monopoly of content potentially, but the woke-est content in the history of the world,” Schmitt went on as he worked himself into a lather. “The overwhelming majority of your stuff right now is overwhelmingly woke and it’s not reflective of what the American public wants to see.”

I very much wanted Sarandos to respond by asking the senator why that same American public has made Netflix, by far, the most popular subscription streaming service in the country, or why its shows regularly attract tens of millions of viewers — far more than, say, the very un-woke Fox News Channel or the MAGA-coded Great American Family cable network. Instead, Sarandos bit his tongue for what must have been the twentieth time that afternoon and offered the mildest of disagreements, saying only that most Americans don’t view Netflix as either Republican or Democratic. 

I’m sure some will say Sarandos and Netflix demonstrated cowardice by not pushing back more forcefully, but honestly? I don’t blame them for staying silent. The attacks were not made in good faith and were factually suspect (at minimum). Any sharp rebuttals would just give the senators what they wanted: clippable, virally shareable verbal fireworks that would prompt wider coverage of their nonsense narrative. 

There are obviously very good reasons for legislators to worry about Netflix’s plans for Warner Bros. and about Hollywood consolidation in general; Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) gently tried to push Sarandos on some of those. But for the most part, what took place Tuesday wasn’t about holding anyone to account or revealing some truth. It was just another skirmish in MAGA’s culture wars, aimed at giving the movement’s base their daily dose of Things to Be Mad About. Sarandos was wise to avoid taking the bait. 

By Joe Adalian and Chris Lee

It’s Josh D’Amaro’s Disney now, or it will be soon, anyway. The freshly named CEO undoubtedly knows his transition to power will be scrutinized intensely over the next six weeks as he takes the reins from outgoing chief executive Bob Iger. How will the former parks boss lead one of Hollywood’s most dominant entertainment companies? Will he get along with newly elevated chief creative officer Dana Walden, who nearly won the big job herself? And where will D’Amaro — who’s never made a show or movie himself — steer the company’s beloved IP? We have thoughts.

Nobody inside Disney’s TV and streaming unit would ever say so out loud, but things have been in something of a holding pattern there over the past year or two as Walden competed for the CEO gig. Everybody clearly wanted to make sure nothing they did would mess up her chance at landing the big job. Meanwhile, Disney’s TV rivals made huge moves: Comcast split up its streaming and cable units and committed upwards of $1 billion to land Taylor Sheridan for Peacock; Paramount started spending like crazy under its new owners, snapping up the UFC and the Duffer brothers; Netflix made a deal to buy Warner Bros. and is now vowing to make movies for theaters.

So with the succession drama over, will Disney TV and streaming start taking much-needed bigger swings? Iger has said he doesn’t think Disney needs to buy any new IP — that’s what his 2018 deal for 20th Century Fox was all about — but the company could use more scripted-TV tentpoles to go along with unscripted sizzlers such as The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the reinvigorated Dancing With the Stars. Its biggest new scripted hit in recent years, ABC’s unsexy but massively watched High Potential, does a great job at getting eyeballs, but broadcast shows don’t tend to drive new sign-ups for subscription services. Doubling down on finding Disney’s next massive streaming success will be a key priority for Walden in her new role as chief creative officer. —Josef Adalian

In 2013, following the two-year bake-off to name a new Warner Bros. CEO, Kevin Tsujihara promptly pushed out his felled competition amid mounting tensions: Bruce Rosenblum “exited” Warner Bros. TV, and Jeff Robinov “departed” as president of the motion-pictures group. At Disney, the board thinks it has avoided a pissing contest or a brain drain by giving Walden her expanded role while making sure D’Amaro has an experienced hand (with the deep Hollywood talent relationships he sorely lacks) running the creative decisions. So right now, there’s no reason to think Walden won’t stay at Disney until her newly extended contract ends in 2030, if not longer.

But amid the never-ending culture wars Disney habitually finds itself fighting, it’s hardly a foregone conclusion the two will achieve managerial lockstep or row the content boat in the same direction. Disney has never had a single, companywide chief creative officer. Will Walden give notes to newly installed Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni about increased Ewok presence in the Rebel Alliance? Will she demand a director’s-cut release of Pixar’s Elio? With the Burbank lot’s sprawling portfolio of television, film, and streaming falling under Walden’s suddenly supersize jurisdiction, it remains to be seen how much freedom D’Amaro gives her — or if, like Warner Bros., things quickly get … awkward. —Chris Lee

While Disney included Walden’s promotion in its press release naming D’Amaro CEO, it didn’t say anything about how, or whether, her new role would impact the day-to-day running of Disney’s TV and streaming businesses. Right now, Walden serves as co-chair of Disney Entertainment with Alan Bergman, the film boss, with both reporting to Iger. Once D’Amaro takes over, Walden will report to D’Amaro, while Bergman will report to Walden. It will then be up to Walden to decide whether Bergman takes over as sole chairman of Disney Entertainment — or someone else replaces her as his partner.

Bergman isn’t a TV guy, but he has been very involved working on Marvel- and Star Wars–branded content for Disney+, and of course he has decades of relationships with Hollywood creatives (most of whom now make both TV shows and movies). And it’s hardly unprecedented for a film vet to get handed oversight of TV: Comcast has had former Universal film chief Donna Langley running both sides of the business since 2023. Bergman and Walden have developed a good working relationship, and he was also in the mix for the CEO gig that went to D’Amaro. Given the success of Disney’s movie business under Bergman, he’s clearly earned a promotion. Whether he has the desire for an expanded portfolio, and the headaches it entails, is another question.

If Walden decides to elevate one of her underlings to co-chair of Disney Entertainment, there are several strong contenders from which to choose. Joe Earley, who heads streaming and direct-to-consumer, has worked with Walden for decades and is one of her most trusted advisers. Like Walden, he’s a former PR exec who knows the creative side of the business, though he’s never been an in-the-trenches development exec at Disney ... —J.A.

By Rebecca Alter

As we noted earlier this week, D’Amaro has “no real experience making TV shows and movies.” He has, however, worked at Disney for 28 years, most recently as chairman of Disney Experiences, so in some ways, D’Amaro is Mister Experience. Crowning the guy who runs Disney’s theme parks, cruise ships, and hotels to head the entire company telegraphs how the megacorporation envisions its future; it is one of the last major Hollywood studios, but it might see other