I’ve made many attempts to mitigate the existential disaster we call Tuesday—tacos, trivia—but lately only one thing is working. Every night, just before 8 p.m., I hide my phone under a pillow in the next room, make a carb-heavy dinner, and turn on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) for Sweater Weather, a series of films dedicated to the transitional season.
Every Tuesday in October, Alicia Malone, an affable Australian film historian, dressed in casual attire and a flippy bob, presents a double feature. They are often mid-century melodramas with gripping protagonists, serpentine plots, and the burnt hues of autumn rendered in indulgent Technicolor. Like All That Heaven Allows (1955), about a widow who finds herself crushed under the weight of 1950s suburban conformity – and the tiny waistline of her full skirts – while harboring a crush on her much younger gardener. Or Leave Her to Heaven (1945), about a beautiful socialite so obsessed with her hapless husband that she will kill anyone who threatens their bond.
In these movies, everyone has their original teeth and no one takes Ozempic. It’s my weekly break from the doomscrolling, all-maxxing, maddening norm of vertical content. I want to live in the Sweater Weather movie world all year round.
TCM has been showing old movies since 1994, when the cable channel was launched by CNN founder Ted Turner. The businessman was obsessed with movies – his favorite, Gone With the Wind, christened the channel’s first broadcast – and had acquired the MGM studio’s vast catalog of films for titles. At the time, deeper films were rarely shown on major networks, and true enthusiasts had to scour library archives to find what they were looking for.
From the start, TCM projected a reverence for the medium, airing uncut films in a wide range of genres — a 1930s screwball comedy in one panel, an ’80s slasher film in the next. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are never interrupted by advertisements for car insurance or pharmaceuticals. The network’s current hosts – led by Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of Citizen Kane scribe Herman J Mankiewicz – and guest stars offer insider stories when introducing each film. Tom Hanks once spoke on TCM about having to tell Bette Davis, then the intimidating grande dame of cinema, that she had stolen his wife’s seat at an Oscars after-party. When Amy Madigan won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress earlier this year, TCM got her to talk about her past roles, including one opposite the late Gene Hackman.
Even Donald Trump appeared on TCM, in 2007, where he typically compared himself to Charles Foster Kane, the rich but pitiful mogul from Mankiewicz and Orson Welles’ masterpiece Citizen Kane.
I am not someone who is sentimental towards brands or companies. I like to think I’m smart enough to know they’ll never love me back. But TCM is different. Karie Bible, author and tour guide at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, burial site of many icons, feels the same way.
Bible started watching the channel while she was a student in the ’90s. “It’s quite emotional to explain, but TCM has been like a close, comforting friend during some very dark times in my life,” she said. “When I was in the hospital about to have kidney surgery, I watched her.”
Bible remembers lying on a stretcher after surgery, watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, then the 1960s horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? “When they came to take me out, I told them I wasn’t going to go until after Baby Jane was finished,” Bible said. “My dad had to take the remote away so he could get me off the table.”
TCM doesn’t share audiences, but in 2020, 68.2 million households had access: retirees, small-town kids and director Martin Scorsese, who reportedly keeps TCM in his editing room. I wouldn’t say I’m dating my boyfriend solely for his TCM subscription, but when he hinted he had one on our first date, I decided there was going to be a second one. It signals something charming and analog, an instinct to choose careful curation over auto-filling recommendations on streamers like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO.
Can a network like TCM, programmed by people who obviously think a lot about what to broadcast, survive in this media ecosystem?
In early October, when Paramount Skydance announced the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery — and thus a slew of cable channels including CNN, MTV and TCM — fans panicked. An organization chart would have produced by new mega-media company Skydance, listing its new properties, made the rounds on a Reddit forum for TCM viewers; The TCM logo was notably absent. “This is very worrying,” one user wrote. “Doomed,” wrote another. (The image is of unknown origin; Skydance’s website includes TCM on a list of brands.)
It was like déjà vu. In 2023, after the $43 billion merger of Warner Bros and Discovery, executives fired several TCM executives, including longtime executives. head of programming Charles Tabesh, a staunch supporter of films both obscure and well-known. This decision disturbed moviegoers, who saw it as the death knell for the channel. Heavyweight TCM fans including Scorsese and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Spielberg called Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, who acquiesced in bringing Tabesh back (although TCM’s 70 employees weren’t also cut). There was a sigh of relief in certain circles: art had taken over.
Now comes Skydance. Staff are reportedly bracing for layoffs across the company, leading to layoffs. $80 billion in debt from merger. “One of the easiest ways to address some of this debt is to sell some of the linear TV assets,” said Gabriel Miller, co-founder of Industry, a film production newsletter. “Obviously (Skydance CEO) David Ellison is not going to sell CNN, but something like Comedy Central or BET could be something that potentially ends up being sold.”
TCM too? The official line is that the network remains in place for now, IndieWire reported. A representative for TCM declined to comment on this matter to the Guardian. A Skydance representative did not comment on the company’s intentions regarding TCM.
TCM has spent decades cultivating its fan base.
Since the network doesn’t show ads, it can’t make money from ads. Instead, it relies on distribution and streaming fees (an app is available for people who already have a TV subscription through traditional cable or a live TV streaming service).
It also hosts live events, including a Los Angeles Film Festival and a “Classic Film Cruise” that kicked off earlier this month.
Marsha Gordon is a history professor who wrote a biography of Ursula Parrott, the 1920s novelist credited with inventing the word “ex-wife.” Gordon spoke at a recent TCM festival, showing a 35mm print of The Divorcee, an adaptation of Parrott’s work that is older than the Empire State Building. The screening took place at 10 a.m. on a Friday morning; Gordon expected there to be maybe 30 people in the audience. Nearly 500 people were present. “They were reacting exactly as you would imagine people would have reacted in 1930: laughing, holding their breath and booing in all the right places,” she said.
The programmers of the festival and the daily television program have a “feel for the game,” Gordon said. They want viewers to have a good time. See: Creepy Cinema, an annual Halloween celebration co-hosted by Sex and the City actor Mario Cantone, who often uses his airtime to do impressions of stars such as Joan Crawford or Bette Davis.
In February, social media users (gleefully) accused TCM of sending a message with its decision to air Gaslight before Trump’s State of the Union. The 1944 film, about a husband who slowly convinces his wife that she has gone crazy, gave rise to the eponymous term relating to the type of psychological manipulation of which Trump and other men have been accused. “@tcm’s counter-programming remains unmatched,” comedian Patton Oswalt posted on Threads. The timing might have been a coincidence: That night, TCM scheduled a series of remakes that had been nominated for the Oscars, a category to which Gaslight belongs. (A TCM representative declined to comment on the theory at the time.)
Such coincidences might not please David Ellison, son of Larry, the world’s eighth-richest man. and a Trump ally who donated $45 million to a Pac supporting his 2024 bid. The younger Ellison downplayed his own connection to the Trump administration, saying he doesn’t “want to politicize” Skydance and emphasizing his “good relationships” with the Biden administration and California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Then again, Ellison has one thing in common with me: he claims to love cinema. The industry scion initially founded Skydance to produce his passion projects. “I think he’s someone who really cares about film and is going to try to make (TCM) work,” Miller of the Industry newsletter said.
Chris Yogerst, an author and media historian who wrote a book about the early Warner brothers, is equally optimistic. He could see a near future where TCM pivots to streaming only — like the top-tier Criterion Collection, which is famous for its library but lacks TCM’s user-friendly host setup. “They could make a hub (on HBO Max)…
Gn entert
