AMC Global Media is known for high-quality dramas such as “Mad Men,” “Dark Winds” and “Better Call Saul.” Now a Peak TV purveyor, the company believes it can make a scene by playing sports.
The company, which operates AMC, Shudder, and BBC America, among others, isn’t ready to announce a major deal that would collude with the NFL or Major League Baseball. But the company is ready to delve deeper into sports-themed scripted and documentary programming, and is eager to draw viewers to the one show it believes will continue to draw large audiences in the streaming era.
“We know we’re not going to buy a major sports league, but we can capture that audience,” Dan McDermott, chief content officer of AMC Global Media and president of AMC Studios, said in a recent interview.
AMC, in partnership with NASCAR, has greenlit a new scripted series, “Thunder Road,” starring Dennis Quaid as the patriarch of a racing family battling multiple challenges. The company also renewed its sports documentary series “Rise,” which takes viewers behind the scenes of sports dynasties, including the post-Katrina New Orleans Saints next cycle and the San Francisco 49ers’ last season in the 1980s. AMC currently also serves as the home of TNA Wrestling. In development: A series based on the popular 1991 action movie Point Break, in which an undercover cop must infiltrate a group of surfers.
Expensive NBA rights and an NFL partnership are “not our market,” said Kim Kelleher, president and chief commercial officer of AMC Global Media. “But telling the stories behind those great seminal moments is very much a focus for us.”
Partnering with the NFL, NBA and other major leagues costs billions of dollars, something a small to medium-sized media company like AMC doesn’t have to spend. However, there is no reason why such dealers cannot be on the scene.
Vice TV, a joint venture between Vice Media and A&E Global Networks, fills part of its schedule with sports documentary series like “The Verdict,” where host Chris “Mad Dog” Russo ponders top athletes and great discussions about women’s wrestling.
This is a game that all media companies must play. The migration of traditional TV viewers to streaming services has given even the most reluctant viewers the tools they need to create their own programming schedules. But in the process, it has lost one of television’s hallmarks: the large audiences that once flocked to watch dramas, sitcoms, and reality shows. The only television format that seems less susceptible to dynamic effects is live sports. This results in a wider audience and a much shorter shelf life for all televised matches.
Before tackling sports, AMC executives studied one of the company’s core audiences: fans of the “Walking Dead” series, which has spawned multiple series on the company’s flagship cable outlet. “It’s a national audience. It’s not biased to the coasts. It’s always been a very broad audience, from Texas to Maine,” Kelleher said. “I feel like when I started looking into the wrestling world, I found that there was a great affinity as well.”
AMC may not have offered sports dramas before, but it can still find properties that meet its long-standing criteria, McDermott said. The company continues to look for unique characters, worlds that viewers don’t normally experience, and stories that offer something more than just a well-told story. “We also think the hallmark of a great AMC show is that it genuinely tries to say something about the world we live in,” the executive says.
“Thunder Road” is produced in collaboration with NASCAR, so AMC has help with access to sponsors for the organization, which can stay true to the real-life details of the sport and potentially attract future advertisers. NASCAR is known for devising unique placements of advertising messages in the sport, said Evan Addleman, executive vice president of commercial sales and revenue operations for AMC Global Media, who said the show has already received “a lot of inbound” interest.
But with a racing league involved, AMC will have to tread carefully. McDermott said the characters may have flaws and cars may crash, but NASCAR wanted the racing scenes to be authentic and was adamant that the series would not depict anyone driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The edict was understandable, he says. “At the end of the day, we want to do in NASCAR what F1 did in F1,” he added.
Can a scripted series aim to capture the large audience that sports has? It seems like AMC is in for the long haul.
