How many times a year can you watch “Old Yeller”?
It must be the kind of question the programmers at Turner Classic Movies ask themselves all the time: How much longer can we get away with showing the same old movies over and over again?
The answer is: They’ve been getting away with it for years. But for how much longer?
Don’t get me wrong. This steadfast cable channel has no bigger fan than me, and possibly you, if you are among the thousands of TCM devotees who rub your eyes in disbelief that a cable TV network in this day and age, owned by a huge media company, Time Warner, continues to pursue a policy of presenting commercial-free (!) old movies, many in black-and-white, for heaven’s sake.
However, TCM’s biggest limitation seems to be a playlist that has grown increasingly constricted as the years have gone by. Many is the evening or rainy weekend afternoon when I check out the listings on TCM and find a string of titles I recognize from just the past few weeks or months of listings, or so it seems.
Sometimes, TCM seems to attempt to disguise the limitations of its playlist by “packaging” its movies under various umbrellas such as its monthlong tributes to a legendary star.
But when the channel devotes a month to the films of Gregory Peck, Cary Grant, Joseph Cotten, Carole Lombard or Kirk Douglas, they are still showing the same old films they would otherwise show, tribute or no tribute.
The same goes for its “talk” show called “The Essentials,” on which a guest celebrity comes on with host Robert Osborne to “present” classic movies these celebrities deem to be “essential” to the average Joe’s knowledge of movie history.
On “The Essentials,” the titles are gussied up by Osborne and his guest’s enthusiasm for the films and their position in film history. But here again, the movies, which may or may not have been “chosen” by the guest celebrity (I suspect their choices are constricted by the list of titles TCM has available), are really the same old movies TCM always shows.
I have no idea how many movies, in toto, TCM has at its disposal. It could be hundreds of them. Perhaps the network doesn’t consider many of them worth airing, though maybe they could package a new show called “The Obscurities,” in which all kinds of little-known films would be shown.
Or maybe many viewers, unlike myself, don’t mind watching “The Best Years of Our Lives” or “Top Hat” six times a year.