In Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times, semi-hidden away at the bottom of an internal page under the column heading “Channeling” was a piece written by Lia Miller about the cable channel AMC. The story focused on how the channel with the no-longer apt name “American Movie Classics” seemed to be showing movies these days that were often less than great, at least in most people’s opinions.
This morning’s Daily Variety ran a story indicating that a New York civil-court judge seems to agree that AMC’s programming no longer fits its name. (Sub. Req’d. Here’s a free Newsday report.) The case related to Time Warner Cable’s considering dropping AMC from its channel lineup because it had stopped playing “classic” movies, specifically films from the 1930s through 60s.
Ironically, AMC’s programming stopped focusing on this era as the much better Turner Classic Movies began appearing on more cable systems, and as noted film historian David Thomson says in the Times article: “[AMC] decided that TCM were doing hat they once thought they were doing, and doing it better, and they decided to make some money.” I call the situation ironic because, of course, Time Warner Cable is owned by Time Warner which also owns (gasp!) TCM!
However, I wish they would simply drop AMC from the lineup because in their attempt “to make some money,” AMC became one of the worst channels out there. Granted, TCM didn’t make things easy for them once the Turner library owned exclusive rights to an enormous library of classic Hollywood films, but I’m not sure what that has to do with AMC suddenly showing, as noted in the article, Death Warrant or Staying Alive.
In fact, the biggest problem with AMC isn’t even just that their movie programming is relatively terrible, and what’s fascinating to me is how the paper of record treats this shift as a relatively new development. I stopped watching AMC completely when they actually chose to (here’s that phrase again) make money! No, I don’t begrudge them (really their corporate parent Rainbow Media, and therefore, Cablevision) making money, but what happened to AMC some years back, at the same time as they really got out of the “classic” movie business was that they stopped showing movies uncut without commercials. (This is a fact which, to my mind, shockingly the Times story doesn’t even mention.)
I simply can’t watch movies with commercials. Television series and even broadcast network movies are specifically written with those breaks in mind – the commercial is inherent to the show’s structure. But that’s not true with a theatrical film, and aside from any other editing for language, nudity or violence that may occur, the introduction of ads (several years ago now) makes AMC anything but a serious channel for movie lovers.
Their motto is “TV for movie people.” Personally, I think that tag line combined with their programming is demeaning to both movie AND TV people. I don’t care if their library has recently become a bit better with the acquisition of 25 John Wayne movies or if they show The Great Escape every day all month. That isn’t stopping them from also broadcasting Look Who’s Talking Too. (Actually, there’s a movie that commercials might help.)
I used to watch AMC religiously. In fact, when I was at UCLA and moved into my first apartment with my own cable box in 1990, I would pour over the AMC schedule and set my VCR for all kinds of wonderful old movies I had never seen before. Even my first several years in New York, AMC was a favorite channel on my TV. TCM wasn’t available yet, and AMC’s programming was still uncut and commercial-free. Maybe they had a smaller library and films would get repeated a lot, but it still was a worthy selection. And I didn’t completely abandon AMC for TCM when Time Warner finally added it to the Manhattan lineup.
I’m actually quite sad that AMC didn’t have smarter programming from people who actually cared about movies more than money. (I know … what fantasy world am I living in.) I have a hard time believing that even with TCM’s enormous library there isn’t a great selection of films AMC could try to acquire to show in place of some of the dreck. IFC and Sundance Channel have both managed to thrive as cable channels focusing primarily on modern independent film, and they’ve even managed to each carve out individual identities for themselves. Some of what AMC is trying to do is maybe even on the right track. I personally can’t take Sunday Morning Shootout because both Peters are just way too annoying to listen to, and Movie Club with John Ridley completely grates on me since everyone but Ridley himself comes off like a moron (please, someone stop Zorianna Kit from talking about movies – stick to celebrity bullshit news!). But at least both of these shows have their concepts in the right place for a channel that wants to be about movies as much as show movies.
Still, TV still gets a bad name for plenty of reasons, and I find myself defending the medium all the time. But AMC lost my favor years ago, and it’s got a long way to go if it wants to win it back.
Out of Focus 
Like you, I was once an enormous AMC fan, though even in its best days, there were problems. (They would only show letter-boxed prints in the wee hours of the morning, sticking to scanned films during prime time.) I stopped bothering to check their schedules about two years ago, and on the occasions when I’ve past by the channel, I can’t say that I’ve seen anything that could be called a classic.They’ve become the final resting place for Rambo and “Friday the 13th” marathons after USA and Spike have lost interest in them..
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