9 ms·

AMC's current streaming problems are emblematic of its inability to create and popularize content that enough viewers want to watch. But this has been happening

AMC's current streaming problems are emblematic of its inability to create and popularize content that enough viewers want to watch. But this has been happening for the better part of a decade now, even before streaming hit critical mass. This is an interesting history of how AMC essentially invented prestige TV (outside of HBO) with Mad Men, followed it up with the mega-hit of Breaking Bad, and then the monster that was The Walking Dead, but failed to continue its success afterwards (and also touches on why TWD became a creative disappointment relative to the prior two). Subsequent original series like Halt and Catch Fire were also not marketed successfully, though I heartily disagree with his take that the title was bad. Any machine code reference in the title means your show is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhTJhMYsD60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhTJhMYsD60

iancmceachern 4y ago
Mad Men and Breaking Bad are both masterpieces. They made them before the "streaming wars" and proved that non-major networks and studios could make good stuff. They just didn't figure out how to bottle that magic, and let it get away.
- citilife 4y ago
  Justified and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was also on FX. As another example of small networks making great stuff.
  - craig_s_bell 4y ago
    Also 'The Americans'
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      FX has always been a low-key prestige series powerhouse. They made The Shield, after all.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      The Americans is the rare example of a very good show which never had a dip in quality throughout its run and absolutely stuck its landing. I think one of the things that really made it for me was Keri Russell playing a character that was so different from a lot of what we were used to seeing her in.
    - chihuahua 4y ago
      "The Americans" is staggeringly good in my opinion. I am blessed with a bad memory, so after a few years, I was able to watch the whole thing again, and except for a half-dozen things I remembered, it was like new content to me. The only criticism is that you know the main characters are going to be OK, so it takes away a bit of the suspense. I wonder if you could have a similar show where the main characters are caught at some unpredictable point in the middle of a season, and then the show continues with new characters brought in to do the same job.
  - Finnucane 4y ago
    Fox has pretty successfully positioned FX as a place for more ambitious shows that wouldn't survive on a bigger network. To the point where I'm willing to give a show a try just because their track record has been good.
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Mad Men had Matt Weiner, who wrote on The Sopranos. Breaking Bad had Vince Gilligan, who wrote on The X-Files. I suspect the common theme here for what makes good television is the creative staff in general and the writing in particular.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - vanilla_nut 4y ago
    This jives with my theory of what makes bad TV: bad writing. It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again. Oddly, Battlestar Galactica has provided a pleasant rewatch every year or two for me for the past decade. It has good writing within each episode, and even though it doesn't hold up in the final season, the writing is overall satisfying enough that I don't avoid it entirely. I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1. I'm sure the writers would have built satisfyingly on the world established in season 1 instead of jumping off the rails and expanding into unnecessary niches of convoluted storytelling.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      > It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again. I'm not gonna claim it was good or anything, but Lost was more than just the show - and a lot of the payoff for the island's mysteries came from the ARG The Lost Experience - https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience > The narrative for the The Lost Experience was designed to be a parallel story line not part of the TV show. Considering the deep mythology to LOST, the Experience acted as a way to cover some background that could not be feasibly addressed in such depth on the main show. In particular, TLE developed the backstory to the DHARMA Initiative and its parent company, the Hanso Foundation. It also established some clues about the Island and the true meaning of the numbers.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  The tragic thing is, according to the video's narrative, AMC has made some very good shows since TWD - HCF, Lodge 49, and The Terror, which were all critically well-received. Critics even liked the Preacher adaptation. But audiences just don't seem to care about AMC anymore besides Better Call Saul.
