Film buffs love it. Trump and Tom Hanks hosted it. Can TCM survive a Hollywood mega-merger?
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I have made many attempts to lessen the existential disaster we call Tuesday – tacos, trivia – but lately only one thing works. Every night just before 8pm, I hide my phone under a pillow in the next room, plate up 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 wearing business casual and a flippy bob, introduces a double feature. These are often midcentury melodramas featuring striking leads, serpentine plots, and the burnt hues of fall 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 teeny waistline of her swing skirts – while nursing 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 films, everyone has their original teeth and no one takes Ozempic . It's my weekly break from doomscrolling, from whatever- maxxing , from the maddening norm of vertical content. I want to live in the world of Sweater Weather cinema all year long.
TCM has aired old movies since 1994, when the cable channel was launched by CNN's founder, Ted Turner. The businessman was obsessed with movies – his favorite, Gone with the Wind, christened the network's first broadcast – and had acquired MGM studio's big film catalog from which to pull titles. At the time, deeper-cut movies rarely played on major networks, and real buffs had to trawl 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 slot, an 80s slasher flick in the next. Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are never interrupted by commercials for car insurance or pharmaceuticals. The network's present-day hosts – led by Ben Mankiewicz, grandson of Citizen Kane scribe Herman J Mankiewicz – and guest stars serve up insider stories as they present each film. Tom Hanks once spoke on TCM of having to tell Bette Davis, then an intimidating grande dame of the screen, that she had stolen his wife's seat at an Academy Awards afterparty. When Amy Madigan won an Oscar earlier this year for best supporting actress in Weapons, TCM brought her on to talk about past roles, including one alongside the late Gene Hackman .
Even Donald Trump appeared on TCM, in 2007, where in typical fashion he compared himself to Charles Foster Kane, the wealthy yet pitiable tycoon from Mankiewicz and Orson Welles's masterpiece, Citizen Kane.
I am not someone who feels sentimental about brands or companies. I like to think I'm smart enough to know they will never love me back. But TCM is different. Karie Bible, an author and tour guide at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, interment site of many icons, feels the same way.
Bible started watching the channel as a college student in the 90s. "It's kind of emotional to explain, but TCM has been like a close, comforting friend during some very dark hours of my life," she said. "When I was in the hospital about to have a kidney operation I was watching it."
Bible remembers lying on a gurney after surgery, watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and then the 1960s horror flick What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? "When they came to wheel me out, I told them I wasn't going until Baby Jane was over," Bible said. "My dad had to take away the remote so they could take me off the table."
TCM does not share ratings, but in 2020, 68.2m homes had access to it: retirees, small-town kids and director Martin Scorsese, who reportedly keeps TCM on in his editing suite. I would not say I am dating my boyfriend solely for his TCM subscription, but when he dropped that he had one during our first date, I decided there would be a second. It signals something charmingly analog, an instinct to choose careful curation over autopopulating recommendations on streamers such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO.
Can a network like TCM, which is programmed by people who clearly think a lot about what to put on air, survive in this media ecosystem?
In early October, when Paramount Skydance announced its acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery – and therefore a collection of cable channels including CNN, MTV and TCM – fans panicked. A flowchart allegedly produced by the new mega-media company Skydance listing its new properties made the rounds on a Reddit forum for TCM viewers; TCM's logo was notably absent. "This is very ominous," one user wrote. "Doomed," wrote another. (The image is of unknown origin; Skydance's website includes TCM on a list of brands.)
It felt like deja vu. In 2023, after the $43bn merger of Warner Bros and Discovery, executives laid off several TCM executives, including its longtime head of programming, Charles Tabesh, an enthusiastic champion of both obscure and well-known movies. The move disturbed film buffs, who saw it as a death knell for the network. Heavyweight TCM fans including Scorsese and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Steven Spielberg called Warner Bros Discovery's head, David Zaslav , who acquiesced by bringing Tabesh back (though not the 70 TCM staffers also cut). There was a sigh of relief among certain circles: art had prevailed.
Just the fear of something going away makes you want to watch it even more
Now comes Skydance. Staff are reportedly bracing for layoffs across the company, which carries $80bn in debt due to the merger ."One of the easiest ways to remedy some of that debt is to sell some of the linear TV assets," said Gabriel Miller, co-founder of the Industry , a newsletter about film production. "Obvously [Skydance CEO] David Ellison isn't going to sell CNN, but something like Comedy Central or BET might be something that potentially ends up getting sold."
TCM, too? The official line is that the network is staying put for now, IndieWire reported. A representative for TCM declined to comment on the record to the Guardian. A representative for Skydance did not comment on the company's intentions for TCM.
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TCM has spent decades cultivating its fanbase.
Because the network does not air commercials, it cannot make money off of ads. It instead relies on carriage and streaming fees (there is an app 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 "classic film cruise" that set sail earlier this month.
Marsha Gordon is a history professor who penned a biography of Ursula Parrott, the 1920s novelist who is credited for inventing the word "ex-wife". Gordon spoke at a recent TCM festival, introducing 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 10am on a Friday morning; Gordon expected maybe 30 people in the audience. Nearly 500 people showed up. "They were reacting exactly as you would imagine people would have reacted in 1930: laughing and holding their breath and booing at the right places," she said.
Programmers for the festival and the daily TV schedule have a "sense of play", Gordon said. They want viewers to have a good time. See: Creepy Cinema, an annual celebration of campy Halloween co-hosted by the Sex and the City actor Mario Cantone, who often uses his airtime to give 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 insane, spawned the eponymous term relating to the type of psychological manipulation Trump and other men have been accused of. "The counter programming at @tcm remains unmatched," comedian Patton Oswalt posted on Threads. The timing could have been coincidental: that night, TCM scheduled a series of remakes that had been nominated for Academy Awards, a category that Gaslight falls into. (A representative for TCM declined to comment on the theory at the time.)
Coincidences like this might not go over well with David Ellison, son of Larry, the eighth-richest man in the world and a Trump ally who donated $45m to a Pac supporting his candidacy in 2024. The younger Ellison has downplayed his own connection to the Trump administration, saying he doesn't "want to politicize" Skydance and highlighting its "good relationship[s]" with the Biden administration and the Democratic California governor, Gavin Newsom.
Then again, Ellison has one thing in common with me: he claims to love film. The industry scion originally founded Skydance to produce his passion projects. "I think he's someone who actually cares about cinema and is going to try to make [TCM] work," said Miller of the Industry newsletter.
Related: Goodbye Warner, hello Skydance: how will the major merger really impact Hollywood?
Chris Yogerst, an author and media historian who wrote a book on the original Warner brothers, is similarly optimistic. He could see a near future where TCM pivots to streaming-only – like the highbrow Criterion Collection, which is celebrated for its library but lacks the friendly host set-up of TCM. "They could make a hub [on HBO Max] or an app where the brand still serves the same format, but it's just adapting to the digital era a little bit more effectively," Yogerst said.
Reports of TCM's death may be exaggerated – and are also great PR, said Peter Saraf, chair of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. "When Zaslav tried to shut down TCM, he actually did it such an amazing promotional favor," Saraf said. "So many people came out and said, you cannot do this. Just the fear of something going away makes you want to watch it even more. I think it would be very foolish of Ellison to even consider touching it."
So Sweater Weather cinema continues, at least for the rest of fall. And as always, I will be there. This week, a friend suggested making plans for Tuesday night. I countered with happy hour, explaining my prior commitment. She said that's fine, and that we should meet up close to my apartment – she would like to come over after and watch TCM, too.
