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Paramount TV media chair George Cheeks, whose domain has included all of CBS in addition to the Paramount cable networks, is said to be in line for an expanded oversight at the newly merged Paramount-Warner Bros. entity (which will be named “Skydance,” the company revealed Friday).

Skydance would not comment, but Cheeks has been seen as a strong lieutenant overseeing the TV properties under Paramount ever since Skydance took control of the company last August. Prior to that, Cheeks was one of the three co-CEOs of Paramount Global — and was the only one of that triumvirate to make the transition to the new company.

Speculation and rumors of how the structure on the TV network and studio side might play out have been heavy over the past few days, now that the question of how the streaming structure at the merged company has been settled (with HBO boss Casey Bloys on top and Paramount direct-to-consumer head Cindy Holland exiting).

Many of the questions in the more traditional Hollywood world of TV networks and studios — still a hefty revenue driver — have centered on what roles Skydance head David Ellison might have in mind for Warner Bros. TV Group and WBD U.S. Networks chairman/CEO Channing Dungey and Cheeks. Both execs are well-liked and respected, and both boast tremendous domains, consisting of both studios and networks.

One scenario making the rounds has Cheeks potentially overseeing all of the vast TV holdings of the combined company, but so far, there’s no firm confirmation and a final structure isn’t expected to be announced until next week.

All eyes will also be on what role Ellison picks for Dungey, whose tenure at Warner Bros. TV Group continues to be extremely successful. Under Dungey, the studio produces more than 80 original series for more than 20 platforms, including HBO, HBO Max and others, with series like “Ted Lasso,” “Abbott Elementary”, “The Bachelor” franchise, “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” “The Jennifer Hudson Show,” “The Pitt,” “Running Point,” “Shrinking,” “Rooster,” “The Voice” and the upcoming “Harry Potter” series. So far this year, the division has landed 13 new series orders and 13 series renewals, while “The Pitt” just landed six Emmys — including its second for outstanding drama.

Dungey also took on oversight of WBD’s U.S. Networks in 2025, including Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, Investigation Discovery, TLC, Adult Swim, Animal Planet, Cartoon Network, Cooking Channel, HLN, OWN, Science Channel, TBS, TNT, Travel Channel, Tru TV and Turner Classic Movies.

When Variety spoke to Dungey last month, she said she had met with Ellison in more of a “getting to know you” setting. Beyond that, she expressed her desire to stick with the company post-merger: “I love my team at Warner Bros. Television Group. I love our shows, our talent. And I’ve become very happy in my U.S. networks role, which was something that I didn’t see coming almost two years ago. The best-case scenario for me is something that allows me to continue to play around in both of these spaces.”

Among the possible setups that observers have spitballed was the idea of splitting their oversight between networks and studios. But if Cheeks does take control of the entire TV business, the biggest question will be whether Dungey will opt to remain and report to him. Insiders say the two have a good rapport, particularly as Warner Bros. TV has been a hefty supplier of series to CBS over the years — including the successful crop of Chuck Lorre comedies that have aired on the Eye.

Beyond that, the question also remains as to how Warner Bros. TV (run by president Brett Paul and creative affairs president Clancy Collins White), CBS Studios (run by president David Stapf), and Paramount TV Studios (run by Matt Thunell) will all be integrated.

CBS Studios is also a major enterprise, producing more than 60 series, while Paramount TV Studios has a hefty slate including the Taylor Sheridan shows.

Currently, Stapf and Thunell report to Cheeks, while Paul and Collins White report to Dungey. There could be a scenario where Warner Bros. TV, CBS Studios and Paramount TV Studios continue as separate labels.

Cheeks had previously been president and CEO of CBS, having joined Paramount in March 2020. This repped his second stint there, having first joined MTV Networks (a part of the then-Viacom company) in 1998 and later taking on roles including exec VP of business affairs and general counsel for the Viacom Music and Entertainment Groups.

Cheeks later moved to NBC in 2012 as president of business operations and late-night programming, then became co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and later as vice chairman of NBCUniversal Content Studios.

Deadline was first to report of Cheeks’ potential new role at Skydance.

I was a classical musician growing up, so I’m probably more disposed than most to like a movie set in the classical-music world. Then again, that could mean that I set a higher bar for authenticity when it comes to depicting it. There’s no doubt that the cinema’s reigning masterpiece of classical-music drama is “Tár” — a great movie in so many other ways that that remains only one dimension of it. But Todd Field inhabited that world, and allowed the audience to do so, in a way that no previous director had. Two other films leap to mind that have the ring of deep-dish classical-music reality: “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” which beautifully caught the experience of studying music in high school, and “Maestro,” a movie I may have enjoyed more than others, even though it left out a ton of stuff about Leonard Bernstein (like, for instance, the heart of his conducting career in the ’50s and ’60s!), because I instinctively filled all of that in.

Viewed on that scale, “Behemoth!,” Tony Gilroy’s drama about a professional cellist, played with perky mystery by Pedro Pascal, scores on the level of authenticity. Pascal’s character, a renowned musician named Alex Serian, has been a member of various world-class symphony orchestras, notably in Chicago, but the film presents us with a more plugged-in contempo angle on this kind of career. In the new era, orchestras are foundering, the pay isn’t what it used to be, and even a virtuoso string musician might need a side gig or two. For Alex, that has meant playing in orchestras that are assembled to record movie scores — a major industry, and one that “Behemoth!” depicts as being nearly as high maintenance as the prestige symphony circuit.

