Idiot Box: AMC plays the Bad guy

Imagine a character, one you’ve had three long seasons to grow deeply invested in, aiming a gun at another character. Your guy isn’t perfect, and you’ve seen him act in less-than-lawful manners before, but he’s been through a lot, and it reads in his terrified eyes while he holds a gun to a defenseless man’s head. He pulls the trigger, and the screen goes black. End of season three.
Now, it’s hard to get angry at the people behind Breaking Bad for ending the third season like this—it’s a common tactic for suspenseful shows, and coming at the end of a fantastic finale to an equally fantastic season, it’s difficult to believe that any of the 1.6 million viewers felt dissatisfied. But that was in June 2010. Fourteen months later, when we still hadn’t heard from our favorite meth-cookers Jesse and Walter, Breaking Bad’s viewers were jonesing.
The source of the shortage, apparently, was the show’s relationship with its network, AMC. During the summer, there were rumors floating around television blogs about arguments between AMC and the show’s producers, which got so contentious that the show began shopping around for other networks. This not only troubled viewers who wanted their fix, but also confused them quite a bit—Breaking Bad is an incredibly successful Emmy magnet. Why would AMC not do everything in its power to keep it on board?
Sadly, I have no answer to this, but only a related question, which has also been tugging at the minds of TV fans for far too long: where in the world is Don Draper? Sure, Mad Men viewers love his enigmatic personality onscreen, but they (well, we) don’t really like waiting for the elusive AMC to decide when it wants to let us watch the fifth season. After the end of the fourth in October 2010, well-publicized arguments about payment for the actors left the show in TV limbo until it was finally renewed in March. Unfortunately, that resolution still forces viewers to wait an inhumane amount of time—until early 2012!—to find out what’s next for the ad men at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.
The weirdest part of AMC’s hardball tactics is that these are two of the most successful shows on television, and easily the best the network has on its roster. For a station whose name—American Movie Classics—attaches itself to cinema, AMC’s original programming has garnered so much acclaim in recent years that it’s able to hold its own against cable TV giants like HBO. Last year, it introduced zombie attack series The Walking Dead, which drew a whopping six million viewers for its finale and will soon debut its second season. Their new show for 2011, The Killing, met similar success (although not without losing some fans by the end).
Unfortunately, the success of these new shows seems to be to the detriment of those that first made a name for the network. Before, if Breaking Bad and Mad Men fans (or producers, or actors) were unhappy, the network needed to adjust. The shows that kept AMC afloat had all the leverage they needed. And since neither show moved to a different station, we’re left to infer that AMC’s new, big league lineup means that our favorite programs are subject to some good old-fashioned network intimidation.
The strangest—but most relieving—part of the whole thing is that when Breaking Bad finally returned for its fourth season in July, its premiere’s ratings were by far the highest of the series, and the rest of the season has proven arguably one of its best.  Maybe there were some strategic machinations behind AMC’s anticipation-building tactics after all.