As a matter of fact, I don't think there's really any true "television film critics" anymore. Siskel and Ebert are sadly, now dead and Gene Shalit is now retired.
http://officialfan.proboards.com/thread/543419/film-critics-on-television?page=1
After Ebert couldn't talk anymore they had a really bad year with the Ben's and then they fired the producer and came back strong for one final year with A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips. Unfortunately the damage was done the ratings were too low and they cancelled the show once and for all. Still, the show was on the air for 5 separate decades(70's-2010)it just couldn't last forever.
shareWould the show had lasted longer had they had A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips on a season prior? It seemed like after Roger Ebert couldn't do the show anymore due to his health deteriorating and Richard Roeper left soon afterward, they went too far into another direction. I think that having Ben Lyons (I don't know for sure if Ben Mankiewicz was part of the problem too or Ben Lyons just dragged him down) on the show really hurt its credibility. It seemed like they had him on in a desperate attempt to appear "hipper and younger". Plus, they started screwing around with the basic format so that it kind of became an infotainment show (a la Entertainment Tonight) instead of a standard movie review show.
shareDisney definitely made a bunch of mistakes..around mid 2009 they fired Roeper and yes, you're right for a few episodes in Sep 2009 they had that ridiculous Entertainment Tonight type show but quickly changed to the two Ben's. Honestly, Ben Mankiewicz was way better than Ben Lyons. I remember Mankiewicz had a good explanation of why he didn't love The Dark Knight.
Could the show have lasted longer if they just started with A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips instead? I think it might have lasted a few seasons but it was obvious they were being cheap by firing Roeper.. and I'm pretty sure since the two original stars Ebert and Siskel were gone the show suffered in the ratings. Some say the show went on too long and really this might be true, not because of all the changes to the show but to the movies themselves. I can't imagine how the 2010's would have been with any of these guys reviewing DC comic book movie after DC comic book movie. No way would they be able to stay sane nor keep an audience.
I would have LOVED it if they would have compromised and simply went back to the original format of having the show on once a month with any combo of A.O. Scott, Michael Phillips, and Richard Roeper. Alas, that's not how syndicated TV works and as Roger Ebert said before he died "everything has gone to hell in a handbasket".
What really hurt the Scott-Phillips era besides being tainted by the two-Ben's period is that they couldn't do the "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down" statement since Roger Ebert and I suppose Gene Siskel's estate owned the intellectual property. So they had to use a much more generic merit system while grading movies.
sharethat's a good point, I thought both Ebert & Siskel(see what I did!) owned right to the thumbs but I could be wrong. Maybe their widows own the right now?
Funny, I used to post comments on Ebert's website and sometimes he would reply, especially when I hit a nerve. I know I hit a very sensitive nerve when Ebert mentioned he had walked by his old Siskel and Ebert studio and saw that the producer had thrown their classic TV studio set into the trash bins. The comments went on throughout that disastrous 2008 season..finally I commented that it's practically a crime for a new producer to come in and disrespect what was basically an American Institution. Yep, Ebert replied that she was fired from the show and "looking for unemployment elsewhere". Ebert was a great guy and he's sorely missed.
I GREW UP WITH SISKEL AND EBERT..EBERT ESPECIALLY I ALWAYS CONNECTED WITH.AS AN ADULT I HAVE COLLECTED ALL HIS MOVIE YEARBOOKS AND OFFSHOOT PUBLICATIONS...I APPRECIATE HIM MORE NOW THAN EVER.
shareIt´s a shame we never got this show in Australia. We had our own version of it. I caught up with a bunch of their reviews on YT and I found myself respecting Ebert´s opinion much more than Siskel. Siskel just seemed far too pretentious.
shareI think you misread Siskel. While he was generally harder than Ebert with his grading of films (and should be appreciated for it), he proved over and over that he was willing to give dubious flicks a Thumbs Up if they entertained him, like the infamous "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1996), which Rog gave a Thumbs Down to.
shareSiskel had some random picks too but on average, I definitely think he was the more cynical of the two and his reasons for thumbs downing a movie, seemed rather arbitrary at times.
shareWhat really hurt the Scott-Phillips era... is that they couldn't do the "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down"
I think your headline says it all.
The advent of IMDB, Aint it Cool News all the way down to Rotten Tomatoes changed everything. The information regarding the quality of a film is easy, fast and compressed. "Perfect" for today's age.
Havng said that, if any TV-critics would have had a market today, it would have been these two. Had they both been alive and vital, I think they might still have had a show. There is no question though, about Ebert being relevant as a writing critic. He would have been nr. 1.
I think they'd both be around 80 years old today..it's such a shame Siskel died of brain cancer in his early 50's(1946-1999) it was way too soon.
shareAgreed, he want way too soon. And not that long after Ebert got the cancer diagnosis. Because of the stupid and uneccesary X-ray treatments he received as a child in an attempt to eradicate frequently-recurring ear infections.
Both gone too soon, and in Gene's case, it happened fast.
