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California lawmakers have agreed on a partial carveout for the film and TV industry from a state cap on tax credits.

The bill, AB 186, was unveiled on Friday evening. It addresses concerns raised in June by the Motion Picture Association and a coalition of entertainment unions, who argued that the cap threatened to undermine the state’s $750 million tax incentive program.

The state budget seeks to stabilize revenues by preventing corporations from claiming more than $5 million a year in tax credits for the next three years. Industry stakeholders argued that the measure had the unintended consequence of hamstringing Hollywood’s recovery by limiting the ability of studios to use state incentives for in-state production.

The MPA and the Entertainment Union Coalition have signed on to the agreement. As Variety reported on Aug. 18, the deal falls short of their request for a complete exemption for film tax credits from the $5 million cap.

Instead, the legislation will accelerate the payback period for studios that elect to refund their credits for cash. Under existing law, studios can choose to get cash back instead of claiming the incentives as a credit against tax liability — but at the cost of a 10% discount, with a payback period of five years. The deal will accelerate that period to just two years and reduce the haircut to 5%.

The agreement also fully exempts credits for independent film — which account for 10% of the $750 million program — from the cap.

“It meaningfully improves the situation,” said Kathleen Thompson, vice president of tax incentives at Cast & Crew, a production services company. “They threw a bone to both the studios and to independents.”

The deal also extends the expiration date of non-refundable tax credits issued prior to 2025 by up to five years. That provision is meant to help studios that are still sitting on millions of dollars of old, unused credits, and were at risk of having them expire after nine years.

The bill is authored by Sen. Ben Allen and Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur, who also wrote the bill that increased the incentive program to $750 million last year. In a statement, Zbur said that the fix will provide “greater stability and certainty” for production workers.

“It does not address every challenge facing this highly competitive and mobile industry, and there is more work to do in the coming months, but this is an important step toward ensuring film and television remain a cornerstone of California’s economy,” Zbur said.

The deal is almost identical to an earlier version that circulated in Sacramento last week. A fact sheet accompanying that version said that it would “mitigate some of the impacts” of the tax credit cap. The only significant difference that a provision to make it easier to claim credits against sales tax — which had been sought by studios — was dropped.

The compromise is the result of complex negotiations among industry unions, studios, legislative leaders and the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom. State leaders resisted an industry-specific carveout because it would have led to calls for similar consideration for the tech industry.

The bill must be approved by both houses by midnight on Monday, and is expected to do so.

Apparently the deep and much-talked-about rift between the Who and former (and future?) drummer Zak Starkey was not quite a hell-freezes-over situation after all. Starkey, who was famously revealed to have been unceremoniously handed his walking orders in April 2025, is now back with Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend … or at least he has rehearsed with them in advance of expected future dates.

Both Daltrey and Starkey have made public statements announcing and confirming the somewhat surprising musical reconciliation. Representatives for both Starkey and the Who confirmed to Variety that the respective statements are accurate.

In a solo gig at the Encore Theater in Las Vegas on Wednesday night, Daltrey informed the audience had recently done a rehearsal with Starkey and “it sounded great,” according to a review of the show the next day in the Las Vegas Journal-Review.

That this was coming direct from Daltrey was especially unexpected, since the singer had been perceived by much of the public as the surviving member who was most aggrieved by Starkey,’s playing or behavior, although Daltrey went on in interviews to suggest that he was being made into a fall guy for a somewhat unpopular decision that was not his alone.

And then, sure enough, Starkey — who had played with the band for 30 years and made it abundantly clear that he would welcome being invited back — confirmed that what Daltrey had said was true.

On social media. Starkey, who is the son of Ringo Starr, posted a screenshot of the relevant paragraph from the Las Vegas newspaper review, and then added his caption: “Nice one Rog x. Lookin forward to tearin it up with The Who again..The rehearsal was great.. I don’t think we’ve ever rehearsed as tough as that .. usually we drink tea and talk about what time we’re going home!”

Then Starkey made a more formal statement, given to Variety, further establishing his zeal for the reunion: “We rehearsed for an afternoon and were absolutely on fire,” the drummer wrote. “I’m so happy to be back playing the music I love with people I love. It’s good to be home.”

If you’re asking yourself “Didn’t the Who do a farewell tour last year?,” the answer is, that was a U.S. farewell tour the band wrapped up last October, with Starkey having gotten the boot before it started. But that didn’t mean the group wasn’t still prepared to make one last swing around other parts of the world, or even to do one-off concerts in the States.

“It’s not over by any means,” Daltrey told the Arizona Republic about the Who, while publicizing his solo tour. “It’s just that was the last tour of America for the Who.” The singer mentioned to that interviewer that the group had recently done a rehearsal to make sure they were properly ready to do a farewell tour in Europe, without mentioning at that time that Starkey had taken part in the rehearsal, if indeed it is just one rehearsal that has taken place so far.

The exact reasons for Starkey’s dismissal have been clouded, with some deciding that it must be due to an on-stage dispute between Daltrey and Starkey over their lack of being in sync during the band’s first-ever performance of “The Song is Over,”, while intimates of the group suggested that the real reasons for a split had to do with other factors. In interview after he was let go, Starkey insisted that he didn’t understand what had happened, even while pointing out that he was still in regular contact with both Daltrey and Townshend.

In July 2025, Starkey did an interview with Variety in which he cheekily declared, “I’m the most famous drummer on welfare.”

