That's absolutely not true. I've learned that I may be messy sometimes, but at least I'm not walking through goat paths of garbage. I've learned that I may be a bit of a fuck up that enjoys recreational drugs, but at least I'm not walking on sunshine. And I've learned that I may be bit overweight, but at least I'm not bed-ridden and disappointing my doctor. I always feel better about myself after watching a TLC show.
I've definitely learned how exploitative it is to force people in terrible life situations, many suffering from mental illness and/or some sort of past trauma or are just in a bad spot all around, to broadcast their lives for all to see and gawk at.
Oh you have a severe eating disorder that is extremely dangerous to your health? What a Freaky Eater you are! You also clearly have your Strange Addiction so we can exploit you twice for the same effort! Oh you're not even living paycheck to paycheck and are dumpster diving behind the grocery store to feed your family? We got an Extreme Cheapskate over here!
Nope, you neglected the worst offender.. SciFi, that they renamed to SyFy (and I pronounce "siffy" or "siffylis" now) that used to have good science fiction but decided WWE and ghost hunting was the way to go.
I know, but the rest of the history of the show is kind of bleak. They had two Netflix seasons before Netflix shitcanned them, then crowdfunded a successful (and terrific IMO) 13th season. This year, they had another crowdfunder, but they did it outside of Kickstarter and put minimal effort in, so it failed. I have no idea if the show will continue at this point. There is Rifftrax and The Mads, but they aren't really the same. I need my puppets at the bottom of the screen!
NOw it’s Disney+ for Star Wars and Paramount+ for Star Trek. I was excited to find the trove of new Star Trek series the Pat for various reasons I didn’t watch in several years
I’m kind of afraid to know the answer about whether I was fooled by marketing ….. when CBS tried to kick off their own personal streaming service with the new Star Treks, I refused to play that game. You’re not getting a subscription for every tv network. Now that the service is Paramount+, I’ll pay (for a while) to also get a studio’s worth of new and old movies. Please tell me there’s a real difference, and I wasn’t just fooled by re-marketing the same old shit
All the people watch commercials, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a correlation between the kind of person that can watch stupid reality shows for hours on end and the kind of person who watches those ads and it actually translates into them spending money on the things in the ads.
Probably so. I don't know if home shopping channels are still on the air, but there were people who watched those religiously. I remember when TV switched over to digital broadcast, there was a big to-do in the town I lived in because a bunch of people watched a low-power broadcast station that broadcast a home shopping channel 24/7 and they wouldn't be able to watch it anymore since it couldn't afford the upgrade.
Jesus Christ, I just looked at their schedule there's a total of 7 hours of TTG per day. Where's the Adventure Time? Where's the Billy and Mandy? Where's Ed, Edd, n' Eddy!?
It's seriously infuriating, the catalog they have at their disposal and they just rerun TTG, a show that at the time caused TT fans to be legitimately upset. No one wanted TTG.
For example, Rebecca Sugar faced a struggle just to continue Steven Universe, one of their more successful titles, but eventually she was forced to wrap it up and leave. Twice.
A big part of this was Garnet and international markets. What with being an open lesbian relationship it had to be...edited for some markets. Which was a cause of struggle and tension. The wedding episode supposedly is what killed it.
TV in the US is so weird. I mean, we've got all of that in Europe too (on some channels), but whenever I watch American TV, everything seems to be cranked up to 11. The aggressive of your news shows, the quantity of your advertisements, the weird rules from the middle ages (no swearing or nudity on certain channels), etc.
And the Pharma commercials?! It's insane, if I want a pill I go to the doctor/pharmacy say I have a headache they will prescribe some shit and I will pick it up, why would I need a commercial for that?
American here. I stopped watching "TV" about 15 years ago, and have streamed just about everything ever since. I'm also exposed to a lot less advertising now and my life is better for it.
Watching television at family/friends house feels like traveling to a foreign country. It's exactly like you describe. I don't recognize any of it anymore.
TV shows produced in my country are reaching cringe-levels, especially the TV mag show KMJS. I lost my trust in watching TV. And noontime shows are spewing cringe and usually controversial remarks.
MTV has been all over those "reality" shows and candidate shows since at least the late 90s though.
