Several weeks ago, my wife and I attended the taping of the The 39th Hispanic Heritage Awards, which celebrates Latino culture and pride.

This was the first year the awards had been presented in Minneapolis, and in a year that has been filled with often violent ICE raids and arguments over who should be considered a "true" American, it was a beautiful, inspiring evening.

The People of Minnesota were presented with the Humanitarian Award, alongside icons like Oscar D’León (Legenda Award), Mon Laferte (Social Justice Award), Eladio Carrión (Inspira Award), and Ximena Sariñana (Music Award).

Hosted by comedienne Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, with special performances by Los Tigres Del Norte, it was a reminder of just how many people love a country that often doesn't love them back nearly enough. You didn't hear anti-American rhetoric and aside from the show opening with someone holding up a sign that read "I Am An Immigrant" (a moment which didn't make the TV broadcast), nearly all talk was centered around the celebration of Hispanic culture and how that culture has integrated and improved America.

As much fun as the live taping was to experience, the resulting one-hour broadcast was less inspiring. The two-hour taping was cut down to an hour and that made for some jarring edits and jumps along the way. And while I appreciated the English subtitles, it was strange that only the speeches were captioned, not the songs.

Still, it was an inspiring evening and it included some very strong performances from the winners. It's well worth checking out, even if you don't understand everything that is going on.

The 39th Hispanic Heritage Awards is streaming now on PBS.com and the PBS Passport app.

Paramount Skydance is borrowing an extraordinary amount of money to complete its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. And almost immediately, investors showed that they are worried about how much debt the new company will have to carry.

Paramount needed roughly $52 billion in new borrowing to help finance its approximately $110 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. The financing included about $41.4 billion of new bonds, plus additional loans. Paramount expects the combined company to have roughly $80 billion of debt once the deal is completed.

That makes this more than just a giant Hollywood merger. It is also a huge bet that the combined company will generate enough cash to pay its creditors while it tries to combine two sprawling entertainment businesses.

Before a company sells bonds, banks usually ask investors how much they would like to buy. This is called an order book. It gives the banks an idea of how much demand there is and helps them decide what interest rate the company will have to pay.

Paramount initially got more than $109 billion of orders for roughly $30 billion of its higher-rated bonds. In other words, investors said they wanted to buy more than three times as much debt as Paramount planned to sell. The riskier, lower-rated bonds attracted more than $23 billion of orders for about $12.4 billion of debt.

That sounded like strong demand. But there was an important catch.

When a company has many investors competing to buy its bonds, the banks arranging the sale can generally push the interest rate down. That saves the company money because it doesn't have to pay as much interest.

Paramount's banks did just that. But when the bonds began trading after the sale, their prices fell. That meant investors who had bought them at the original price immediately saw the market value of their holdings decline. Bloomberg reported that some investors were angry enough to complain directly to the banks that arranged the deal.

The problem was particularly noticeable in the higher-quality debt. Paramount had persuaded investors to buy the bonds at their full face value, but some of those bonds quickly traded below that price.

Think of it like buying a concert ticket for $100 and discovering the next morning that other people are selling identical tickets for $96. You haven't necessarily lost money unless you sell, but the market is telling you that the ticket isn't worth what you just paid.

Paramount isn't borrowing at anything close to the rates paid by the U.S. government. Investors demand extra interest because lending to a company is riskier than lending to the federal government.

Interest rates on U.S. government bonds have also risen substantially. That makes borrowing more expensive for companies generally, because corporate bonds normally pay a higher rate than government bonds.

Paramount's new bonds therefore carry some unusually high interest rates. Its new first-priority bonds mature at various dates between 2028 and 2066, with interest rates ranging from 6.30% to 8.90%. Some of the lower-priority bonds carry rates above 9%.

That is a lot of interest for a company that is already taking on a huge amount of debt.

There is another reason some investors are unhappy.

Paramount already had about $18 billion of older unsecured bonds outstanding. The new borrowing is backed by company assets and gets paid ahead of those older bonds if the company ever runs into serious financial trouble.

In plain English, the old bondholders have moved farther back in line.

That helps explain why some existing Paramount bonds fell sharply after the new financing was announced. Investors were being asked to lend even more money to Paramount while the company was giving the new lenders a stronger claim on its assets.

The basic concern is simple: Paramount is taking on an enormous amount of debt at a time when parts of the traditional television business are shrinking.

The company is betting that the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. business will be able to produce substantially more cash than the two companies could separately. Management has said it expects to find about $6 billion in annual cost savings from combining the businesses.

That is a very large target.

The new company will own an extraordinary collection of entertainment properties, including Paramount's movie and television businesses, CBS and Paramount+, along with Warner Bros., HBO Max and CNN. The idea is that combining those businesses will create a stronger competitor in streaming and give the company more valuable film and television franchises to sell around the world.

But the company has to achieve those savings while integrating two enormous businesses and dealing with continued declines in traditional television.

That is why the bond market's reaction matters. Stock investors can tolerate a lot of uncertainty because they own a piece of the company and can benefit enormously if things go well. Bond investors have a more basic question: will the company have enough cash to pay us back?