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    Lodge 49 was excellent. It was a shame that they dropped it. Also, while trying to remember the name of Jim Jefferies' very original show, Legit, I looked at a list of FX original shows and they really have had an astonishing number of high quality shows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_...
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The Terror and Lodge 49 are both great, but AMC also had Better Call Saul, which was incontrovertibly one of the best shows on television and, by the end, the acknowledged successor/extension of Breaking Bad --- which is just to say, until very recently, AMC still had Breaking Bad as a going concern. Maybe it just shows to go you that the make/break for these networks isn't prestige content so much as broader business execution issues.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Gee, I wonder if their shitty streaming strategy could have anything to do with this?
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Funnily enough Breaking Bad benefitted from Netflix quite a bit [0]: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/14/21312595/netflix-breaking-bad-podcast-streaming-land-of-the-giants https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/14/21312595/netflix-breaki...
- nmfisher 4y ago
  Halt and Catch Fire was even better (though more niche).
vogt 4y ago
It’s this, as well as (IMO) an atrocious user experience in the AMC+ app. I mean it is truly very bad, both from an interaction perspective as well as performance. It doesn’t even hold a candle to the major players in the streaming app space. Another thing, they have taken some transparently user-hostile approaches to rolling out content (like splitting Better Call Saul up multiple times) in order to drive signups. The streaming ecosystem is a defragmented mess right now, but AMC have nobody to blame but themselves here.
- willbes 4y ago
  Their user hostile approach to Better Call Saul just shows why they just don't get streaming. I cancelled them almost immediately when I realized I couldn't watch Better Call Saul episodes that had already aired earlier in the season.
- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > like splitting Better Call Saul up multiple times This was the most annoying user hostile thing I've run into in awhile. I figured I would buy a months subscription and watch the last season then see if there were any other shows that looked interesting and would keep me paying for several more months of subscriptions. Not only did they remove the first episodes of the last season so I couldn't watch it, I couldn't even buy the episodes outright or pay extra to watch them. I finally gave up and hit the high seas. It baffles me that corporations are so stupid they won't offer any way for people that are trying to give them money to do it. People that pirate your shows aren't going to attempt to pay for a subscription. The people who are willing to pay it don't want to put up with stupid BS tactics just to watch the content.
  - vogt 4y ago
    Yep. The _exact_ same thing happened with me. Seeing the forest for the trees appears to be a skill lacking at the top at AMC. What's worse, is that the entire thing killed my perspective on the brand. I didn't think of them as anything but the publishers behind two of my all-time favorite shows (BCS, BB) until the AMC+ debacle and everything around BCS. It's just bizarre to me. All of the major incumbents in cable took a "wait and see" approach after watching Netflix and Hulu eat their lunch. I don't know why AMC chose to wait, see, and then do everything wrong afterward. Now here I am ranting with like 3-4 posts about how bad of a taste in my mouth they've left. It didn't have to be this way!
akiselev 4y ago
