Skydance‘s CEO Business Leadership Team unveiled on Monday features only Co-Chairs, with everyone in the group sharing oversight of a division alongside someone else. All pairs come from the same side of the merged Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery company (WBD’s Casey Bloys & JB Perrette for DTC and James Gunn & Peter Safran for DC; Paramount’s Dana Goldberg & Josh Greenstein for film) except for one crossover duo: Paramount’s George Cheeks and WBD’s Perrette, who will serve as co-Chairs of Skydance TV.

The move marks the latest shared leadership position for Cheeks and also a new role he has not been in yet — at least by title — as Chief Content Officer of Skydance TV, a unit spanning Skydance’s three TV studios, Warner Bros. TV, CBS Studios and Paramount TV Studios, CBS and about 30 basic cable networks. As Skydance TV Chief Business officer, Perrette will oversee the division’s ad sales, distribution, content sales and international operations.

For a decade now, Harvard Law graduate Cheeks has been the business partner to a creative executive, whether it was as Co-President of Universal Cable Prods. and Wilshire Studios alongside Dawn Olmstead or as NBC Entertainment Co-Chairman alongside Paul Telegdy. Now he is the creative executive alongside Perrette with a title matching that of Skydance DTC Chief Content Officer Bloys, one of TV industry’s most accomplished development executives.

That caps a long evolution for Cheeks that can be traced back to one of his first Hollywood jobs, while having Perrette as Chief Business Officer across DTC as well as TV Studios and linear networks corrects a structural flow that existed at both Paramount and WBD.

The Business Guy

After stints at entertainment law firms Loeb & Loeb and Hansen Jacobson Teller and the BA & legal department of Castle Rock Entertainment early on, Cheeks landed a business and legal affairs job at MTV Networks. There, along with drafting deal memos, he also started doing script coverage for then-top programming executives Tony DiSanto and Liz Gateley.

Cheeks got his first formal assignment on the creative side — and showed his talent relations skills — when, as EVP Business Operations for NBC and Universal TV, he was put in charge of NBC Late Night in 2014. Lorne Michaels took a liking to him (while disliking his predecessor) and took him under his wing, valuing his creative sense by asking for his feedback on writer packages and taking him to auditions.

Cheeks has acknowledged that getting the NBC Late Night gig changed his career, fueling his aspirations to straddle business and creative. He would later be handpicked as the main liaison to NBCUniversal’s other uber TV producer, Dick Wolf, for similar reasons (the procedural king wanted to switch executives), proving that he can work well with top-level talent.

Still, when Bonnie Hammer announced Cheeks and Olmstead’s appointment as UCP co-Presidents in early 2018, she called Olmstead a “talented creative executive” while praising Cheeks’ “business savvy” as “second to none.” Similarly, Steve Burke’s statement about Cheeks’ promotion as NBC Entertainment co-Chairman alongside Telegdy later that year called him “a strategist and masterful dealmaker.”

That is a perception Cheeks carried over in his 2020 move to then-ViacomCBS as President and CEO of CBS Entertainment, with David Nevins initially serving as the division’s Chief Content Officer. That changed in 2021. Overseeing CBS-branded operations in various roles over the past five years — including another shared one as co-CEO of Paramount Global — varnished Cheeks’ creative credentials as he worked closely with such executives as CBS Entertainment President Amy Reisenbach and CBS Studios President David Stapf.

Now Cheeks, who also has been overseeing Paramount’s basic cable networks, will be focusing on programming and marketing content while expanding his portfolio to include Warner Bros. TV, Paramount TV Studios as WBD’s cable brands, leaving most of the business areas to Perrette. (Given his business background, Cheeks is still expected to get involved in some decisions.)

Bundling Linear & Streaming Business Ops

Legacy media companies such as Skydance are faced with managing the transition from linear TV to streaming, and Perrette serving as Chief Business Officer across both direct-to-consumer and linear networks/TV studios will help facilitate that as the two areas have become intertwined in many key areas such as carriage agreements, ad and content sales.

For instance, in affiliate distribution deals for linear networks, carriers increasingly insist on bundling the streaming service. The same goes for ad buyers who package ad time across linear and digital.

And then there is content licensing, which could be a lot more efficient if the studios’ distribution divisions and their sibling streamers are overseen by the same business op executive. For instance, CBS and Paramount+ had been siloed, with Paramount+ automatically asking for exclusivity on virtually all CBS series. A holistic approach would help determine whether certain shows need to stream exclusively on Paramount+ or, based on their engagement and other metrics, they could be licensed to other platforms too, bringing in revenue that can be used to produce more shows.

Straddling both areas will also give the business executive in charge more ownership over next-day CBS series to better integrate them into the platform alongside the Paramount+ originals. (CBS fare, a big viewership driver in-season, is expected to stay largely on Paramount+ until the streamer’s merger with HBO Max is completed within the next couple of years.)

Additionally, the new streamlined structure with Perrette across both linear and streaming business ops makes for simplified and expedited decision-making. At WBD, where he was CEO of global streaming, it was a quartet of executives collaborating on these decisions: Perrette, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, Chief Revenue and Strategy Officer Bruce Campbell and President of International Gerhard Zeiler.

‘The Odd Couple’ 2.0?

In addition to being the only cross-company pair in the top Skydance executive echelon, Cheeks and Perrette share another distinction — Cheeks is the only former Paramount Global and Perrette the only former Discovery executive in the group.

As for compatibility, both are bringing in good track record. Perrette already has his successful partnership with Bloys, and Cheeks has showed that he could work with anyone.

Cheeks joked about it when asked in 2019 how he gets along with Telegdy, a flamboyant, larger-than-life personality.

“We literally could not be more different. It’s like Casting 101: ‘Let’s cast this dude and that dude and they’re so different, they’re an odd couple,’” he said at NATPE.

Cheeks clearly impressed Hollywood moguls with his performance as he keeps getting cast as half of executive couples.