In the UK the BBC had a weekly movie review show called "Film xx" (where xx was whatever year it was.
It was very well known, like Siskel.and Egbert, was the go to show for movie fans and had the likes of Barry Norman and Jonathon Ross presenting it since the 1970s.
About ten years ago it began limping along, with regular revamps, changes to presenters, and seemingly getting pushed further back in the schedules and tucked away.
Then last year it finally ended. There is now no comparative show on UK TV.
Shame really.
In the olden days almost every weekend there was a movie(or 2, or 3)worth reviewing, nowadays it's about once a month. I can certainly understand why the old standard movie review show has gone extinct. I don't watch many movies anymore but if something intrigues me I'll check out Chris Stuckmann on YouTube, he's mostly no-nonsense and pretty reliable.
shareHe grew up with television movie review shows....
😃😎✌️
I agree, but learn some punctuation. I liked Siskel and Ebert when they first started on PBS, but later all the different shows with the different guys were kind of sad. They just wanted to make money, and Ebert became a lover of just about any movie.
It is hard to critique movies any more because most of them have less depth than TV shows do these days, and TV shows can go longer and more in-depth to a story.
Movies are so bad for the most part these days, they are all the same, and very few of them are human stories, and those that are take themselves overly serious.
I go back and watch very old movies and they are like in a completely different world. They suffer from different problems, usually they are so slow and simple for audiences that were not so sophisticated to movie tropes as we are these days. But I like most of the very old movies, especially the Pre-Code movies.
The guys from the youtube channel Red Letter Media are (for me) this generation's Siskel & Ebert.
shareMY MAN!...100% AGREE...THOSE DUDES ARE FUCKING PERFECT...ALMOST THE ONLY THING I WATCH ON YOUTUBE...IVE SEEN EVERY VEIDEO THEYVE DONE SIX TIMES AT THIS POINT...NO OTHER CHANNEL EVEN COMES CLOSE.
shareNot really, well at least for me.
I loved the show "Sneak Previews" which was the initial PBS program
that featured Siskel and Ebert. Then they had to get ambition and move
to network TV with "At The Movies" ... at least that is what I think I remember
happening. With Siskel and Ebert the show was still pretty much OK, but
being on commercial TV they were loathe to downgrade movies that were
bad, and would even talk up garbage that the studios had spent a lot of
money on. When I saw what was going on I pretty much stopped as a
regular viewer and caught the show once in a while while in decline.
Then Siskel left because he was sick, or died, and Ebert become an egotistical
jerk and the brought in all kinds of other critics and the whole thing was lost.
But, all of that was way before the Internet. I suppose if you were still watching
with the, at least to me, repulsive shows where they had a robotic voiceover
squawking Roger Ebert's voice and his now wildly pathetic shill reviews for
Hollywood. It all become too much for me.
I felt sorry for Siskel to die so young, and for the horrors that befell Roger
and his surgery. But none of the other critics did I enjoy, and one of them
even turned out to be a religious fanatic railing against Hollywood - which
I even agreed with but the religious aspect of that criticism was just as bad
as what was happening in Hollywood.
This is all pretty ancient history, sadly reminding us that we will all be gone
someday, and life is short and it is not that far away for any of us. I do
miss that original show which is where I found out about and learned to
enjoy and even prefer offbeat, and foreign movies. For years I eschewed the
Hollywood releases, but would be sure to catch French, Italian, German, English,
Japanese, Chinese and all kinds of other movies as Hollywood became all about
remakes, exploration movies, sequels, action movies, pandering to kids, and
product placement. It's sad.
Im in UK so never watched or even heard about these guys until quite recent (although I guess I often came across the names Siskle&Ebert in american movie magazines I used to buy in the 80s/90s like Cinefantastique, starlog etc but id never actually seen their show or really got their importance) but now watching some of their reviews for the likes of the Star Trek and Superman movies you really get that cosy feel of yesteryear, even the title sequence with the saxophone and them doing the thumbs up around NYC feels good.. – everything was simpler, 'proper' movie reviewers called the shots on a movie not RT, IMDB or 'film twitter'.
as a poster above states in UK we had a similar kind of vibe going with Barry Norman and his Film (insert year here) show and like S&E it went down the toilet when Norman and then Ross moved away .. there was also an American type movie show on in the middle of the night that showed all the latest trailers and brief making of BTS stuff for forthcoming movies (most of which werent due in the uk for ages)
its sad what happened to these guys (one died which pretty much killed the show as the other tried to get with the times then suffered a horrible death) and its a shame these types of show were lost to the internet really, and ironically its the internet thats allowing them to live on (for example id have never seen a S&E until utube) ..lest they be lost in the movie mists of time.. like tears in (well..you know the rest)
There should be. Gene was always the fun one out of the two. Which is why nobody really cared about the program after he died.
Then it was not surprisingly cancelled.
The Angry Movie Nerd or whatever was always lame. I'm proud to say I've never clicked.
A show like this is cheap as hell to produce and should be easy enough to syndicate or stream and then syndicate.
They were the perfect duo.