AMC has now joined the wave of entertainment companies helping to stave off quarantine boredom by funneling more bright shapes and amusing sounds into our increasingly baby-like brains: Per Deadline, the company announced this week that, like HBO, it’s making a number of its various networks’ TV offerings available for free streaming for the masses—no subscriptions, no fees, just a boundless desire to watch zombies chew on people’s heads.
Now, this offer is not quite as sweeping as HBO’s “Here are some of the most critically beloved television programs on the planet, do with them what you will” approach. For instance, while the network has made several episodes of The Walking Dead available for streaming, they’re all from the first half of the currently airing tenth season, rather than a full, series-long binge of headshots, angst, etc. (Some of this is presumably linked to the fact that AMC licenses a bunch of its stuff to Netflix, where, for instance, the previous nine seasons of the zombie munch-a-thon are currently available to stream.) Meanwhile, BBC America has expanded its slate of nature documentaries, but you’re not going to see the big guns—your Planet Earths and their ilk, real “Oh shit, there’s a penguin, now I don’t feel so terrified” stuff—on the free rota. Sundance TV is offering a pretty hefty line-up, though, and IFC has dipped into its archives, offering up what appears to be a rotating set of episodes of Comedy Bang! Bang! and Mystery Science Theater 3000. (The latter is on the earliest post-KTMA stuff, by the way, in case you’ve never actually seen the super early Comedy Central episodes.)
Also unlike HBO, which has filtered all of its stuff into the HBO GO and HBO Now sites and apps, the AMC properties are a bit more dispersed, forcing you to do some searching to hunt them down.. So if you want, say, those new episodes of The Walking Dead, you’ll have to head to AMC’s site proper, while stuff like Comedy Bang! Bang!, MST3K, and Kurt Braunholer’s Bunk—and hey, watch Bunk, it’s fun—are all over at the IFC site.
But of course, AMC does not come only offering the olive branch of free stuff: They also have a video full of cheerful platitudes from celebrities, reminding us that we’re all in this together. (And while we make fun, we can’t deny that seeing Giancarlo Esposito happily hanging out with his family is pretty neat.)