He said that when he was sacked, he had been asked to say that it was his decision to quit, which was not acceptable for him. ““I’m not a rock star and they are,, but I’m not gonna let people… make me look fucking bad and them look good because they want me to lie,” he told Variety then. “I wouldn’t do it… and then when they did it, I just threw ‘em under the fucking bus because it was bullshit. And then my dad stepped up for me, and that was the greatest thing in the world.”

He elaborated: “I didn’t really enjoy being treated like that at all, because (Daltrey) is my friend, but he was wrong. And Roger is one of them guys that, once he’s made his mind up, there ain’t going back. And I couldn’t believe the amount of support that happened. And then, how many times do you get fired twice?”

Of reconciliation prospects, Starkey then said, “I feel like anything could happen, but if it doesn’t, I’m cool with it, man. … The weirdest thing was, the day before I got sacked the last time, I’d done an interview with the Sunday Times and I said, “’t’s a vocation, man, being in the Who — it’s not a job. It’s like being a nun, or a nurse.’ And 12 hours later after that, I was fired. It’s so fucked up. But actually, it’s so funny, isn’t it? That’s what’s great about it. It’s funny as well as fucking insane. … If it doesn’t come back together, then it doesn’t come back together. But wow, what a great 29 years, man. I’d like to make it 30. Whatever it is, it would be great, just because them two guys are in it.”

Well, just how good can grief be? That’s a question raised by Sara Bareilles‘ “Good Grief,” which, true to its promissory title, deals primarily with loss and death and the kind of tough stuff that folks in a marketing meeting might suggest slightly downplaying when one is releasing one’s first studio album in seven years. If that focus sounds like it could make for a slog, Bareilles — who was prompted to go down this path by the death of her decades-long best friend — is very much into finding ways to celebrate as well as mourn, or at least actively explore how those two polarizing impulses might intersect. But apart from that, there’s the matter of just how awfully spirit-lifting her earth-angel mezzo-soprano tends to be, even when backing herself into dark corners before backing her way back out again. All of which is to say: Music lovers could not ask for a better bereavement counselor.

Not one to put off dealing with the elephant in the room, she concentrates several of the songs most overtly tied to her friend’s death from cancer in the first third of the album. Counterintuitively, perhaps, this is where some of the most joyful-sounding material is found too. Bareilles starts off with “Home,” which approaches the subject matter from a different angle, paraphrasing bits of a conversation she saw Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper share on television about their own experiences with grief, and how for many of us it gets emotionally brushed under the family dinner table: “I was taught to bury with the dead / The presence of my grief / I see it now, but didn’t then / That silence is a thief / It made strangers out of friends / Robbed me of saving graces offered in unlikely places.”

The second number, “Just Kids,” is where she begins to bring her own experiences with loss in, going in completely on her late BFF, college bestie and former tour manager Chad Joseph, finding some wryness in the details — “You never got to get married and I hate where you’re buried” — yet a weird exultation in writing about him in real time. In a meta moment, she describes herself singing the song she’s writing about him as a voice mail she’s driven to put down as a voice mail, in public: “Out on the street / Singing in the phone / They’re looking at me / There was a time / That I might have cared / But this one’s for my best friend so let ’em stare.” If this were one of her past or future Broadway musicals — say, a sequel to “Waitress” where Jenna has to plan a funeral — it would be the 11 o’clock number.

By track 3, the Aaron Dessner-co-produced “Still Crying,” she’s hovering over a deathbed: “Pray, pray to someone I used to know / I request a rescue / Tell Him that he moves too slow.” But it’s not arranged as the somber ballad you might expect, but as a waltz-tempo ode to emotional exhaustion that sounds weirdly romantic, almost like an old-fashioned doo-wop tune, but with tearlessness replacing true love as the ideal end game of all this striving. (Bareilles cites Roy Orbison as the reference point in interviews.) At this point it’s pretty clear that “Good Grief” will never be a grind to get through, however tough the stuff it deals with is, and with the album just getting started, and a lot of potential showstoppers scattered throughout in a variety of moods and styles, the clock will not get run out too exhaustingly or early.

There is a song dealing movingly with IVF struggles Bareilles has been open about, “Ladies in Line.” (Sondheim might appreciate this strange echo of the “Company” line.) She offers two numbers that touch on the grief Americans might feel about current sociopolitical currents: the dramatic, ominously percussive “Hands Off My Body,” first premiered in concert a couple of years back (“No I’m not gonna choke on a thank you / To a god I don’t pray to / Your holiness haunts me”), and “Heartland,” a defiantly hopeful patriotic ballad sung partly from the point of view of the Statue of Liberty. There’s even a devastating breakup ballad, “Say Leave,” although Bareilles is fairly recently (and apparently happily) wed; she’s not above borrowing from friends’ romantic experience to find a bonus way here to break some hearts, just in case the death stuff didn’t get you.

But fans who follow her on social media, where she’s discussed mental health struggles, will sense she’s writing more out of her own life again with “Nervous Breakdown.” The title sounds like it could be a last, harrowing straw, but it’s actually a track that breaks the noble mood as a purely fun, semi-comical jazz shuffle that delves into high anxiety over the ironic comfort of a cabaret-style stand-up-bass-and-piano combo. “I’m having a nervous breakdown / Just me myself and I / You, you’re not invited!” she warns, through what sure sounds like a smile.

But of course, “Good Grief” is an invitation, to commiserate and put a dent in the cycles of misery — be they related to death, love or America, even — through the sharing of voices, starting with Bareilles’ sweetly uplifting guide vocal. And all that, as someone once said, baked in a beautiful pie.