By Michael Schneider

General editor of the variety

In 2020, my Variety colleague Kate Aurthur and I wrote a cover story about the death of cable, complete with striking art of a coaxial cable shaped like a skull. The headline read, “RIP Cable TV: Why Hollywood Is Slowly Killing Its Biggest Moneymaker,” and I think it remains one of the most damning indictments of the way this company made a series of potentially fatal choices to upend its entire financial model.

Since then, we’ve been proven right time and time again. But it didn’t take a genius to see the storm brewing, as several basic cable channels had already gone zombie (or should I say, downright “ridiculous”). Four years later, there’s nothing “slow” about the way the congloms have killed off their cable assets.