Hey, I'm Bam Magera and this is Jackass Roomraiders where Xibit builds flat screens into your entire house for no reason after we had a hot girl go through all your embarrassing shit while you waited in a car of some kind outside watching together with your adversaries who go absolutely apeshit about anything that happens, also UV sperm detection light. NEXT
Yep. Although it still did music videos for at least a few hours a day until the 2000s. VH1 was a holdout for a longer time. Does that Canadian MuchMusic channel even exist anymore? We got that when I used to have DirecTV. It had a fun early low budget MTV feel to it which I knew was not destined to last.
It was a fun channel. My favorite memory is having the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies come in and play foosball with the VJ. They said he could request any video he wanted, so he requested Mr. T's Commandments, which is an (I think unintentionally) hilarious video where Mr. T does a Christian rap about honoring your parents while beating people up.
MTV invented the reality format. The first few seasons of The Real World were innovative and novel. Then the execs realized how much cheaper reality was to produce and flooded the market with garbage until it was all we had left.
MTV's downfall started when they got rid of all the Music freaks in the C suite that liked music and hired TV producers. Then we got Remote Control. We didn't realize it at the time, but that was the downfall of MTV. Once those TV execs realized they could make non-music content, we got The Real World. It was OVER.
Remote Control was probably the first program not about music (I remember LL Cool J quipping that they didn't have questions about the radio) but I think it was still in the spirit of the youth culture and edginess of early MTV. But, yeah, it likely marks the time at which the execs decided they had to "innovate" new programming that strayed from the format that made people watch MTV in the first place.
That said, I don't think they knew the monster they were unleashing when they created The Real World.
Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It's all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.
I'm actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can't think of any who have successfully broken into more "traditional" media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget.
I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there's something else entirely going on.
Hollywood^1^ is so insular that they don't even realize these people exist.
Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.
That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.
^1^ used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.
Nickelodeon gave Fred their own TV show+movie and YouTube bankrolled some popular creators to make a few YouTube red originals, that's about as far as I can think of
It's so cheap to produce that it doesn't need as many people watching it to be deemed profitable. And many people watching it probably just let it run in the background because it doesn't need any close attention. Basically like soaps, but soaps need writers so are more expensive.
Yeah, that’s my brother. Every time I visit, he seems to have some new reality show he watches. Somehow he’s always surprised I’ve never heard of I t and am not interested in it.
It’s always on in the background and no one pays attention unless the ice starts cracking under the truck, or the survivalist misses his airdrop, or some manufactured drama hit the fishing boat or whatever. He’s a pretty active guy, so I’ll bet most of the time these reality shows are going, there’s no one even in the room
Edit: I just checked their line up, as I haven't been anywhere cable was playing for years. They're doing one show per day now, it's an all day marathon of either Ancient Aliens, Pawn Stars, The UnXplained (bigfoot, etc.), American Pickers (literally a reality show about trash) or Mountain Men (seems to be a reality show about some dudes in Alaska).
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of before I went over and checked their line up. In the wee hours of the morning they have something called "paid documentaries" without any further detail. I'm very curious what that is. Is it an infomercial? Some unholy cross between an infomercial and a documentary? Are they selling imitation Nazi gold?
Oh, don't worry, the same cancer is destroying fun on the internet, only worse because of the techniques they use to keep your attention that TV can't replicate because it's not an interactive medium.
I used to love A&E when it was biographies and Lovejoy.
The major TV networks were so embarrassed by being outproduced in quality by these niche cable networks that they raised the level of their programing to match. LOL, no. They bought out all the niche cable TV channels and turned them into trash. Hurray Capitalism.
Edit: and in the streaming era, the same kind of thing happened to Pluto. They had some great, quirky programs. Like the train channel. Checked them out a couple weeks ago and they look completely different post buy out. All the tech and gaming content gone. No train channel. Bunch of channels that just run reruns of one show.
A&E stands for Art & Entertainment. Before it was biographies it was cultural programming, like An Evening at the Improv, Breakfast with the Arts, and Live by Request (concerts). Same with Bravo, with fine arts and film.
Say what you will about the entertainment merits of Real Housewives and Kardashian shows, at least the stars of those shows signed up to have their drama exploited for ratings. The producers of shows like Hoarders and Intervention are morally bankrupt. TLC is basically an entire network devoted to turning people's mental health and addiction crises into spectacle for cheap entertainment, and it's absolutely disgusting.
