Breaking Bad is arguably the best show on television right now, and along with its stellar cast, directing, writing and acting, it’s one of the most engaging stories I’ve ever seen. So engaging, that it’s only a week and change away from debuting its new season, and that still feels like an incredibly long time. Unfortunately, the wait could be even longer for Dish Network subscribers, who are SOL when it comes to getting AMC this year. Dish is another satellite TV provider that has at one point or another, failed to make a deal with a popular cable network, and the drama spills out into the public, and fans of that channel have to get involved themselves.
“Dish has not discussed rates with us at all,” AMC said in today’s statement. Dish customers have lost some of their favorite shows because of an unrelated lawsuit which has nothing at all to do with our programming.” [Ad Age]
Basically, Dish says that AMC is charging too much for its channel with its shows with low ratings, (Walking Dead, Mad Men, ) and AMC says that Dish is dropping them because of an unspecified 2008 lawsuit that would lose Dish money, to the amount of $ 2.5 billion. A similar thing happened with FX/DirecTV a year or so ago, and years before that DirecTV and G4, only G4 is such a terrible channel DirecTV decided to not accept their deal and now DirecTV is G4-less. That’s ok though, because G4 has never had anything close in quality to the worst show on FX or AMC combined, and that includes reruns of Two & A Half Men. How this keeps happening, I don’t understand. Perhaps there’s just a constant cycle of lawsuits that are on hold indefinitely to stymie cable and satellite providers, and some great TV Pope declares who will get what network approval every 10 years.
So the Great TV Pope has declared that unless Dish and AMC can come to some agreement, AMC, IFC and We TV will be dropped from Dish. How will they get their dose of Zombies, Meth Drama, Men in Suits, Experimental Indie Cinema and Women’s Programming now?
On an interesting side note, FX was originally going to pick up Breaking Bad, until the president of FX thought that Walter White would make one male anti-hero too many for their channel.
“We had three dramas with male antiheroes and we looked at that script and said, ‘Okay, so here’s a fourth male antihero,’” Landgraf recalled. “The question was: ‘Are we defining FX as the male antihero network and is that a big enough tent?” [EW]
I suppose this means that no matter what, at some point every Satellite TV customer, would have to have worried about not getting their fix of Breaking Bad. What with FX’s fans’ main rallying cry being to save It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in some alternate universe somewhere it very well may have been “Save Breaking Bad! Tell FX you love meth!” Mostly, I’m just glad I have DirecTV right now…
Grizzly Bomb 