Word: spinned
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...like in AT&T's breakup plan. For starters, it's very hard to figure out just what is going to happen over the next two years. And confusion is a big negative in the risk-averse investment world. There's also grumbling that the various spin-offs and tracking stocks will mean endless--and endlessly expensive--work by investment bankers and lawyers...
...fans (ask Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew). But The X-Files isn't the only series of a certain age adding a prominent new face and taking a prominent risk. After losing nice guy Michael J. Fox, who's fighting Parkinson's disease, ABC's city-hall sitcom Spin City added bad boy Charlie Sheen. On NBC's Law & Order, Dianne Wiest takes over from Steven Hill, who was the show's savvy, world-weary district attorney for 10 years. Law & Order, driven more by taut crime tales than characters, has gradually jettisoned its original cast and flourished ("This sounds...
Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Spin City (Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.), lived his own scary story with Fox's loss. To replace Fox, he needed a big-enough star to "legitimately stand on his own" without imitating his well-liked predecessor. He picked a departure, all right--Sheen, lately out of rehab and one of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss's most infamous customers. "I saw it as an opportunity to get back into the fold," says Sheen. It took eight script drafts to introduce deputy mayor Charlie Crawford, a party boy we first see waking...
Breaking up has worked in the past. Ma Bell's dizzying array of spin-offs, including the regional Bell companies in 1984 and Lucent and others in the '90s, have mostly done well by being good businesses to start with and then being set free to raise capital, allocate resources independently and enter new markets as they liked...
...current dismantling is about failure. AT&T's business services and long-distance operations are suffering, reflected in the stock's 64% plunge since March. And two of the parts, initially anyway, won't enjoy the freedom so vital to effective spin-offs. The cable and consumer businesses will be tracking stocks. Their earnings will be reported separately, but managers must still compete for resources within...