“That’s what entertainment’s supposed to do! It’s supposed to make you forget your miserable life!”—Ted Turner.
To sum up a life lived as loudly and as large as Ted Turner’s is an impossible task. He was a pioneer in so many ways, an entertainer at heart, an ecologist, and the last of the great showmen. When I worked at Turner during the TCM/FilmStruck days, he no longer roamed the halls in his bathrobe, but his presence haunted the Turner campus in Atlanta, his legendary stories passed down from older colleagues like folklore. When I read that he passed away on May 6, 2026, at the age of 87, my thoughts immediately turned to the city of Atlanta, which he called home for much of his storied career.
Turner was never one for shyness, and his often controversial statements earned him the nicknames “The Mouth of the South” and “Captain Outrageous.” He was born Robert Edward Turner III on November 19, 1938, in Cincinnati, Ohio, although he spent much of his youth in the South, growing up in Savannah, Georgia, and attending the private boys’ school The McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Majoring at first in classics, then economics at Brown University, Turner never graduated, having been kicked out for having a girl in the dorms (the school awarded him an honorary B.A. in 1989). After serving in the United States Coast Guard Reserve to avoid the draft, Turner took over his father’s business at the Macon, Georgia, branch, and soon became president and chief executive of Turner Advertising Company.
Selling off radio stations in the 1960s, Turner bought a UHF television station in Atlanta, Georgia, changing its call sign to WTCG, representing his Turner Communications Group. On the station, Turner programmed old movies, soon adding theatrical cartoons, golden era sitcoms, and more, including “Gilligan’s Island,” “I Love Lucy,” “Star Trek,” and “Looney Tunes.” From this grew the superstation model, and later TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, and of course, TCM—Turner Classic Movies.
But before all that, Turner bought the rights to broadcast the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks, later purchasing the Braves outright. Due to his broadcast savvy and his infamous theatrics as the owner of the baseball franchise, Turner turned the Braves into a household name. If you do a quick image search, you’re as likely to see photos of Ted sitting in the dugout and in the stands as often as you will in the owner’s suite—or participating in a pre-game ostrich race.
His 24-hour news network CNN launched on June 1, 1980, with Turner vowing that they would not “be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event.” The media titan even created a doomsday video to be broadcast should the world actually end (which you can watch on YouTube, despite the world still enduring, somehow). It’s nearly impossible to overstate the impact CNN and its sister network, Headline News, had on how the world consumes news.
Along with revolutionizing cable news, Turner also changed the way viewers accessed movie history. In 1985, four years after MGM purchased United Artists, Turner worked a deal to buy the company and used its film library—which also included the RKO and pre-1950 Warner Bros. films, for broadcast on his TBS superstation, and later controversial colorized versions of black-and-white classics on TNT (According to Henry Jaglom, two weeks before he died Orson Welles said to him, “Don’t let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons.”).
On April 14th, 1994, at 6 p.m. in Times Square, Turner, along with film historian and host Robert Osborne and Hollywood legends Arthur Hiller, Arlene Dahl, Jane Powell, Celeste Holm, and Van Johnson, officially launched Turner Classic Movies with a broadcast of Oscar-winner “Gone With The Wind,” Turner’s favorite movie. The mission of Turner Classic Movies was to air these classic films uncut and commercial-free, adding historical context through Robert Osborne’s introductions, essays on their website, and their erstwhile Now Playing Guide, and preserving the history of classic Hollywood from those who made the films.
Along with screening films from the newly acquired library, Turner Classic Movies undertook an oral history project that remains one of its greatest legacies. Snippets of these interviews with classic stars like Sylvia Sidney and Eva Marie Saint still air in between movies on the channel to this day (and also on YouTube). TCM has aided in the restoration of countless films, including many silent films for which they commissioned new scores. Along with producing documentaries on stars like “The Divine Greta Garbo,” TCM also produced in-depth docuseries like “Moguls and Movie Stars,” exploring the early days of the Hollywood studio system.
The channel’s popular programming blocks, such as Silent Sunday Nights, TCM Underground, TCM Imports, Summer Under The Stars, 31 Days of Oscar, and Noir Alley, introduced generations of film fans to the breadth of film history worldwide. In 2010, the channel held its inaugural TCM Classic Film Festival in the heart of downtown Hollywood, bringing fans and stars together.
I know firsthand that TCM has changed lives, not just for those of us who worked as film historians, but for the viewers who found a home with the channel. Each week, we received countless letters, emails, and social media posts from viewers who had TCM on in hospital rooms or while in prison, finding peace or courage through the classic films we aired. During the recession, I became obsessed with TCM (I think I watched it about sixteen hours a day), and without the many films I watched on that channel as I regrouped and figured out what I wanted to do with my life, I know I wouldn’t be a film historian today.
Many of my colleagues, when I first worked at TCM, had been with the channel since the beginning. They often shared stories with me about Ted Turner’s many antics, from bowling parties in the mansion at the center of campus to racier stories best left unshared in mixed company. But at the heart of these stories was always a reverence for his passion and his love for what he had created when he first launched TCM all those years ago. At the 2019 edition of the TCM Film Festival, Turner addressed the opening night crowd, ending his brief remarks saying, “Let’s keep showing these movies until the end of time.”
While TCM may be Turner’s greatest filmic legacy, it is far from his only one. For movie lovers of a certain generation, both TBS and TNT offered up a slate of modern fare that could be watched over and over again. From broadcasting 24 hours of “A Christmas Story” in December to what my partner Robert Daniels likes to call TNT Classics, aka movies like “Legends of the Fall” that seemed to always be playing on the station. For years, Dinner and a Movie was a weekend tradition for my family, while my mother also always enjoyed whatever action films were broadcast under the Movies For Guys Who Like Movies moniker. After Turner’s passing yesterday, author and historian Caden Mark Gardner shared a Letterboxd list called TBS Superstation Cinema that brought a glimmer of nostalgia to my eye.
As the planet hurls towards destruction, I also can’t help but think about the impact of “Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” the environmental-themed animated series Turner co-created with Barbara Pyle, who later headed the Captain Planet Foundation, which is now chaired by Turner’s daughter. Laura Turner Seydel. Narrated by LaVar Burton, “Captain Planet” was a favorite show of mine as a child, one that gave me hope that it wasn’t too late to turn things around for our beautiful, dying planet. I don’t know if I believe that that is true anymore, but I do credit this show for introducing me, and many of my peers, to ideas of sustainability and environmental awareness at a young age that changed how I moved through the world irrevocably.
In her tribute to her ex-husband on Instagram, the great Jane Fonda wrote, “I see him in heaven now with all the wildlife he helped bring back from extinction – the black footed ferrets, the prairie dogs, Big Horned sheep, Mexican Gray Wolf, the Yellowstone wolf pack, bison, the red cockaded woodpecker and so many more, they’re all gathered at the pearly gates applauding and thanking him for saving their species.”
A true American original, Ted Turner lived his life large and with purpose. He studied the past to fully understand the present and prepare for the future. Along with his five children, he leaves behind a remarkable, complex, and, yes, controversial legacy that will continue to reverberate long after him… at least until the end of the world as we know it.