Long live TCM! Our culture would be worse off without movies on TV
Television. Movies. Movies on television. Movies as television. Their association goes back to the early years of commercial TV, when talking pictures were but two decades old, and though the terms of the relationship have changed over time, they remain tightly bound. Most everyone will have seen more movies on TV than in a theater; it's where they live, and live on.
Nothing has demonstrated this more clearly than the recent alarm — the shock, the horror, the outrage — over firings at the top at Turner Classic Movies, another fine example of an out-of-touch executive riding in on a merger and breaking what doesn't need to be fixed. The cries of the devoted citizenry were joined notably by Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson, leading not only to the rehiring of Programming Vice President but also to the directors coming on board as volunteer curators. Alone among broadcasters, cable networks, premium cable networks and streamers, TCM remains dedicated, in an intelligent, curated manner, to the deep history of
