Gone With The Wind

The irony of TCM showing a documentary last week called Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession wasn’t lost on anybody paying attention. During a week in which five TCM executives were fired and staffing cut, jeopardizing the channel’s existence, showing a documentary about a cable channel devoted to airing, without commercials, an eclectic mix of overlooked and under-appreciated movies, foreign films, six-hour director’s cuts – essentially films that weren’t being shown anywhere else, felt like a cautionary tale about history repeating itself.

With nearly 100,000 subscribers in Southern California at its height in the mid-1980s, Z Channel became embroiled in lawsuits, then sold to Cablevision and NBC in March, 1989. Three months later, it was off the air.

TCM is still here and on the surface seems to be running the same as ever. For now, we have the assurances of several TCM hosts on social media that things aren’t changing. Spielberg and Scorsese, among others, have both spoken out loudly about the need to keep TCM alive, including personal calls to the guy ultimately calling the shots here, the same Warner Bros. Discovery CEO who rebranded HBO to Max and hired the exec – since fired – who attempted to make CNN more appealing to conservatives. That Trump town hall went really well, didn’t it?

The Z Channel documentary was originally made in 2004 for the Independent Film Channel. Originally a commercial-free service devoted to airing independent films, today it’s known as IFC where you can catch repeated airings of Lethal Weapon 2 and Lethal Weapon 3 through most of the day, followed by six-hour blocks of Everybody Loves Raymond and Three’s Company.