Last night, I watched an interesting film on IFC called The Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. This film focused on the Z Channel and its programmer, Jerry Harvey.
What was the Z Channel, you ask? Back in the early days of cable television in Los Angeles, there was this cable system in Santa Monica called Theta Cable. I was familiar with them because, at the time, we lived up Kenter Canyon in Brentwood, and TV reception was crap. It was cable or nothing. Theta provided their customers with a wired cable box that had a slider switch for channels from A to Z. To put this in context: there were no cable-ready TVs; no VCRs; no national cable networks. Theta, given its audience of movie-industry people, started a premium channel called The Z Channel. This channel showed recently released movies, about four per week, uncut. To those raised with HBO or Sho, this may sound like nothing; but back then, the only way to see movies was either in the theatre, or via encrypted over-the-air services such as On-TV (Ch 52) or SelectTV (Ch 22), which had image quality problems.
What made the Z channel special was its programming mix. Very eclectic: major movies and little known films (I particulary remember watching The Crazy World of Julius Vrooder on the channel; I’ve never seen it again). I was in my early teens at the time the Z channel started: this way my only way to see some of this stuff.
Time passed. Theta was sold to Group W, and is now part of the Adelphia holding. The Z Channel died in competition with the national satellite providers. Yet I still have fond memories of those days. This movie brought them back.
