The call is coming from inside the house

At some point in the coming weeks, TRL murderer MTV will let go a huge portion of its staff as parent Viacom goes the cost-cutting route. Now there are rumors floating at Gawker that VH1 might get in on the firing action.

And this just in to Jossip: Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and CMT will also see sizable firings as well. We're told a "360 degree" layoff strategy is in the works, with "around Christmas" cited as a timeline. [Photo: Webshots]

Fresh off the news that big poppa Sumner Redstone is divorcing his second wife and will probably not be throwing the company Christmas bash this year, daughter Shari stepped down today from her position as chairwoman of Midway Games Inc., which is a giant pie slice of the whole Redstone legacy.

So those rumors about the Redstone stock plummeting despite some good CBS ratings might actually have had some merit to them. It doesn't take Nate Silver to estimate that Sumner will now attempt to sell Midway to rally up some funds for the family debt, pay for his divorce with company stock (again), and try to salvage what's left of his personal savings with some investments from National Amusements.

Barack Obama's soaring election to the nation's highest office didn't just inspire millions of little boys and girls, millions of young people, and millions of seniors who thought they would never live to see the day when a black man became president. It also inspired Wall Street! Gearing up for an Obama sweep, investors rallied behind media stocks, sending Sumner Redstone's Viacom up 9 percent, along with Disney, CBS, and News Corp. Funny, because these are the very media companies that, now that the election is over, are expected to suffer huge audience losses. [MediaPost]

Don't be too sad if you are one of the Election Day layoff staffers over at Viacom: you're not missing much of a Christmas party, anyway.

MTV's parent company isn't the only one calling off its major annual bash; Lydia Hearst already did or did not call out her dynasty for throwing elaborate parties while the country goes broke, and now it's been shut it down as well.

Full list of the companies going rogue Scrooge this year after the jump. At least they'll be able to cut in half their companies' sexual harassment lawsuits?

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Like, don't bother coming back to work. Ever. Low blow MTV, using Election Day to layoff a couple rounds of employees. That's not change we can believe in!

Then again, these are the same guys who tried to take away employee benefits during that permalancers strike 11 months ago. How many ways can you Scrooge your employees with trying to use a holiday to overshadow how fucked they are?

So by now you've all realized that searching for most network television clips on YouTube can be a pretty fruitless exercise. If you want to watch The Daily Show, you have to go over to Comedy Central's website, because Viacom is all up in YouTube's business when it comes to copyright infringement. Unless it's a fair use, fifteen second thing, and even the candidates are not really sure how to deal with that when it comes to the Internet.

So while Viacom dukes it out with YouTube's papa bear over at Google headquarters to the tune of one billion dollars, they've also been in the works to team up with MySpace so you can legally watch episodes of your favorite season of Punk'd (it's the third season, isn't it?) on Rupert Murdoch's social networking service.

Hear that Google? That's how you do it when you're Sumner Redstone! Although wait… Redstone's the chairman of Viacom, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace…does that mean the two competitors are actually making nice to screw over YouTube and Google?

Ah, you got to love the sweet smell of capitalism in the morning.

When Sumner Redstone, chief executive of National Amusements and Midway Games (and through Amusements, has majority holdings in Viacom, CBS, Paramount, and everything else in the world) divorced his first wife in 2002, he paid for the settlement in Midway stock. Which one would have hoped his first wife Phyllis would have sold by now, since the plummeting Dow makes the original settlement substantially less lucrative than it was back in good old '02.

But now that Redstone is breaking off his second marriage, will he be able to pull the same stunt again and trade promises of money for the actual thing?

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Sumner Redstone, the titan who famously cut Tom Cruise loose from Paramount, is about to do the same to his second wife. The 85-year-old Viacom founder filed for divorce from 46-year-old Paula Fortunato, with whom Redstone had been married for five years.