> Late last month, James Dolan, the company’s chairman, made clear how troublesome that was for the company…. It was a surprising admission for Mr. Dolan, _whose family controls AMC Networks_. (emphasis mine) I think this is just another case of a cash cow getting nuked by incompetence through nepotism. His daddy is a billionaire and his claim to fame is not investing in satellite television. He went from trust fund rehab [1] kid to media executive. Edit: [1] there’s nothing wrong with going to rehab but most people don’t go from rehab to CEO of Cablevision.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  How the f did James Dolan become CEO of AMC? You're vastly underselling his shittiness as a person and businessperson. He also bought a chain of electronics stores right before the industry all but vanished, then bought a chain of movie theaters right before the industry all but vanished, and is possibly the worst sports franchise owner in North American pro sports, destroying a hugely storied team in the basketball capital of the world, banning fans and former players from the arena for criticizing him, and also firing one of the most legendary play-by-play guys of all-time for criticism. Then there's bullshit like this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/inside-jim-dolans-feud-with-steve-ballmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/inside-jim-dolans-fe... Apparently after tanking New York City's bid for the Olympics because he didn't want Madison Square Garden to have to compete with the new venues that would be built, he tried to do something similar in Inglewood, but had his lunch eaten by Ballmer because he let some underlings whose names he can't remember handle the details and didn't get the deal he thought he was getting. Dude could give Meg Whitman a lesson on how to fail upward better. She might be President by now.
  - ciabattabread 4y ago
    It amazes me that Dolan the relatively successful hockey team owner and Dolan the bad basketball team owner are the same guy.
burnte 4y ago
HCF was an amazing show.
- er4hn 4y ago
  Chiming in to add onto this. Fantastic show that is very much worth watching. I'd describe it as similar to Mr. Robot: Halt and Catch Fire uses tech to talk not only about the history of the tech industry, but also to say a lot about people.
louky 4y ago
Yeah, I saw a reference to HCF cold, and was like wait - that can't be a reference to the assembly mnemonic! But it was, and a good show. Brought back memories from the 1980s-90s for sure.
Melatonic 4y ago
Halt and Catch Fire is great but definitely does not have the same wide appeal as the others. Great show but just a more niche audience.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  'Halt and Catch Fire' appears to have been an experiment in targeting nano-audiences. In the case of the show, older tech millionaires and billionaires, and the rest of us were able to go along for the ride. It was difficult not to notice how many ads during the show were for luxury goods and high-end gadgetry. This may be why it kept getting renewed despite the low ratings: they had succeeded in reaching their very narrow, very valuable niche audience they targeted, and advertisers were willing to pay a premium for that access.
thom 4y ago
This is no doubt the most boring and prudish opinion in the universe, but I would have enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire if it had more computers and less sex.
- gibspaulding 4y ago
  Sex scenes are a dime a dozen, but a good computer joke is pure gold in my book.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  So I initially gave up on this show part way through the first season, but not because I hated it exactly it just fell off my radar and didn't grab me. The sex in it did seem...out of place and kind of shoehorned in. And the Joe MacMillon character's out of control Jobish behavior irritated me. But the season 1 finale was solid, I liked many of the characters and the subject matter so I went back to it and I'm so glad I did. It is now one of my favorite shows of all time. The characters were slightly retooled after season 1 and their bizarre family structure is very compelling. The backdrop of the era was why I really showed up for the show but the characters and performances were why I loved it.
mzs 4y ago
I watched AMC when they showed older American films of some note. Same with HBO, when they showed movies before they were available to rent. All the shows they produced themselves never appealed to me. I tried to like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad but they just got repetitive and uncreative.

