Clicking the channel over to Turner Classic Movies, with its ad-free screenings of old films, curated introductions by experts, and interviews with directors and movie historians, is a genuine pleasure. The channel’s deep library, presented with thought and care and largely composed of titles from the history of Warner Bros., MGM, and RKO, is one of the most impressive film archives around, and it’s available to basically any cable subscriber. There are few viewing experiences left in the world of television that I might call “wholesome,” but TCM is one of them.
So last week’s news that TCM—a small part of the Warner Bros. Discovery media umbrella—had been targeted for layoffs and budget cuts by Warner CEO David Zaslav felt like a sad reflection of our current media landscape. TCM’s existence felt anomalous in a world where even big streaming networks are starting to push out ad-supported tiers; its expert curation was a rarity, given that most apps burden the viewer with picking what to watch from thousands of choices with very little guidance. TCM is where I’ve watched many unheralded masterpieces for the first time, scouring through the listings to find noir classics and Golden Age musicals, but also underseen gems such as Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground and Paul Bartel’s Eating Raoul.
Anxiety about TCM’s future has simmered since Warner Bros. began its merger with Discovery in 2022. Zaslav started to make cuts across the portfolio once the deal was completed, letting employees go and even shelving entire finished films as part of tax write-offs. In January, TCM’s long-running host Ben Mankiewicz reassured fans that the channel’s future was secure, saying Zaslav was passionate about TCM. Six months later, Zaslav slashed the channel’s staff from 90 to “about 20,” according to The Wrap; the cuts included Pola Changnon, TCM’s general manager who’d logged 25 years at the company. Changnon and many of the other people let go had deep institutional knowledge of the network’s library, which informed TCM’s masterful curation.
The news prompted brief, fevered pushback from some of Hollywood’s most esteemed filmmakers, as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson convened for an “emergency call” with Zaslav to head off any more trouble. After the meeting, the filmmakers issued a joint statement calling TCM a “precious resource of cinema” but otherwise held their fire on Zaslav, saying, “It’s clear that TCM and classic cinema are very important to him … We are heartened and encouraged by the conversations we’ve had thus far, and we are committed to working together to ensure the continuation of this cultural touchstone that we all treasure.” Warner Bros. chief content officer Kathleen Finch added, “We remain fully committed to this business, the TCM brand, and its purpose to protect and celebrate culture-defining movies.”
After the publicity storm surrounding the layoffs, Zaslav announced that TCM would be put under the creative control of the industry veterans Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy, who currently head Warner’s film group. De Luca’s connection to Paul Thomas Anderson is particularly notable—as the lead executive of New Line Cinema in the ’90s, he green-lit Anderson’s breakout movie, Boogie Nights. He also worked at DreamWorks, the studio co-founded by Spielberg. Given that De Luca runs a film division, it’s hard to imagine he’ll have much time to devote to TCM—but his and Abdy’s appointment at least felt like an act of reassurance, a promise that the channel might not entirely abandon its cinematic mission. Zaslav has also continued his damage control, issuing a statement that these moves will establish “a more sustainable structure behind the screen … so that TCM is set up for long-term success.” He also said that he was bringing back Charles Tabesh, a programmer who was originally part of the layoffs and who was considered crucial to the network’s identity.
But no matter how many well-meaning statements Warner Bros. pushes out about the esteemed place TCM has in its corporate firmament, the trend lines during Zaslav’s tenure have seen the company shrinking staff and selling assets for parts. What happens next could be something of a slow erosion; with far less staff on board, the thoughtfulness behind TCM’s programming seems sure to disappear. Eventually, the channel could go with it. As Vulture’s Josef Adalian wrote last week, this “feels like the beginning of the end”—the dismantling of a channel’s identity, much like what has already happened to well-known cable brands such as Comedy Central and MTV, which now seem to exist mostly to air reruns.
In a perfect world, some benevolent new owner might swoop in and make a grab for the TCM brand—someone like Spielberg, actually, a mini-mogul himself. But the value of TCM is in its deep library, the rights to which would be much harder to pry away. The loss of that library is what tanked another beloved streaming service, the fledgling FilmStruck, which combined the archives of the Criterion Collection with TCM. In 2018, Warner decided to cut its support as the result of a prior corporate merger with AT&T, demonstrating that its love of cinema’s hallowed history could stretch only so far.
The decline of TCM may be slow and miserable, akin to something like Twitter’s current trajectory, where the site’s basic functionality remains but its culture slowly melts away. For now, TCM will trundle on, devotedly airing classics that sometimes literally can’t be shown anywhere else. But its position has become frighteningly precarious—and whatever next round of cuts comes down could prove the deadliest.
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June 29, 2023 at 10:56PM
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The Erosion of Turner Classic Movies Is Cause for Alarm - The Atlantic
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