Just Deserts: Tabesh at Turner Classic Movies

TCM’s programmer being rehired may signal strength and vitality at Warner Bros.

Three men make today’s cultural achievement known as Turner Classic Movies (TCM) possible: Ted Turner, an advertising and real estate upstart from the American South who created the cable television channel in the early 1990s; Robert Osborne, an actor and Hollywood trade publication columnist who was TCM’s first host and programming boss Charles Tabesh—who recently exited TCM. In a rare, abrupt and potentially promising Hollywood reversal, Tabesh re-joined TCM this week.

Ted Turner, a former Ayn Rand admirer who also pioneered journalism with the Cable News Network (CNN), is rarely heard from after selling his businesses. Robert Osborne, who introduced Ted Turner’s TCM in 1994 with an initial, intelligent and unapologetic screening of Gone With the Wind, died in 2017. Working with a small band in Atlanta and LA, Tabesh, a sports and entertainment broadcasting businessman in Southern California, studies, contemplates and selects which movies air on the channel, which runs via satellites…