If you missed it the other day, New York magazine’s Joe Adalian had an excellent analysis of what’s behind the recent business and p.r. problems at AMC. It’s worth reading in full, but one major point in brief: all those times you wondered how in the world they could afford to produce HBO-type shows on a basic-cable budget? Turns out they can’t, not exactly.
One prescription Adalian offered was that AMC would need to (1) get several profitable years out of megahit The Walking Dead (which it owns) and (2) complement its dramas with some cheaper programming, such as reality shows. Behold: today AMC announced that The Walking Dead would get a supersized 90-minute launch and that it’s picked up two reality shows, one from filmmaker Kevin Smith.
The Walking Dead season, by the way, is going to be split into two parts: following the debut Oct. 16, the show airs six weekly episodes, then returns with another six Feb. 12. Also after the New Year, the network debuts Kevin Smith’s Secret Stash, which amazingly—given the creator and the title—is somehow not about pot. (It’s about comic book culture, and is set at Smith’s comic store, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash.)
The second AMC reality entry is JJK Security, due in the third quarter of 2012, about a small family private security company in rural Georgia. Sounds like something you might see on one of Discovery’s networks or A&E, but—because this is AMC and we’re classy—the network says it’s “inspired by what filmmakers like the Coen Brothers, Christopher Guest and Robert Altman have done capturing quirky, larger than life characters in the scripted realm.”
I hope so. Of course, if it also ends up being inspired by what networks like History channel, Bravo and MTV have done in the bang-for-the-buck realm, that probably wouldn’t hurt, either.