From Dawn Till Dusk: El Rey Network and the Evolution of Cable Television in the 2010s

ABSTRACT:In 2013, El Rey launched as an ad-supported cable channel. Cofounded and majority owned by Robert Rodriguez, El Rey tapped into the filmmaker-entrepreneur’s appeal by targeting both a young Latino audience and a wider audience of genre fans. Unfortunately, shifting industrial, economic, cultural, and technological conditions ultimately led the channel to cease operations in 2020. This article traces El Rey’s evolution from its initial inception up through its programming strategies in the COVID-19 era. El Rey is presented as a small, upstart channel that differentiated itself in an increasingly challenging television landscape. Although larger structural conditions in the end made its survival untenable, the story of El Rey can be seen as representing a new direction for linear cable television in the 2010s.