AMC+ Has a Real Problem

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 22, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | February 22, 2023 |

My kid has been steadily going through the Breaking Bad universe and has finally arrived at the end of season five of Better Call Saul. After plugging away at it for several months, he’s excited to watch the sixth and final season of Better Call Saul to complete the experience. He’d watched Breaking Bad and the first five seasons of Saul on Netflix, so when he told me the final season wasn’t available on Netflix, I told him, “No problem. Just watch it on AMC+.”

That’s when I discovered that Better Call Saul was unavailable on AMC+. In fact, neither is Breaking Bad or, for that matter, the most popular series in AMC history, The Walking Dead. The only way to watch the sixth season of Better Call Saul right now is to buy it. I subscribe to eight or nine streaming services, and yet the final season of one of the most popular series on cable is not available on any of them. I understand and appreciate that it will eventually stream on Netflix and that there is a window between its original broadcast and its streaming release, but what’s the point if the window is designed to encourage you to subscribe to AMC+?

I’m usually so invested in keeping up with new content that I rarely watch a series more than a few months old, so I only just realized this week that AMC+ has little access to much of AMC’s most popular content. Killing Eve is on Hulu. The Walking Dead is on Netflix. You can watch The Walking Dead: The World Beyond on AMC+, but you have to go to Hulu to watch Fear the Walking Dead. Likewise, Into the Badlands, which ran for three seasons on AMC, streams on Netflix, while two seasons of the limited series The Terror stream on Hulu. Want to watch the kooky and deranged Ultra City Smiths? You can watch it on AMC, but not on AMC+. Remember the phenomenal The Night Manager with Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Debicki? That’s on Prime Video, but not on AMC+. Wanna watch all four seasons of Preacher? That’s on Hulu.

All of this came to my attention just as Puck was questioning whether AMC+ could survive. The problem, they argue, is that either other studios own much of AMC’s content (Sony owns Breaking Bad, for instance), or licensing a series to Netflix or Hulu is worth more to the company than streaming it on its own platform (The Walking Dead). That means that subscribers to AMC+ are basically paying for access to mostly their new content, which is fine if you liked Interview with a Vampire (which was great) or Mayfair Witches (which is not), the forthcoming Lucky Hank, or the next season of Dark Winds. But is that enough to justify the $8.99 monthly expense? That is $3 more a month than Disney+, which has thousands and thousands of titles, and $2 more a month than Apple TV+, which produces 12 to 15 good-to-great TV series a year, while AMC+ is producing multiple spin-offs to a series that you can’t even watch on their streamer.

As I’ve said before: I like AMC. I’m rooting for AMC because AMC/Shudder/Sundance/BBC America is about the last place that hasn’t been snatched up by a media conglomerate, but subscribing to the streamer feels like paying the 30 percent mark-up to buy a book at your local bookstore instead of Amazon. I’ll do it to support local businesses, but it’s not sustainable.

Source: Puck