“At the Movies” is fading to black after 24 seasons.
The cancellation will bring down the curtain on the Chicago-based nationally syndicated TV showcase for dueling film critics that traced its lineage to WTTW-Ch. 11’s mid-1970s pairing of the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert and Tribune’s Gene Siskel.
Disney-ABC Domestic Television and ABC Media Productions finally yelled cut Wednesday, announcing the final show with current reviewers Michael Phillips of the Tribune and A.O. Scott of the New York Times will air the weekend of Aug. 14. It was anything but a surprise ending.
The plug nearly was pulled last year after one season with poorly received Ben Lyons of E! Entertainment Television and Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies in the critics’ chairs.
That pairing was installed in a misguided bid to bring a new sensibility to the program, following a bitter divorce from Ebert and Richard Roeper, the Sun-Times colleague Ebert picked to succeed Siskel after Siskel’s 1999 death from a brain tumor at age 53.
Instead, last August, just weeks before the new TV season, Disney-ABC announced it had hired Phillips and Scott. Respected print reviewers, they were a throwback to the tradition and standards of Ebert, Siskel and Roeper. But their earnest, sometimes bookish approach — a sharp contrast to the slick, too often superficial approach of Lyons in particular — failed to restore the viewership the two Bens squandered.
“To their credit,” Phillips said Wednesday night, Disney-ABC “never tried to make us anything we weren’t.”
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