The conductors who oversee the recording of the movie scores are portrayed as hyper-demanding corporate perfectionists. (One of them, a prima donna played by Thomas Kretschmann, makes it feel like you’re seeing Klaus Kinski going to work for Skydance.) And from the film’s opening scene, which immerses us in the lingo of rehearsal, which is a mixture of old-school classical Euro directives (“pianissimo”) and Hollywood jargon (“new ink”), we’re right there in the cavernous recording studio, feeling the heat and the nuance.

My all-time pet peeve in classical-music films is that characters who are supposed to be playing the violin or cello almost never look real — you can see from a mile away that they’re faking it, imitating the finger and bow movements like crude mimes. Tony Gilroy has solved this problem in the most committed way possible: He had Pedro Pascal learn to play the cello. That’s really Pascal doing it, which is why everything about his motions looks real, from the vibrato to the bowing to the way he moves his head. That devotion works for the film. It allows us to feel that Alex is as genuine in his talent as a professional athlete or a star chef. Virtuosity is the air he breathes. Not every orchestra player is a virtuoso, of course, but Alex, we learn, was a child prodigy who came from a high-powered musical family (we see a clip of him playing Bach as a 6-year-old on “The Tonight Show”). That’s his pedigree, and it’s also his problem, since the family craziness has messed him up.

In addition to presenting its musical demimonde with reverent accuracy, “Behemoth!” has another quality going for it: The film is playful. It’s not a symphony — it’s a scherzo. This is only the fourth feature Gilroy has directed (it’s his first since “The Bourne Legacy” in 2012), but coming off the “Star Wars” television series “Andor,” which he created and was the showrunner for, he makes his enthusiasm for the filmmaking process palpable. For most of the film, Alex is doing movie-score session work, and Gilroy introduces an impish device: We see and hear the orchestra recording a score (the music might be suspenseful, romantic, pensive), until seconds later it becomes the score of “Behemoth!” itself. I’m not honestly sure I can say what this slightly meta gambit accomplishes, but it’s clever and fun. Gilroy got no less than nine acclaimed film composers to contribute their talents to the movie (they include James Newton Howard and Alan Silvestri and are billed as the Behemoth! Collective). But he could easily have executed the exact same trick with just one composer.

Leaping around in time, Gilroy draws us into Alex’s world with an effervescent wink at the badness of his behavior. Alex is wriggling out of a fling with Carol, the wife of one of the Chicago orchestra’s wealthy patrons — she’s played by Olivia Wilde, who radiates such intense stalker energy here that we’re not quite sure how to react. Alex just keeps calm, and that’s what Pascal does, more or less, throughout the movie. Alex’s life is falling apart, yet somehow he’s the eye of the storm; everyone around him is screwier than he is. With an elegant mustache and perfect gelled hair that dips down onto his forehead, Pedro Pascal has never looked more dashing — he’s like a refined Burt Reynolds, or maybe a passive Brando. Between his classical chops and his glamorous looks, women drop for Alex, but he’s an artist who has drifted through life, drinking and having flings, always ready to move on to the next woman and the next city and the next gig. It’s a frictionless life he revels in. But something’s got to give.

Gilroy seems to have been influenced by the elliptical quality of “Tár,” though not always to good effect. I enjoyed, to a point, the cut-and-paste chronology of “Behemoth!,” but there’s a flaw in it: The actors look identical in every scene, so some of it is confusing — like the episode in Dallas where Alex meets Nadia (Eva Victor), a star violinist who seems his match. They sleep together. But then, after a fraught phone conversation with the billionaire who wants to marry her, she lashes out at Alex (who has done nothing wrong), and we’re not sure where this is going or why. A few scenes later, tragedy has struck. But did all these events happen one after another or years apart? We figure it out, but Gilroy should have made it easier to read.

Alex, after the debacle of his break-up with Wilde’s clingy diva in Chicago, returns to Los Angeles, where he grew up. He can get session work there, and does. He still seems mellow, but he’s bestirred by a pet obsession: listening to the original avant-pop compositions posted online by Viviana (Alexa Swinton), a 15-year-old girl who has become a local celebrity. It turns out that he’s got a connection to her; she’s Nadia’s daughter. But why is he so interested? He’s just got…a feeling.

Alex’s brother, a talented but scruffy podcast host, is played by Will Arnett with a lived-in self-doubt more interesting than anything about his character in “Is This Thing On?” It’s through their conversations that we start to piece together Alex’s troubled family life — but here, once again, Pascal suffers in such a placid way that we keep wanting more. The movie finally comes to a head in an expertly staged suspense sequence where Alex, pretending to be a caterer’s assistant, sneaks into Nadia’s stone mansion, finds what he was looking for, and then has to sneak out. Naturally, the music playing under all this is “movie music.”

What, in the end, is “Behemoth!,” apart from a movie with a dismally bad title? (You can’t remember it. You can’t pronounce it. And it’s hard to say what, exactly, it means or why it carries an exclamation point — though it is, of course, the title of one of the films that Alex is helping to record the score for.) “Behemoth!” is a midlife-crisis movie. It’s a classical-musician movie. It’s a mild romantic mystery. It’s Tony Gilroy fiddling around with pure movie form. (He’s a sly orchestrator of big-screen storytelling.) But 19 years after “Michael Clayton,” he’s still looking for a subject that will allow him to do what he did so masterfully in that movie: heighten our perceptions of the world along with our emotions, until they become one.