Turtleknife's Online Marketing Blog

Breaking Bad is launching it's third season soon and to find top quality television like this outside of HBO and Showcase is rather rare. But to me AMC is a business more like HBO or ShowTime, except that they don't run 100% their own productions. In fact, if you surf through AMC's lineup its filled with old westerns and classics. On the other hand, with 2 industry leading and critically acclaimed series in Breaking Bad and Mad Men AMC can run crap all day interjected with a few of these home-spun productions and make some serious money.

You see, Breaking Bad and Mad Men are the type of television that is winning viewers and slicing up the audience of network television to the point where almost like the newspaper business, the slide seems unstoppable. All they seem to have is reality TV, but yes, there are some bright spots like The Good Wife and The Mentalist, but look at where all the awards have been going this last decade or so. Ever since The Sopranos shocked the world with language, sex, and despicable human characteristics, television has changed. It has changed in such a way that to get realy quality you must be a high end subscriber now to the movie networks outside of your basic cable subscription.

People don't really talk about sitcoms like they used to when Friends and Seinfeld were so big. No all we have is Two and a Half Men, and I gotta ask, who the heck is watching that? The Sopranos and to an extent Six Feet Under redefined series television. The "water cooler" talk is now about shows like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Weeds, Californication, Nurse Jackie, United States of Tara, In Treatment, Band of Brothers, John Adams etc. I mean these shows are attracting some of Hollywood's biggest names because they can get the chance to create some real quality for television and they can knock down a series in a few months of work, then off to another movie set.

I just find myself relying less and less on network TV for my entertainment time, and I really thing that there will be some redefining in the next few years to come because they will not be able to rely on shows like CSI and Law and Order forever.