With Sarah Barnett Exiting AMC, the Era of Prestige Cable TV is Officially Over

Variety broke the news yesterday that Sarah Barnett was stepping down from her role as Head of AMC Networks. In the 11 years that Barnett worked for AMC, she established Sundance TV as an incubator for brilliant television series like Rectify and Top of the Lake, ordered a little series called Killing Eve for BBC America, and held fast to the conviction that AMC Networks could remain a bastion of linear cable in the shadow of the streaming wars. Through it all, Barnett remained committed to champion unique perspectives and female voices. But her surprise departure from AMC marks more than just the end of her ride with AMC. It also marks the official end of the golden era of prestige TV on basic cable.

Sarah Barnett’s journey with AMC Networks started in 2008 when AMC acquired Sundance TV. Barnett, who had been Head of Marketing at the then-called Sundance Channel, was soon shuffled into place as head of Sundance TV. In 2011, Barnett ordered the network’s very first scripted series, Rectify. She followed this cult hit up with fellow critical darlings The Honourable Woman and Top of the Lake, the latter of which marked feminist filmmaker Jane Campion’s first foray into television. Her success in turning Sundance TV into a hub for chic and creative programming earned Barnett the gig as head of BBC America in 2014. Rejecting conventional programming wisdom, Barnett’s used the growing success of Orphan Black to inspire her to look at more off-beat female-centric programming. This led her to greenlight Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve to series ahead of the British auteur’s major U.S. breakthrough, Fleabag. Barnett’s continued programming success would land her the top gig at AMC Networks.

In a 2019 interview with Vulture’s Josef Adalian, Barnett admitted that she was eager to champion female perspectives at AMC. Barnett said, “I think AMC has been incredibly good, for very many years, at telling complex stories about masculinity. A lot of the shows have very strong female characters, [but] there are a lot more stories to be told in our world about complicated women.”

Among the projects and voices Barnett championed were Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s juggernaut hit Killing Eve, author Deborah Harkness’s sumptuously romantic supernatural series A Discovery of Witches, and the upcoming Rashida Jones comedy tentatively titled Kevin Can Go F–k Himself. Angela Kang became showrunner of The Walking Dead under Barnett’s watch, and in turn, the mastermind behind the franchise’s ever-expanding universe of content.

Barnett’s tenure at AMC Networks started off in the “Golden Age of Television” (aka “Peak TV”). It was a time when AMC lead the way for the industry with inventive hits like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. It was also an era that embraced Barnett’s attitude of seeking out new unique talent over slavish devotion to data algorithms. As recently as her last executive session at TCA, Barnett warned against this emerging trend.

“Far from more choice, the untested and the unusual are minimized in the algorithm of big data,” Barnett told the assembled press. “The Internet claimed it would free us from the old gatekeepers and provide frictionless choice and diversity of voice. But the biases of Hollywood powerbrokers seem to be being replaced by those of engineers and data scientists a few hundred miles up the coast.”

As her peers found their networks swallowed up in corporate mergers and reconfigured to fit into a streaming portfolio, Barnett’s strategy seemed to be to resist the call to pivot to streaming. Instead, during her tenure at AMC Networks, Barnett leaned harder on linear programming than before. Rather than order programming to appeal to a mass streaming audience, she championed quirky shows like Dispatches from Elsewhere and Lodge 49. Barnett often used cross-channel premieres as a way to encourage audience growth, placing BBC America’s Killing Eve on AMC primetime to great ratings success (not to mention wins at the Emmys and Golden Globes).

And through it all, AMC Networks resisted the call to invest in a singular standalone streaming service or to get swallowed up in a larger corporation’s big gamble. Not even the titans of Peak TV, like HBO’s former head honcho, Richard Plepler, or FX’s John Landgraf, managed to stick to their love of linear for as long. Plepler left HBO in early 2019, just as WarnerMedia was firming up plans to launch HBO Max in 2020, and is now at Apple TV. Meanwhile Landgraf’s beloved FX is now finding its provocative programming funneled directly onto Hulu after a deal between parent companies Fox and Disney.

Under Barnett’s leadership, AMC was the one persnickety cable network that largely avoided participating in the streaming wars, but now her watch has come to an end. In a statement to Variety, Barnett explained her decision to step down now: “This is a year that has confronted us with radical change on multiple fronts. After a lot of consideration – and with a slightly breaking heart – I have decided that it is the right time for me to follow my curiosity and leave things in the very capable hands of the outstanding team at AMC Networks.”

Barnett might never have been the most powerful television executive in Hollywood, but that was never her game. Her programming philosophy was always about risk, discovery, and resisting the obvious. It’s the kind of philosophy that flourished during the Golden Age of TV, and it’s now out of fashion. Scale is everything, data is king, and the streaming wars must be fought at all costs. Where Barnett goes next is a mystery, but her tenure at AMC will fondly be remembered as we reminisce a now bygone era of television.