Another good one gone

All good things come to an end, and At the Movies is no exception. Dave Itzkoff has the story in The New York Times:

The balcony is closed, this time for good. After nearly three decades, At the Movies, the syndicated television program that introduced many viewers to the film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, as well as to film criticism in all its thorny and contentious glory, will cease production this summer. Disney-ABC Domestic Television, which distributes At the Movies, and ABC Media Productions, which produces it, said in a statement late Wednesday that the current version of the show, which is hosted by Michael Phillips of The Chicago Tribune and A. O. Scott of The New York Times, would broadcast its last original episode the weekend of 14 August.
The demise of At the Movies was a blow to the legions of armchair reviewers it spawned in its many incarnations, some of whom went on to professional careers in criticism. “It’s impossible to overestimate the impact of what Gene and Roger did,” Mr. Scott, the co-chief film critic at The Times, said in a telephone interview. “Any one of us who’s doing this now, on any platform or in any medium, is following them.”
But the program’s cancellation is also a reflection of the rapid changes that the film and television industries have undergone in recent years: the proliferation of print and web outlets that offer movie reviews as much as the declining value of At the Movies in Disney’s syndication portfolio. “From a business perspective,” Disney said in its statement, “it became clear this weekly, half-hour, broadcast syndication series was no longer sustainable.”
At the Movies had its origins in a 1970s-era program, called Opening Soon at a Theater Near You and then Sneak Previews, shown on the Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW. That show paired Mr. Siskel, the buttoned-down film reviewer of The Chicago Tribune, with Mr. Ebert, the irascible critic and crosstown rival at The Chicago Sun-Times. In 1982 they took their powerful thumbs and their often heated arguments on the week’s newest release to At the Movies, a syndicated series produced by Tribune Entertainment.
They left to start another series, Siskel & Ebert & the Movies, in 1986, which went through several host changes and eventually reclaimed the title of At the Movies. For a time the show was disdained by other film reviewers, who felt that its thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdicts reduced movie criticism to a mere yes or no, an argument that seems downright quaint today.
After Mr. Siskel died in 1999, Mr. Ebert shared co-hosting duties with a rotating lineup of critics until his Sun-Times colleague, Richard Roeper, became permanent co-host in 2000. Mr. Ebert took absences beginning in 2006 to be treated for cancer, leading to another round of substitute critics and his eventually ceding his chair to Mr. Phillips of The Tribune.
When Mr. Ebert and Mr. Roeper officially left At the Movies in 2008, they were replaced by Ben Lyons, a television producer and online columnist, and Ben Mankiewicz, a radio and television host, in a flashier, more upbeat version of the show. It was not well received by fans, or by Mr. Ebert, who wrote of the untested Mr. Lyons, “To put him in my seat was a mistake.” The next year Mr. Phillips and Mr. Scott became hosts.
By that time, At the Movies represented an increasingly tiny sliver of Disney’s syndication pie: shown once a week nearly nationwide, for a half-hour, it was not able to generate nearly as much revenue as programs like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or its powerhouse morning talk show, Live! With Regis and Kelly, which are typically broadcast five days a week.
While the show was still profitable and its ratings improved over the version hosted by the two Bens, according to several people close to the production of the show, Disney found the economic vital signs too discouraging to continue.
In a post late Wednesday on the website of The Sun-Times, Mr. Ebert wrote of At the Movies that it “didn’t fail so much as have its format shot out from beneath it”. Rather than attributing its downfall to any particular hosts, he wrote, “Blame the fact that cable TV and the Internet have fragmented the audience so much that stations are losing market share no matter what they do.”
Mr. Ebert also pointed to the limited influence that reviews can have on certain movies and certain moviegoers, adding: “Theatrical distribution is now dominated by the big-budget, heavily marketed 3-D of the Week. Such films have a success utterly independent of critics.”
Mr. Phillips said in a telephone interview that, although At the Movies faced increased challenges in reaching a wide audience, neither its Chicago-based production staff nor Disney ever pressured him or Mr. Scott to dumb down their on-air discussions. “When they let us on the show,” he said, “they knew they weren’t going to get anything that could fool the Access Hollywood crowd into watching. They were always stressing that we have an arena for film criticism that tells the truth.”
Mr. Scott said that the shuttering of At the Movies did not necessarily reflect a diminished interest in cinema criticism, or a decline in its ability to influence audiences. “It’s always been true that people can go to the movies without reading what critics have to say about the movies,” Mr. Scott said. He added: “Criticism matters to the people who care about it. It’s not that everybody out there in the world needs to hear what we have to say, but some people want to. And there is still, I think, an appetite.”