AMC

American Movie Classics, or AMC, is an American cable TV Networks that was established in 1984, originally as a movie channel. Most of the movies it showed in its first twenty years came from the Golden Age of Hollywood and the years immediately after, such as Marx Brothers comedies and film noirs. Starting in 1993, it began running the annual Film Preservation Festival, a multi-day marathon of rare, restored films that were previously lost, in order to raise money for film preservation. In 1997, AMC also started running Monsterfest, a weeklong marathon of Horror movies that ran before Halloween; this was replaced in 2008 with Fearfest.

Starting in the late '90s, AMC began to undergo a famous case of Network Decay. In 1996, the network debuted its first scripted series, the Dramedy Remember WENN, about people working at a 1930s-'40s radio station, and in 1999 it premiered the series The Lot. Around the same time, the network ended its long-standing policy of showing movies uninterrupted and began running commercials during movies. AMC also had a short-lived Panel Game, The Movie Masters, moderated by Gene Rayburn. The biggest change came in 2002, when AMC became a general movie channel, adding films from the last 30-40 years to its lineup and pushing pre-1970 films to late night, morning and late afternoon. It's been suggested that rival network Turner Classic Movies (TCM) was responsible for this shift, as that network's establishment cut deeply into AMC's selection of classic films (the vast Turner library was now inaccessible), but the main reason for the shift was an effort to appeal to a younger demographic.

The final sign of AMC's decay — and perhaps proof that Tropes Are Not Bad — was the network's investment in original series late in the Oughts. In 2007, AMC debuted Mad Men, a critically acclaimed drama that entered the public consciousness and established the movie network as a purveyor of high-quality television shows. AMC followed this up with Breaking Bad in 2008 and Rubicon and The Walking Dead in 2010. In 2011, it premiered the shows The Killing and Hell on Wheels, the former about the investigation of a girl's murder and the latter a period drama about the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. AMC has also crafted two Miniseries: the 2006 Western Broken Trail, and the 2009 remake of The Prisoner.

List of AMC shows and Miniseries:

 * The Movie Masters
 * Remember WENN (1996-1998)
 * The Lot (1999-2001)
 * Mad Men (2007-present)
 * Broken Trail (2006 mini series)
 * Breaking Bad (2008-present)
 * The Prisoner (2009 mini series)
 * Rubicon (2010)
 * The Walking Dead (2010-present)
 * The Killing (2011-present)
 * Hell on Wheels (2011-present)

Tropes Associated with AMC as a whole

 * Adored by the Network: AMC's favorite movie must be Unforgiven.
 * Network Decay: A case of a Shift That Fits as the channel transitioned from a movie of old time movies to a large variety movie channel with some original programming. However, this did bring some good shows on the table, so perhaps Tropes Are Not Bad.