The Essentials continues

After the death of Robert Osborne, TCM revamped The Essentials by bringing in host Alec Baldwin. Baldwin sat down with a series of guest hosts: David Letterman, Tina Fey, and William Friedkin for seven weeks each. The last of Friedkin's weeks was on September 23, and I didn't think to see what was going to happen last Saturday night: as much as I enjoy The Bad and the Beautiful, I've seen it enough times that I wanted to get something else off my DVR.

The home page for The Essentials doesn't mention any further guest hosts. This led me to wonder whether Baldwin would be going it alone. It wouldn't be a first for The Essentials; the original seasons of The Essentials had a guest host (if memory serves it was a couple of directors) hosting the series and presenting the movies by themselves. But a look at The Essentials' schedule page suggests that it's the same guest hosts, repeated in the same order as was done in May through September, until the end of January, after which we'll get another go-round of 31 Days of Oscar.

There's no big deal per se about having repeat movies in The Essentials; after all, all the seasons Robert Osborne did with various gust hosts only had about 30 movies selected which of course implies repeats. But when you only have the one guest host the repeats don't look so glaring as they do like this.