The new bonds' weak performance suggests that some investors thought Paramount's debt was priced too aggressively.

The cost of insuring Paramount's debt against default also jumped sharply. That insurance is known as a credit default swap. Its price effectively reflects how concerned investors are about a company's ability to repay its debts. Bloomberg reported that the cost of insuring $10 million of Paramount debt for five years reached about $432,000, up from roughly $379,000 the previous day.

Paramount's stock also fell about 9.6% on October 1st, adding to the sense that investors were questioning the financial structure of the transaction.

Paramount's management has pushed back on the significance of the first-day decline, describing it as short-term market turbulence rather than a verdict on the merger itself.

The bigger test comes later.

Paramount is about to become a much larger entertainment company, but also a much more heavily indebted one. The merger is expected to close October 6th, after which the combined company will operate under the Skydance name. David Ellison will remain in charge, with former Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz serving as co-CEO and focusing on day-to-day operations and integration.

The Hollywood question is whether the new company can make the combination work.

The financial question is even simpler: can it make enough money to pay for it?

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There are worse things to be than being trapped on a remote island with a bunch of wealthy eccentrics, a beautiful hotel, a raging storm and a dead body. Well, actually, there is one worse thing: being trapped there with a man who used to play Sherlock Holmes and has decided that method acting is now a viable law-enforcement technique.

That is the wonderfully nutty premise of Netflix’s The Final Problem, a Spanish mystery series that takes the familiar ingredients of the locked-room whodunnit and gives them a sly little twist. José Coronado plays Benjamin Basil, an aging actor whose most famous role was Sherlock Holmes. When a group of guests becomes stranded at a luxury hotel on a remote island in 1959, a murder occurs. Then another. With the police unable to reach the island, Basil begins applying the observational skills he learned playing Holmes to the increasingly complicated business of figuring out who is doing the killing.

And, bless the man, he is pretty good at it.

Coronado is the secret weapon here. Basil could easily have been an irritating gimmick — the washed-up actor who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else — but Coronado gives him enough melancholy, vanity and genuine intelligence to make the character considerably more interesting. He understands that Basil is both a man who desperately wants to be taken seriously and someone who has spent his entire life pretending to be someone else.

That gives The Final Problem a terrific central joke: What happens when an actor who has spent years playing the greatest detective in fiction starts behaving as though the skills he learned for the role are actually useful?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

The series also understands the basic pleasure of a good old-fashioned mystery. There is a remote location, a limited pool of suspects, hidden relationships, buried motives and enough secrets to keep everybody looking suspicious. The setting is gorgeous, the period atmosphere is beautifully realized and the ensemble gives the show the necessary collection of people you would absolutely not want to be stuck on an island with after somebody gets murdered.

The result is less interested in reinventing the murder mystery than in having some fun with its machinery. And that's perfectly fine. Not every detective story needs to blow up the genre and rebuild it from scratch. Sometimes it is enough to give us a handsome hotel, a nasty storm, several suspicious rich people and a guy who can tell what you had for breakfast by looking at your shoes.

The series does occasionally get a little too stately for its own good. There are moments when you want to grab everyone by the shoulders and yell, “Somebody is murdering people! Pick up the pace!” But that leisurely quality is also part of its charm. The Final Problem is operating in the tradition of the classic mystery, where atmosphere matters almost as much as the solution.

And when it works, it works because the show understands that the best mysteries aren't merely about finding out who did it. They're about spending time in a world where everyone has something to hide.

The Final Problem isn't trying to be the next great television detective series. It doesn't need to be. It's a stylish, entertaining and occasionally deliciously silly mystery with a terrific central performance and a premise that is just clever enough to keep you watching.

Sherlock Holmes would probably approve.

The actor playing him might even agree.

The Final Problem is currently streaming on Netflix.

Also, I wrote about Carrie, which I had mixed feelings about:

I also reviewed the Catherine Zeta-Jones thriller Kill Jackie, which turned out not to be all that thrilling:

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3RD:
A Doctor To Die For: The Sarah Harris Story (Lifetime)
A Knight To Remember (Hallmark)
A Tale Of The Secret Saint Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
Be My Guest with Ina Garten Season Premiere (Food Network)
Black Clover (Crunchyroll)
Get Jiro Series Premiere (Adult Swim)
#I'm Looking For A Zombie Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
Late Night Law Season Two Premiere (A&E)
Magical Explorer Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
Ranma ½ (Netflix)
Romelia War Chronicle Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
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SUNDAY, OCTOBER 4TH, 2026:
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Blue Box Season Premiere (Netflix)
Even Though I'm A Super Timid Noble Girl, I Accepted The Bet From My Cunning Fiancé Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
Hotel Inhumans (Crunchyroll)
Late Night Law Season Two Premiere (A&E)
Marshals Season Two Premiere (CBS)
90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way Season Premiere (TLC)
Reborn As A Space Mercenary: I Woke Up Piloting The Strongest Starship! Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)
Schumacher '94 – The Birth Of A Legend (Netflix)
Sister Wives Season Premiere (TLC)
Tracker Season Premiere (CBS)
Uncle's Obsession With Cute Things Series Premiere (Crunchyroll)