iancmceachern 4y ago

Mad Men and Breaking Bad are both masterpieces. They made them before the "streaming wars" and proved that non-major networks and studios could make good stuff. They just didn't figure out how to bottle that magic, and let it get away.

citilife 4y ago
Justified and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was also on FX. As another example of small networks making great stuff.
- craig_s_bell 4y ago
  Also 'The Americans'
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    FX has always been a low-key prestige series powerhouse. They made The Shield, after all.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The Americans is the rare example of a very good show which never had a dip in quality throughout its run and absolutely stuck its landing. I think one of the things that really made it for me was Keri Russell playing a character that was so different from a lot of what we were used to seeing her in.
  - chihuahua 4y ago
    "The Americans" is staggeringly good in my opinion. I am blessed with a bad memory, so after a few years, I was able to watch the whole thing again, and except for a half-dozen things I remembered, it was like new content to me. The only criticism is that you know the main characters are going to be OK, so it takes away a bit of the suspense. I wonder if you could have a similar show where the main characters are caught at some unpredictable point in the middle of a season, and then the show continues with new characters brought in to do the same job.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Fox has pretty successfully positioned FX as a place for more ambitious shows that wouldn't survive on a bigger network. To the point where I'm willing to give a show a try just because their track record has been good.
remarkEon 4y ago
Mad Men had Matt Weiner, who wrote on The Sopranos. Breaking Bad had Vince Gilligan, who wrote on The X-Files. I suspect the common theme here for what makes good television is the creative staff in general and the writing in particular.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  This jives with my theory of what makes bad TV: bad writing. It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again. Oddly, Battlestar Galactica has provided a pleasant rewatch every year or two for me for the past decade. It has good writing within each episode, and even though it doesn't hold up in the final season, the writing is overall satisfying enough that I don't avoid it entirely. I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1. I'm sure the writers would have built satisfyingly on the world established in season 1 instead of jumping off the rails and expanding into unnecessary niches of convoluted storytelling.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    > It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again. I'm not gonna claim it was good or anything, but Lost was more than just the show - and a lot of the payoff for the island's mysteries came from the ARG The Lost Experience - https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience > The narrative for the The Lost Experience was designed to be a parallel story line not part of the TV show. Considering the deep mythology to LOST, the Experience acted as a way to cover some background that could not be feasibly addressed in such depth on the main show. In particular, TLE developed the backstory to the DHARMA Initiative and its parent company, the Hanso Foundation. It also established some clues about the Island and the true meaning of the numbers.
Apocryphon 4y ago
The tragic thing is, according to the video's narrative, AMC has made some very good shows since TWD - HCF, Lodge 49, and The Terror, which were all critically well-received. Critics even liked the Preacher adaptation. But audiences just don't seem to care about AMC anymore besides Better Call Saul.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  Lodge 49 was excellent. It was a shame that they dropped it. Also, while trying to remember the name of Jim Jefferies' very original show, Legit, I looked at a list of FX original shows and they really have had an astonishing number of high quality shows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_...
- tptacek 4y ago
  The Terror and Lodge 49 are both great, but AMC also had Better Call Saul, which was incontrovertibly one of the best shows on television and, by the end, the acknowledged successor/extension of Breaking Bad --- which is just to say, until very recently, AMC still had Breaking Bad as a going concern. Maybe it just shows to go you that the make/break for these networks isn't prestige content so much as broader business execution issues.
- jandrese 4y ago
  Gee, I wonder if their shitty streaming strategy could have anything to do with this?
no_wizard 4y ago
Funnily enough Breaking Bad benefitted from Netflix quite a bit [0]: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/14/21312595/netflix-breaking-bad-podcast-streaming-land-of-the-giants https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/7/14/21312595/netflix-breaki...
nmfisher 4y ago
Halt and Catch Fire was even better (though more niche).

vogt 4y ago

It’s this, as well as (IMO) an atrocious user experience in the AMC+ app. I mean it is truly very bad, both from an interaction perspective as well as performance. It doesn’t even hold a candle to the major players in the streaming app space. Another thing, they have taken some transparently user-hostile approaches to rolling out content (like splitting Better Call Saul up multiple times) in order to drive signups. The streaming ecosystem is a defragmented mess right now, but AMC have nobody to blame but themselves here.

willbes 4y ago
Their user hostile approach to Better Call Saul just shows why they just don't get streaming. I cancelled them almost immediately when I realized I couldn't watch Better Call Saul episodes that had already aired earlier in the season.
_gabe_ 4y ago
> like splitting Better Call Saul up multiple times This was the most annoying user hostile thing I've run into in awhile. I figured I would buy a months subscription and watch the last season then see if there were any other shows that looked interesting and would keep me paying for several more months of subscriptions. Not only did they remove the first episodes of the last season so I couldn't watch it, I couldn't even buy the episodes outright or pay extra to watch them. I finally gave up and hit the high seas. It baffles me that corporations are so stupid they won't offer any way for people that are trying to give them money to do it. People that pirate your shows aren't going to attempt to pay for a subscription. The people who are willing to pay it don't want to put up with stupid BS tactics just to watch the content.
- vogt 4y ago
  Yep. The _exact_ same thing happened with me. Seeing the forest for the trees appears to be a skill lacking at the top at AMC. What's worse, is that the entire thing killed my perspective on the brand. I didn't think of them as anything but the publishers behind two of my all-time favorite shows (BCS, BB) until the AMC+ debacle and everything around BCS. It's just bizarre to me. All of the major incumbents in cable took a "wait and see" approach after watching Netflix and Hulu eat their lunch. I don't know why AMC chose to wait, see, and then do everything wrong afterward. Now here I am ranting with like 3-4 posts about how bad of a taste in my mouth they've left. It didn't have to be this way!

