Ted Turner, the buccaneering media magnate who proved that a short attention span and a bottomless chequebook could reshape the world’s living rooms, has died at the age of 86. Or 87. Or possibly 104, depending on which of his own cable channels was running the ticker at the time. In the end, even Turner’s longevity became another ratings grab. Born into billboard fortune in Cincinnati, young Ted displayed an early genius for turning inherited money into more interesting inherited money.
He built an empire on the heretical notion that people might enjoy watching television at any hour of the day or night, an insight that now seems about as revolutionary as discovering oxygen. CNN arrived like a 24-hour nervous breakdown and promptly made news addictive. For this alone, future generations will curse his name while refreshing their feeds at 3 a.m. His nautical period produced the 1977 America’s Cup triumph with Courageous, a victory that briefly convinced the nation its loudest sailor was also its finest. Turner celebrated the way he celebrated everything: at maximum volume, with maximum gin. One almost expected him to demand the Cup be mounted on a missile.
Then came the wrestling phase, surely the most gloriously unhinged chapter in a gloriously unhinged life. He bought Jim Crockett Promotions, rebranded it World Championship Wrestling, and hurled it into battle against Vince McMahon’s WWF. The Monday Night Wars that followed were less a business rivalry than a pay-per-view cage match between two egomaniacal showmen who understood that Americans secretly prefer their soap operas with folding chairs and suplexes. For a while, WCW actually won. Turner had taken billionaire excess and bodyslammed it onto basic cable. The spectacle was undignified, absurd, and wildly entertaining; in other words, perfect.
His personal life reached its highest camp when he married Jane Fonda in 1991. The union of the Mouth of the South and Hanoi Jane was less a marriage than performance art. They seemed ideally matched until it turned out they weren’t, which came as a surprise to absolutely no one except perhaps Ted’s publicists. Environmentalism provided the late-period halo. Turner’s grandest gesture in this arena was Captain Planet and the Planeteers, a cartoon of such toe-curling worthiness that it stands as his only documented faux pas. Even the man who greenlit The Man Show apparently had limits, though they proved temporary.
He leaves behind several ex-wives, a herd of bison, more money than most small nations, and a media landscape that still bears his chaotic fingerprints. Ted Turner didn’t just live in the future; he cablecast it, wrestled it, and occasionally tried to lecture it about recycling. The world is quieter now. One suspects he would have hated that.