In an across-the-pond merger that will hopefully work out better than the last time AMC tried that sort of thing, the home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead is now in league with BBC America. As The Wrap reports, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s colorful American cousin—with its wild stories about secret cloning initiatives and adorable, Anglophilic insistence that “He’s just called ‘The Doctor’”—will join IFC, WE tv, and SundanceTV as the latest addition to the AMC Networks family, at a cost of $200 million, a 49.9 percent stake in the cable network, and the assumption of its operational control.
In addition to ensuring inner-sanctum fisticuffs when some brash Yank endangers the Jaguar account, the joint venture strengthens an intercontinental programming partnership that previously brought Top Of The Lake and The Honorable Woman (and will soon bring the miniseries One Child) to Sundance. The arrangement should last a good century or so, until some BBC executive decides—with no input from the Americans—to levy an outrageous tax on a new series of Broadchurch, to which the AMC brass reacts by dumping David Tennant in Boston Harbor. But hopefully that unpleasantness can be avoided, because nobody wants to see another Turn.