Warner Bros. TV's Boss Will Now Oversee MTV and BET, Too

George Cheeks named 10 Skydance TV chiefs as Jesse Sisgold, David Ellison's partner since 2014, left for an advisory role at RedBird Capital.

Channing Dungey already runs Warner Bros. Television, the studio that makes "The Pitt." Under Skydance's new TV structure, she'll also oversee more than 50 cable brands from both sides of the merger, including MTV and BET from Paramount and HGTV and TNT from Warner.

George Cheeks, Skydance TV's co-chair and chief content officer, named the 10 executives who'll report to him in a staff memo Wednesday, Deadline reported, and TheWrap had the same lineup. So who decides what gets made on the TV side? Mostly the people who already did. The seat that disappeared belonged to Jesse Sisgold, who'd been at David Ellison's side since Skydance was tiny.

The center of the chart is a new unit, Skydance TV Studios. It puts three shops under one roof: Dungey's Warner Bros. Television Group, CBS Studios under David Stapf and Paramount Television Studios under Matt Thunell. In Cheeks's memo, that's "NCIS" at one, "Reacher" and the Taylor Sheridan shows at another. CBS's documentary shop, See It Now Studios, becomes a label inside CBS Studios, and its president, Susan Zirinsky, reports to Stapf.

Around the studios, David Berson runs a Global Sports Group that combines CBS Sports, TNT Sports and WBD Sports, with rights that run from the NFL to March Madness. Amy Reisenbach keeps CBS Entertainment. Tom Cibrowski oversees CBS News operations, but the newsroom's top editor isn't on Cheeks's chart. Editor-in-chief Bari Weiss reports straight to co-CEOs Ellison and Ynon Kreiz, as previously announced.

Then there's the layer that keeps the machine running. Bryon Rubin becomes chief operating officer and picks up the CBS Television Stations group, working with its president, Jennifer Mitchell. Laurel Weir takes research, Mike Benson takes marketing and Chris Ender takes communications, serving as Skydance TV's spokesperson.

Five days earlier, streaming went the other way. On Oct. 23, Casey Bloys filled the top of Skydance DTC with the same team he'd led at HBO, Deadline reported, and Paramount+'s head of originals, Jane Wiseman, left as HBO took over. Her team now reports to Sarah Aubrey. Cheeks's version keeps the Warner, CBS and Paramount chiefs in their chairs, at least for now. Weir will keep running scheduling for the Paramount cable networks "while we work through integration planning," he wrote.

Sisgold's exit came first, in Ellison's own memo earlier Wednesday. Sisgold joined Skydance in 2014, TheWrap reported, and Ellison remembered the company as "14 people working out of a bungalow on the Paramount Lot." Sisgold most recently ran Paramount Sports Entertainment, now Skydance Sports Entertainment, which made documentaries, many of them with the NFL and other leagues, according to Deadline. That unit now goes into Skydance TV Studios, "with details to follow," Cheeks wrote.

Sisgold isn't going far. He'll be a senior advisor to Gerry Cardinale at RedBird Capital Partners, based in Beverly Hills himself, TheWrap reported. Cardinale sits on Skydance's board, and Deadline described him as one of the main people who designed the deal itself, the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery.

Earlier this fall, before the deal closed, Sisgold laid out the upside to TheWrap: "Obviously, if the merger were to happen, there's just more turf, more opportunity." The merger closed Oct. 6. Most of the turf now sits with Cheeks's 10, and his memo ended by admitting the map isn't finished: "More to come."

Source: Deadline, retrieved October 29, 2026. Other sources: TheWrap, Deadline (2), TheWrap (2), Deadline (3).