The court documents show that Redstone is making sure Fortunato doesn't get a penny too, for reasons you can only imagine. The man must be richer than god (or is he?) and the two likely had a pre-nup. He may have only gone through the ringer once before, but Sumner knows enough to make future Mrs. Redstone's sign a legally binding contract saying they won't try to get his gold, or a guest-spot on Two and a Half Men, after the divorce.

If you're a large media company that's about to ax hoards of employees, what's the best way to deliver the news? Publicly announce the firings on a news dump Friday? Sure, but anybody can do that. Spin the layoffs as "right-sizing"? Fine, but PR speak is so transparent these days. What about blame the economy? Blaaaaand!

So, might we suggest two better alternatives that at least show you're a big media company bursting with creativity?

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Well, it didn't take long after Michael Hirschorn left his position as Executive Vice President of Original Programming (whew!) at VH1 before the Viacom station decided to sack all the good ideas the exec had to make the station money. Starting with I Love the 80's and all of its eventual, sadder spin-offs, and culminating with Best Week Ever, Hirschorn pioneered the whole genre of ADD entertainment where talking heads commented on celebrity pop culture.

But now that Hirschorn is gone and the celeb train has moved on to schadenfreude (it's all cyclical you see, from Jerry Springer you get people snarkily commenting on Jerry Springer, and then you get Celebrity Rehab), VH1 is scrapping the original format of Best Week Ever for a revamp with a single-serve host, Paul F. Tompkins who will run a show that will "have a less mean-spirited take."

So…it's a completely different show?

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When an insanely wealthy family dumps hundreds of millions in stock of their own company, on lookers can't help but wonder: WTF? So when the family of Sumner Redstone — he the chieftan of Viacom and CBS, as well as movie theatre chain and holding company National Amusements — did just that on Monday (though now they say only $233m was chased in, not the $400m previously reported), rumors started flying it was because National Amusements was about to tank thanks to the incoming recession. Except: So not true!, says the movie theatre head Shari Redstone, daughter of Sumner.

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It is, perhaps, fitting that Viacom and CBS chief Sumner Redstone's holding company is called National Amusements, because this economic crisis surely is a national freakin' amusement. Redstone's company, of course, is named after the chain of 1,500 movie theatres his family owns, and which also holds controlling stakes in both media giants. And it was that stake that he was forced to sell off on Friday. Four hundred million dollars worth of stock (of the nonvoting variety), in fact, to pay down debt that is suddenly due in an era when refinancing loans, even for the wealthiest among us, is harder than getting a ticket to space. [LAT]

Let's face it: The only time you've ever heard the word "flux" used in a sentence was either a) to describe the economy or b) next to the word "capacitor" in Back to the Future. Which is why you'll have no idea why MTV just spent all of its TRL rent fund buying out Social Project. Social Project is the group which MTV previously partnered with to create Flux, a social media network. You know guys, a social media network like Facebook, or MySpace, or… another one of those:

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Just when you thought MTV couldn't become more of a soulless corporation without transforming into subplot fodder for a John Grisham novel, the former hipness barometer outdid itself in one week by:

1) Canceling TRL, and with it the last shred of reasoning behind calling the Viacom subsidiary a music station.

2) Signing a contract that would allow them to stay at their Times Square location (that really only made sense to inhabit when TRL was on the air) with a $35-per-square-foot rent increase.

3) Destroying the rainforest for the sake of the Real World/Road Rules Challenge show that no one knew was still on the air:

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In New York, if the criminals aren't kicking your ass and taking your wallet, the businessmen are, and they're doing it while staying well within their legal rights. That's why New Yorkers looking for real estate have learned to eat shit and like it.

Not even very rich and powerful Manhattan-based companies are above getting jacked. Take, for instance, Viacom, which is said to be renewing its lease at 1515 Broadway when it expires in 2010, even though they won't even be broadcasting TRL, which is what made the space so preferable to begin with. Says Greg Hughes, CFO for New York City's largest commercial landlord SL Green, Viacom will probably continue to rent most or all of the 1.5 million square feet they do at the horrendous Times Square location for the new price of $85 per square foot, up from the $50 per square foot it's currently paying.

