Curated themes and highlights on specific movie stars are a great jumping off point that never claim to be exhaustive. It’s not something an algorithm can achieve. That’s why losing Tabesh was a code-red alarm for anyone who cares about TCM. Curation takes a wealth of knowledge of movies, but not just knowing a bunch of titles that have been said to be similar, but the movies that haven’t been associated together before. Real programming makes you see movies you’ve seen already differently when curated with other movies and TCM has done that time and again.
For the record (and Emily states this in the piece), Charlie Tabesh has been rehired as chief programmer at TCM, but the fact that he was ever let go in the first place speaks volumes about how much Warner under David Zaslav cares about TCM, which is the single most valuable entity to classic film fans over the past several decades. I’m not unworried.📽