akiselev 4y ago

> Late last month, James Dolan, the company’s chairman, made clear how troublesome that was for the company…. It was a surprising admission for Mr. Dolan, _whose family controls AMC Networks_. (emphasis mine) I think this is just another case of a cash cow getting nuked by incompetence through nepotism. His daddy is a billionaire and his claim to fame is not investing in satellite television. He went from trust fund rehab [1] kid to media executive. Edit: [1] there’s nothing wrong with going to rehab but most people don’t go from rehab to CEO of Cablevision.

nonameiguess 4y ago
How the f did James Dolan become CEO of AMC? You're vastly underselling his shittiness as a person and businessperson. He also bought a chain of electronics stores right before the industry all but vanished, then bought a chain of movie theaters right before the industry all but vanished, and is possibly the worst sports franchise owner in North American pro sports, destroying a hugely storied team in the basketball capital of the world, banning fans and former players from the arena for criticizing him, and also firing one of the most legendary play-by-play guys of all-time for criticism. Then there's bullshit like this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/inside-jim-dolans-feud-with-steve-ballmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/07/inside-jim-dolans-fe... Apparently after tanking New York City's bid for the Olympics because he didn't want Madison Square Garden to have to compete with the new venues that would be built, he tried to do something similar in Inglewood, but had his lunch eaten by Ballmer because he let some underlings whose names he can't remember handle the details and didn't get the deal he thought he was getting. Dude could give Meg Whitman a lesson on how to fail upward better. She might be President by now.
- ciabattabread 4y ago
  It amazes me that Dolan the relatively successful hockey team owner and Dolan the bad basketball team owner are the same guy.

burnte 4y ago

HCF was an amazing show.

er4hn 4y ago
Chiming in to add onto this. Fantastic show that is very much worth watching. I'd describe it as similar to Mr. Robot: Halt and Catch Fire uses tech to talk not only about the history of the tech industry, but also to say a lot about people.

louky 4y ago

Yeah, I saw a reference to HCF cold, and was like wait - that can't be a reference to the assembly mnemonic! But it was, and a good show. Brought back memories from the 1980s-90s for sure.

Melatonic 4y ago

Halt and Catch Fire is great but definitely does not have the same wide appeal as the others. Great show but just a more niche audience.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
'Halt and Catch Fire' appears to have been an experiment in targeting nano-audiences. In the case of the show, older tech millionaires and billionaires, and the rest of us were able to go along for the ride. It was difficult not to notice how many ads during the show were for luxury goods and high-end gadgetry. This may be why it kept getting renewed despite the low ratings: they had succeeded in reaching their very narrow, very valuable niche audience they targeted, and advertisers were willing to pay a premium for that access.

thom 4y ago

This is no doubt the most boring and prudish opinion in the universe, but I would have enjoyed Halt and Catch Fire if it had more computers and less sex.

gibspaulding 4y ago
Sex scenes are a dime a dozen, but a good computer joke is pure gold in my book.
ridgered4 4y ago
So I initially gave up on this show part way through the first season, but not because I hated it exactly it just fell off my radar and didn't grab me. The sex in it did seem...out of place and kind of shoehorned in. And the Joe MacMillon character's out of control Jobish behavior irritated me. But the season 1 finale was solid, I liked many of the characters and the subject matter so I went back to it and I'm so glad I did. It is now one of my favorite shows of all time. The characters were slightly retooled after season 1 and their bizarre family structure is very compelling. The backdrop of the era was why I really showed up for the show but the characters and performances were why I loved it.

mzs 4y ago

I watched AMC when they showed older American films of some note. Same with HBO, when they showed movies before they were available to rent. All the shows they produced themselves never appealed to me. I tried to like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad but they just got repetitive and uncreative.