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The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy.

From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time.

Find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

It is Monday, March 18th.

Hollywood loves the power list. It's a town of egos and hierarchies, both perceived and actual.

I've edited many, many power lists in my day. When I was at Hollywood Reporter, we did something like 20 or 25 of them a year, maybe more, various elements of the business.

And the biggest one, at least the one that drove the most people crazy,

was something called the THR 100. We called the 100 most powerful people in entertainment.

I think they stopped doing it after I left in 2020. But this was my favorite because it evaluated what I might call the juice that people had in town, the cachet, the influence,

the people you most want to be in business with.

The official methodology we used was the size and reach of a person's purview, their empire they

oversee, the success of his or her work, and that was recent, plus the power to get things made,

greenlight power. Company ownership would help there.

And then some intangibles like heat, clout, indicators of influence that we could glean from conversations with insiders.

An imperfect science, of course, but informed and fun.

So today, Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg and I are going to rip off that template pretty shamelessly,

except we're just doing our top

10. Who are the most influential figures in entertainment right now? The rule is they all have to be

in the business. So no Andy Jassy at Amazon, he's a CEO, or Tim Cook at Apple, their companies are

in the business, but they aren't themselves. And celebrity definitely matters, but it's certainly

...