The fight to save Turner Classic Movies

Cable stalwart Turner Classic Movies could be in trouble. There are rumblings in the entertainment sector that Warner Brothers Discovery, who owns the TV channel, could be gutting and possibly shuttering the classic movie station for good.

Arriving on televisions in 1994, Turner Classic Movies was created by mogul Ted Turner to be a bastion for classic film, garnering a huge following of classic film fans. For 29 years the channel has presented a library of movies spanning the first 100 years of cinema, from silent films like Buster Keaton’s The General to gritty seventies thrillers like The French Connection. Commercial free and supplemented by historical interviews and short vignettes, the channel is strictly focused on the screenings of the films, providing context and commentary from a rotating bevy of likeable hosts like Ben Mankiewicz and Dave Karger.

The trouble is with Turner Classic Movies’ current owner, the conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery, which has faced more than a few flops at the box office. A few of their predicted major blockbusters, like DC’s The Flash and Black Adam, were poorly received by audiences, creating a panic amongst the studio as they had sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into the films advertising campaigns and production budgets, leaving a smaller institution like TCM almost gutted. David Zaslav, current CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, recently let go most of the senior management at TCM after decades of their service in preserving classic film and presenting the channel to modern audiences, with two-thirds of the employees cut, per GQ.

The existence of Turner Classic Movies is a rarity on television these days

To some bigwigs in the industry, the next logical step would be that, since Warners is hemorrhaging money due to the dwindling box office returns, that the niche channel itself would be liquidated. Well known names like directors Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, champions of classic film, insisted on an emergency meeting with CEO Zaslav to discuss what Warner’s plans for the channel were for the future. Notable actors like Patton Oswalt and Ryan Reynolds also took to the twitterverse to state their displeasure at the thought that the channel could be tampered with, with Reynolds tweeting that TCM is “a holy corner of film history.”

The interjection of these well known figures may bode well for at least the preservation of the channel, as Zaslav has appointed the two heads of Warner Brothers’ film division with leading the channel for the future. As the only remaining film-centric basic cable channel, the existence of Turner Classic Movies is a rarity in this day and age – not only does it focus on classic film as something to be treasured and respected, but also does so with no distraction or fluff. One can learn something wild about any film, be enraptured by a film older than your grandparents, and enthralled by an actor that you previously had no clue even existed. Many of this generation and previous hold TCM as the only way to organically discover classic film, brilliant actors of another age, and genres not usually played for audiences in theaters.

Hopefully, even with the corporate gutting the channel has experienced, it can still exist in a form close to what we recognize as Turner Classic Movies. Its loss would send ripples through both the television and film communities, as we’d lose not only a film-centric channel that educates and reveres the past, but we’d also lose our modern connection to these films as expertly presented by TCM. Let’s hope, that unlike Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind, that they do give a damn.

Turner Classic Movies has a streaming component through MAX – Watch Turner Classic Movies (TCM).