March 08, 2019
By Rodney Ho
The initial memo Monday in which AT&T described how it was divvying up Turner Broadcasting networks and there seemed to be logic in all the various splits.
TNT, TBS and truTV joined HBO. CNN and HLN were teamed up with live sports. And Cartoon Network and Adult Swim will help bolster the new Warner Bros. division focused on children and younger people.
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But it seemed, on the surface, odd that Turner Classic Movies (TCM) ended up in that Warner Bros. "new global kids and young adults business." That network, which Ted Turner created in 1994, is the opposite. It targets a much older audience that prefers their movies black and white, mining films from primarily from the the Old Hollywood days of the 1930s through the 1960s.
But Warner Bros. is also a film studio which owns a vast library of thousands of classic movies. TCM on the whole airs just films, both licensed from Warner Bros. and from other studios. Even its original shows are tied to such films.
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So TCM - run by Jennifer Dorian since 2014 - is not actually going to be part of the division for kids and young adults. It's really under the Warner Bros. umbrella because of its usage of Warner Bros. films for programming purposes.
TCM was created in 1994 by Ted Turner to leverage his library of 4,700 feature films from MGM, RKO and pre-1950 Warner Bros. films Turner Broadcasting acquired in the mid-1980s.