Nowadays specialized programming catering to the esoteric pursuits of enthusiasts survives on cable, or sometimes on public broadcasting, and the larger viewing public is fractured, fickle and increasingly likely to satisfy its tastes online. “At the Movies,” dwelling in odd time slots in some markets and moving around in others, had a hard time finding or holding onto a big enough audience. But even if it had done better in the ratings, a 30-minute chunk of non-prime-time air was never going to be a very lucrative proposition. Which was what the Disney corporate statement confirming the cancellation meant when it called the program “unsustainable,” a word more commonly used to describe destructive farming or fishing practices. We were a very small fish or maybe a cash crop planted in dry, degraded soil.

I’m sorry “At the Movies” is over. I had a good time doing it and wish it could have kept going, but I have no scores to settle, no blame to assign, no might-have-beens to explore. Maybe if Mr. Phillips and I had agreed less or fought more, we could have replicated the combative, thin-line-between-love-and-hate dynamic that had characterized the Siskel-Ebert partnership. Maybe if we had stuck closer to the old format, or discarded it entirely, or been better looking, or liked “The Blind Side” ...

Image Michael Phillips, left, of The Chicago Tribune, and A. O. Scott of The New York Times. Credit... Disney-ABC Domestic Television

Or maybe not. As the eulogies for “At the Movies” flow into the larger threnody lamenting the death of criticism, it is worth remembering that the program, now inscribed on the honor roll of the dead, was once implicated in the murder.

Movie criticism on television? Movie criticism with thumbs? You can’t be serious! That was more or less the message of an impassioned, anxious essay by Richard Corliss, published in Film Comment in 1990 (and reprinted, with characteristically impish generosity, by Roger Ebert in an anthology of his own work). The article was called “All Thumbs, or, Is There a Future for Film Criticism?,” and Mr. Corliss’s point was that sound bites, video clips and glib quantification threatened to dumb down the critical enterprise and to dilute the impact of thoughtful analysis and good writing.

Twenty years ago, the agent of that decline was a kind of television program  two guys trading opinions on the movies of the week  that now, in its twilight, looks exalted and heroic. The threat Mr. Corliss identified has migrated to the Internet, where self-credentialed commenters snark and snipe and where the simple binary code of the thumbs-up or thumbs-down voting that Mr. Siskel and Mr. Ebert trademarked has been supplanted by the crunched numbers of the Metacritic score.