Make no mistake: Summer may be nearly here, but winter is coming to CBS. The ongoing problem at the broadcast television company, hanging like a sword of Damocles over its head, remains the expected recombination with Viacom. “Ain’t no stopping it now,” a former CBS executive tells me. The former executive added that CBS’s decision to extend acting C.E.O. Joe Ianniello’s contract through the end of 2019 “virtually guarantees” that the merger with Viacom will be announced before the end of the year, because it ratifies what was already painfully obvious: that CBS could not find an A-list, permanent C.E.O. while the merger with Viacom is unresolved.

According to another longtime CBS observer, the boards of the two companies are “getting re-acquainted” after merger talks broke off unexpectedly a year or so ago, when then-CBS chief Les Moonves decided he did not want Bob Bakish, the C.E.O. of Viacom, to replace him as C.E.O. of the combined company. (He preferred Ianniello.) But Shari Redstone, the daughter of media mogul Sumner Redstone, the principal owner of Viacom and CBS, wanted Bakish to succeed Moonves. Now, with Moonves long gone, the two boards—fully under the control of Shari Redstone—are having a grand time renewing their conversations as a prelude to the expected full-blown merger. There is “constructive engagement” going on, the CBS observer says.

But that’s where the good news stops. A merger between CBS and Viacom will inevitably lead to job losses. When the two sides abandoned their last attempt at a merger a little more than a year ago, more than $1 billion in “cost synergies” had been identified by the bankers and executives involved in the discussions. On Wall Street, “cost synergies,” in the context of merger negotiations, is code for “expense cuts.” And that’s what the rank and file at CBS (and Viacom for that matter, too) probably have not reckoned with as Shari Redstone continues to push the two companies together. “People inside CBS aren’t focused on this happening, even though they should be,” says the former CBS executive. “A billion dollars of synergies sounds nice when it rolls off a banker’s tongue, but guess what? That means big job losses are coming in the aftermath of the merger.”

You will recall that the Redstone family controls both CBS and Viacom through its roughly 80 percent voting stake in both entities. Although once upon a time Viacom bought CBS, the two have been separately traded companies since 2006. For the past three years, Shari Redstone has been pushing for a merger between Viacom and CBS, presumably to make it easier for the Redstones to begin to diversify, and to liquidate, the family’s $5 billion or so stakes in the two companies.

As part of the agreement under which Moonves left CBS last September, after a spate of #MeToo accusations, Shari Redstone agreed that her family’s holding company, National Amusements Inc., would not initiate a third round of merger discussions until after September 2020. But the cleverly drafted document did not exclude the possibility that the boards of the two companies—on their own (wink, wink, nod, nod)—would initiate merger discussions well before that time. And, of course, that is exactly what is happening. Wall Street banks and lawyers have been hired. No one is talking for the record, but it sure looks like the third time will be the charm, especially since Moonves (or anyone else for that matter) is no longer in a position to stop a deal. The negotiations between the two boards of directors have reportedly been underway for some time. (Spokespeople for CBS and Viacom declined to comment.)