Josh Sapan (born 1950) is a media executive who served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of AMC Networks, as well as the Executive Vice Chairman.
During his 35-year leadership of the company, 25 as CEO, Sapan has been credited with building a number of award-winning shows, movies and media brands. They include AMC's Mad Men; Breaking Bad and prequel Better Call Saul; The Walking Dead, which resulted in the expansion to 7 different Walking Dead themed TV series; IFC’s Portlandia; SundanceTV’s Rectify; and Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Bravo was sold to NBC, a division of GE for $1.25 billion in 2002. Sapan is credited with bringing independent films to wide audiences through IFC Films, which he led the launch of in 2000. At IFC Films he supported the early work of directors Barry Jenkins, Lena Dunham, Lynn Shelton, Christopher Nolan, Mira Nair, Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater and Steven Soderbergh.
Sapan brought AMC Networks into the targeted streaming business with the launch of Doc Club in 2014, later rebranded Sundance Now, the horror genre streaming service Shudder in 2015, followed by the acquisition of the British Mystery themed Acorn TV, ALLBLK, the first streaming service created for Black film and TV, and AMC+.
Sapan led the overall management of the various businesses within AMC Networks, including the company's national television networks and subscription video on-demand services; AMC Studios, the company’s television production business; IFC Films, its independent film distribution business; AMC Networks International, the company's international programming business, as well as 25/7 Media Holdings LLC (formerly called Levity Live.)
During his tenure, AMC Networks has produced a number of award-winning and critically acclaimed shows with the company’s flagship channel AMC becoming the first basic cable network to win the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series for Mad Men, and the only cable network to win the award four consecutive years, having been nominated 10 years in a row.
He has led AMC Networks since 1995, including its spin-off from Cablevision in 2011. Since becoming a public company, Sapan has presided over AMC Networks' increasing net revenues and operating income for seven consecutive years through fiscal year 2017.
Prior to the company's spin-off into AMC Networks, Sapan was president of Rainbow Media's National Entertainment Division (a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corporation) where he oversaw AMC and Bravo.
Life and education
Sapan was born to a Jewish family in Queens, New York. His father worked in advertising, and his mother was an Off Off Broadway actress. Sapan was raised in Little Neck, Queens and attended P.S. 187. Sapan studied radio, television and film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but left school in 1970 moving to Boulder Colorado and later Berkeley California.
When he returned to college at UW-Madison, Sapan worked for a company that “four walled” films, taking 35 mm prints of wilderness films to theaters in small towns in Wisconsin which had been rented by the film company. He also acted with the Broom Street Theatre in plays such as Bertolt Brechts “The Exception and the Rule”, and in what may have been the first staging of the rock opera "Tommy". He performed at Broom Street opposite André De Shields who would later go on to star in "The Wiz" on Broadway. During this time, he also began collecting a substantial number of classic film posters discarded by theaters in Wisconsin.
At UW-Madison, Sapan led two film societies: The New Utrecht film society and Thor Film Society, New Utrecht showed foreign and art films such as "Woman in the Dunes" and "The Bicycle Thief", and Thor showed mainstream movies and college oriented fare, finding particular success with "Reefer Madness".
The film society experience led Sapan to purchase two 16 mm projectors and establish a mobile movie exhibition business in the Midwest, operating out of Athens Ohio, known as The Court Street Theatre.
After graduating from UW-Madison in 1975, Sapan returned to New York City and worked various jobs including as a labor union organizer for Local 1114 in the nursing home and hospital industry, which was later subsumed into Local 1199. He successfully organized The King James nursing home for that union.
During this time, Sapan read a book about the embryonic cable TV industry titled “The Wired Nation “which predicted the proliferation of cable TV content,” and began to volunteer at UA Columbia Cablevision in Wayne & Pompton townships New Jersey.