Battle to Save TCM Reminds the Movie Business That It Isn’t All Content

By all accounts, Turner Classic Movies is a tiny part of Warner Bros. Discovery’s business, but it’s remained a profitable one even as the tides around linear cable television continue to recede. More importantly, the network has continued to play a vital role in not only preserving film history but popularizing it with subsequent generations.

The origin of TCM itself lies in a different era of corporate deals and under-appreciated “content.” When Ted Turner briefly bought MGM in 1986, he quickly realized he didn’t want to be in the moviemaking business, but he saw infinite value in MGM’s classic film library, which dominated Hollywood during the American movie industry’s golden age between the 1930s and ‘50s. Turner sold the studio less than a year after he bought it, but kept the film library for his nascent Turner Broadcasting System. Soon thereafter he even added RKO Pictures’ library to his treasure chest.

It was eventually partnering with the likes of film historian and journalist Robert Osborne, who became the first TCM host, which paved the way for creating a cable network in the 1990s that made it not only a business priority but a mission statement to spotlight the classic libraries of MGM, RKO, and all the other studios that were neglecting the value or interest in their film libraries. TCM’s own library only exponentially expanded after TimeWarner acquired Turner, thereby combining WB’s film library with MGM’s.

Personally, I can say that in my household, TCM was ubiquitous. With perhaps the exception of wherever Duke basketball might be playing that night, there was never a more beloved channel playing on the family television. As was the case for millions of young, burgeoning millennial and Gen-Z movie lovers, TCM acted as a gateway to film history and a true appreciation for classic storytelling. For nearly 30 years, it made the past accessible and engaging, for both young and old moviegoers.

As Scorsese once noted to the LA Times, “[TCM] gives me something to turn to, to bounce off of, to rest in, to reinvigorate my thinking—just glancing at some image or combination of images at a certain moment. It’s more like a presence in the room, a reminder of film history as a living, ongoing entity.”

A large aspect of that wasn’t just the fact it played old movies though; it was the care and curation applied by programmers like Tabesh, as well as the expertise and passion brought on by hosts such as Osborne, and later Mankiewicz, Karger, Alicia Malone, Jacqueline Stewart, Bill Hader, and more. The best of the network’s talent could always add fresh perspective via freshly recorded intros and outros which played before and after each film. This is what makes TCM still far more appealing and educational to cinephiles than just a block of streaming content to scroll through.