Grantland's Andy Greenwald on AMC's future

We discussed this topic at length in the Breaking Bad thread, but now Greenwald has come out with a thoughtful piece about AMC's direction post-Breaking Bad/Mad Men, how The Walking Dead's crazy success has bought it some time and the reasons for the recent string of prestige-show failures:

www.grantland.com/story/_/id/9829683/the-state-amc

He makes an interesting point: that AMC's two critical smashes --- Mad Men and Breaking Bad --- were both rejected by other networks. Aside from The Walking Dead, nearly everything AMC has developed on its own --- Rubicon, The Killing, Hell on Wheels, Low Winter Sun --- has been a failure.

Also this:

I guess the over-arching argument is ... as long as TWD is pulling in 7-to-8-figure ratings by hacking up zombies every week, do they really care that everything else on their network sucks?

 

I'm intrigued by "Halt & Catch Fire" though that is 99.9 percent because of Lee Pace. I know nothing about the show itself.

 

Rubicon had the potential to be a great show.

 

Steak, I think at a certain point something has to give, right? I mean, I think there was the assumption that things would keep humming along with NBC's Thursday Night, until at a certain point, it didn't. Right now, AMC has Mad Men (critic darling, great ad rates I believe because of the demo it gets) and The Walking Dead, and after that, pretty much nothing.

Greenwald didn't get into this, but I think one of their failures has been relying on cheap, short-term rating success shows after their hits lately, as opposed to trying to grow new shows. Meaning, the reliance on panel shows hosted by Chris Hardwick about the show everyone just watched, instead of original programming.

 

I love AMC's fleet of Hollywood movies, each interrupted by frequent commercials, because there's really no where else to go in cable- or satellite-land to see commercial-free movies.

TCM > (x 1K) AMC

 

Take it from this TV vet, AMC is in great shape; in the current cable marketplace, you make your nut on the carriage fees, you make your profit off ad sales. So the $$$ AMC rakes in off one huge hit (MM, BB, WD) covers the make-goods it has to pay out on all the failures, and leaves plenty left over for profit.

 

The argument in the original post isn't financial, but aesthetic. It's that the only original programming that has been successful on AMC are two series that they picked off the scrap heap and a comic book adaptation.

Everything else that has come out of the AMC development office has been crap.

 

He'll On Wheels is a very god show. A bit predicable but well written and acted

 

I'll continue to contend that Mad Men is a good show of a certain kind, by and for critics, but it is not, on the whole, a great audience show. Most people I know who have watched it find it tremendously boring. And it is, on one level, tremendously boring. It is a success in the sense that the TV industry and Internet critics are damn well insistent on it being one. And sometimes that's enough, so long, of course, as channels are sold in a cable bundle.

 

I really enjoyed Rubicon, but it never was going to be a great show. It was too convoluted. The stakes were too high, too quickly. The fate of the world rested on Will Travers. (Aside: I remembered that off the top of my head.)

 

Most people I know who have watched it, including my wife and I, find it to be excellent. Proves nothing. Same as your field research.

 

Seemingly everyone who regularly watches Mad Men loves it, but there definitely are many people who gave it a shot and didn't.