Too lazy to do the math? We gotcha covered: Starting in 2010, Viacom will be spending about $128 million per year to rent space in one of the ugliest buildings on one of the ugliest streets in the world.

We are no longer shocked at how crappy MTV has become.

Though it's not offering much in the way of higher salaries these days, media giant Viacom is offering New York staffers one perk: a revamped dining room/cafeteria space/whatever-the-classy-word-is-for-mess hall at their headquarters on Broadway. Now the space is 12,000 sq. ft and includes such bonuses as a "8-ft. by 8-ft. projection screen broadcasting MTVN Networks channels 24 hours a day" as well as a bocca ball light fixture(?). No word yet on the food stuffs, but that's not what the place is really for.

NEway, Viacom's revamp comes not a moment too soon, as it was desperately losing the unnecessarily elaborate Eating Space Awards, which we just made up.

But how does Viacom's new foodie digs compare to other media companies' digestive offerings? Let's check in on the free Skittles:

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Comcast is buying shopping newsletter DailyCandy for $125 million, which is either a sign that old media is finally "getting it," or that old media can still be convinced to buy things at inflated prices. But in case you needed another signal that old media actually does not get it, look no further than VH1's new blog Scandalist, which launched this week. Not only did its namers take a cue from Web 1.0 (see: Gothamist), but the nature of the site — celebrities, involved in scandals, oooh! — represents a three-years-too-late attempt to join the fray of celeb blog gossip with an insta-tired brand and exactly nothing new to bring to the table, except some traffic dumping from VH1's homepage (which is how AOL drives traffic to any of its dozens of un-read weblogs). Also: It's a lesson VH1 should've already learned.

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Eighty-five-year-old Sumner Redstone, who's spent much of his career steering Viacom, and then CBS, into a media conglomerate sporting some of the most valuable properties in the industry, has no intention of making his legacy a family affair. He will not select daughter Shari to succeed him when his last day leading the companies arrives. But also, Redstone is crazy: "I’m not worried about [naming a successor] ’cause it’s going to be another 20, 30 years." And: Shari's camp says this is all nonsense. [NYT]

Sumner Redstone, who continues to play grandpa to both CBS and Viacom even after the companies went their separate ways, has a few remarks for one of his offspring. Actually, just one remark: You fucked up.

Okay. "Made a mistake" was what Redstone actually said about Les Moonves, the smiling operator behind CBS, who bought the rights to broadcast an event from Elite XC, the mixed martial arts sport that promises to be violent. That bloodsport is normally shielded from broadcast and aired only on cable, but Moonves is after cheap ratings for the tiffany network. — though that doesn't mean Redstone, who has as much at stake in seeing CBS succeed, is happy about it.

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The media has oversimplified the decision by Paramount to stop selling its shows to Showtime! You see, Paramount is Viacom's movie studio, while Showtime is CBS's premium channel, and the two were getting along so well ever since Viacom and CBS went their separate ways, but now Paramount is teaming with MGM and Lionsgate to create a new premium channel.

Les Moonves, who heads CBS, played nice in press reports with Viacom chief Philippe Dauman. Moonves' deputy, Showtime chief Matthew Blank, told the Times, "We wish them well." Dauman not-so-blandly opined, "It’s our responsibility at Viacom to drive our strategy to benefit our shareholders."

But now one newspaper is fueling rumors all this backroom dealing is a move to try to oust Moonves! CAN YOU BELIEVE?

Corporate daddy Sumner Redstone, who chairs both Viacom and CBS, is said to be unhappy with CBS's crappy stock performance. Or at least those are the rumors Dauman's been able to plant, as he eyes the throne of octogenarian Redstone, who, despite his misgivings, must leave this earth, and his companies, at some point.