Be worried about what’s going on at Turner Classic Movies

TCM is one of the few cable channels that remains true to its original purpose. The "old movies channel" still shows old movies in an era where the "sports channel" is filled with sports-themed cable news style yelling matches, the "music channel" is almost all crappy reality TV shows, the "history channel" is filled with stupid conspiracy theories and crappy reality TV shows, the "news channels" are filled with yelling matches and partisan propaganda and even the "cartoon channels" sometimes air programming that isn't appropriate for elementary school aged children.

The only other cable channel I can think of that remains as committed to its original purpose as TCM is C-SPAN which still airs neutral and non-partisan coverage of politics as it happens (which is usually more boring than watching paint dry but very useful whenever something big and important is actually happening). So it is not good news that Warner Bros management, fresh off destroying a bunch of works of art for a tax writeoff, is now turning its attention to TCM to "fix" a channel that isn't broken. We all know where that slippery slope ends if/when they decide TCM "needs to draw higher ratings to increase ad revenue": a weekly All Elite Wrestling program on TCM (not unprecedented given that NBC once aired a WWE program on the science fiction channel).

This is unfortunate, it was actually TCM that introduced me to some more obscure films I’m really passionate about from Studio Ghibli which are now some of my favorite most-cherished animated films.

What set TCM apart were the interludes where the host explains the background of how the stories came about, where the directors were in their careers when the film was made. Just really insightful stuff.

I’m still shocked they renamed HBO max. HBO has to be one of the strongest premium brand names around. There’s clearly something wrong going on in the organization. Perhaps it’s a debt issue after the merger with discovery.

I don’t really agree with the article. TCM was a wonderful thing as it was conceived but the times have changed a lot since then.

Its main viewership is dying. Not to overuse the word “literally,” but, literally dying.

Live cable is basically the worst way to watch a movie I you can imagine at this point. I love all the kind words about curation but hello have you ever heard of the Internet? There is no shortage of sources of movie curation all better than anything a mass-market cable channel can offer.

I think ultimately TCM needs to be reallocated into something that fits live cable better, possibly not even related to movies. Longer term, I don’t think most cable stations will exist at all. They will be content portals for the various media conglomerates like we see on streaming sites. I think that cable service as we understand it now will essentially be shut down. Just look at the free “cable” services out there like Pluto. They’re all pseudo-channels pieced together with a grab bag of content.

I’ve also got a bit of an unpopular opinion here: the Max rebrand makes a ton of sense. Why? Because the “HBO” Brand is associated with adult shows, i.e., R-rated content. This is a problem. Did you know Max is the streaming home of Sesame Street? Yeah, that used to have the HBO brand on it.

HBO Max got to the point where most of its content isn’t even from HBO. Making the streaming service a separate brand from the content sources makes perfect sense.

What specifically has gone wrong with TCM? The icon on Max is too small? CNN is bad? But if you tune your tv to TCM, as you've always done, has anything changed?

From the headline I assumed Ted was back to colourizing all of the classics again.

AMC used to have the same format, then the same thing happened to it. Belatedly going the way of TLC and Bravo.

As a kid, anytime my dad was watching tv, he was watching TCM. I've learned there were a lot more remakes of old movies than I realized, and was always told, the original is much better--aside from the black and white, which I quickly got over, that's mostly held true.

> In Zaslav's short time on the job, he's already considerably damaged CNN

Only in the mind of NPR. CNN was damaged goods long before this.

No, I will not. Don’t tell me what to do.