The Phantom Reckoning

This week, CBS made an announcement: Les Moonves, the chairman under whose watch the network had transformed into a commercial juggernaut, was resigning. It was news that was, as so much news will be these days, simultaneously shocking and deeply predictable—the latter because the departure came after Ronan Farrow, in July, had reported in The New Yorker on allegations of sexual harassment and emotional abuse that had been made against the TV executive; the former because CBS, despite assurances that it “takes each report of misconduct very seriously,” had previously declined to act decisively in response to the revelations. On Sunday, however, The New Yorker published a second report on Moonves—this one containing allegations of forced oral sex and physical violence, some of them made by women who had spoken out because they had felt betrayed by CBS’s laconic response to Farrow’s initial story. It was this additional round of reporting that appears to have propelled the network to its newfound moral clarity. “Moonves is gone,” Stephen Colbert summed things up on The Late Show this week. He paused. “For at least nine months until he does his set at the Comedy Cellar.”

The joke was prophetic: There are indeed shades of Louis C.K.’s warp-sped return in the recent saga of Les Moonves. The executive, it was quickly reported, isn’t fully leaving CBS; instead, he will remain at the network to “perform transition advisory services.” (The flawed logic of “too big to fail” appends itself just as readily, it seems, to those who have delivered unto the world the jingle that begins with “men, men, men, men, manly-men, men, men” and concludes with a climactic “meeeeeeeeeeeen.”) A CBS board member, in discussing Moonves’s demi-departure, lauded the executive’s “24 years of service” as if he were simply a happy retiree on the cusp of being presented with his golden watch. Which was, for all its dissonance, fitting. There remains a chance, after all, that Moonves will depart CBS not with a golden timepiece so much as a golden parachute: Pending the results of an investigation being conducted by law firms that are kept on retainer by CBS, he still stands to exit his role with as much as $100 million in severance. And even if he earns nothing more, he will leave the network with a net worth estimated to be $700.