In the 80s, if you got up really early, like 5 am, Discovery would sometimes just put a camera on a professor giving a lecture. It was pretty cool. I guess we have YouTube for that sort of thing now, but you even make a suggestion like that to a Discovery executive now and they'd probably try to murder you.
Discovery showing Time Team made me a lifelong fan. Most of the old episodes are on YouTube now. They have a Patreon to fund new episodes. They aren't as good because Tony doesn't host them, but they're still fun.
I actually do watch C-Span (streaming) from time to time if there's an important bill up for a vote. But that's a pretty wonky level of keeping an eye on what the government is doing. I'd still rather have it than not.
This is unfortunately not hyperbole but incredibly and sadly accurate because but neglects to mention aliens on history channel and that it's hard to find weather on weather channel due to insane amount of ads.
TV has gone the way of AM radio.
A lot of TV has always just been a way to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible. Moving from 4 channels to 200 didn't increase the amount of stuff you could watch, it just spread it all over the place.
It ate itself, streaming is going the same way. Maybe they'll eventually catch on and have a service that contains every movie and TV show (once they've finished in the theatre, and past the Blu-ray/Pay-per-view part of their lifespan where people will pay for it individually), for like £30 a month, and it can be like Spotify and the other music services. A Kaleidescape for poor people. Until then I've gone back to mostly yarring it for any new stuff, and using a Jellyfin server.
Nobody wants a dozen services to look through, even if they did have more money than sense.
Unfortunately we’ll probably have to battle contracts again before that happens. As more of us rebel against the insanity by switching what services we subscribe to every couple of months, they’ll have to try to prevent frequent switching. for cable, they always pushed long term contracts and we had no choice. I’m not getting locked into a long term contract unless it’s a serious discount, and even then I realize it’s mostly a trap to get your credit card on auto-renew.
Also, A&E (Which stands for Arts & Entertainment) used to show opera, ballet and classical music concerts. Maybe it wasn't hugely popular, but my family would watch.
Myth busters was one of the shows that signaled the end honestly.
It was a good show but it was a signal that pure educational television no longer worked. Myth Busters was a quasi intellectual show but it rarely followed any scientific method other than “we tried it this way and will extrapolate all results from that”
Great show, lots of entertainment but it was definitely part of the “we need to be flashier and shinier and louder”
Plus all the filler. I love the Streamlined Mythbusters project, but it's absurd how short some episodes get when cut down. Iirc there was one that was cut down to 11 minutes of actual content.
cable is still the cash cow for companies that own content, have networks, and streaming services (comcast, disney, etc), who cannot apparently make a profit off their streaming services. imagine that, selling your content on the open market made more money than locking it all behind your own paywall.
No they don't. There is an ever increasing amount of gold diggers, and not a lot of gold havers to go around. So a few gold diggers are happy, and many are endlessly searching and wondering why they aren't getting a proposal or commitment.
Yeah I remember when the cable tv folks pitched cable like there wouldn't be ads, vs. public airways that had to be ad-supported because there wasn't any subscription for it. When they turned cable into ad wasteland I felt that like the fucking betrayal it was
We don't have tv anymore since around 2000, before we just watched VH-1'n'stuff, not because "it's all so bad for the kids" - it is, but that wasn't the main reason, it's just shit) we watched SpongeBob over Internet with our (at that time) little daughter in English, not our native tongue german, she had an easy entry into studying internationally because she just spoke English almost better than German. She told me once she even dreams in English most of the time, so we speak our own little germish/engleutsch mix during the day here, it's partially more efficient to communicate that way (including some family neologisms)
There were still some okay shows on animal planet, last time I checked, when I stopped at a hotel and turned on a TV. They had a treehouse building one that was cool... Don't know why it was on animal planet, but still
I'm an expat American who has lived outside of the US for 17 years. Last time I went back there was 8 years ago. 2 years ago I got a pen pal from the US who just LOVES talking about these trashy cable shows. I'm also kinda 48 years old. So, I remember when cable became a new thingy. People said cable programming was trash since cable programming came into existence. Sure, the programming wasn't all realities. MTV had music on it. You know what the adults said about MTV (including my parents?) They said, "All that sex in the music videos. So perverted." Just imagine the scandal of playing Madonna's "Like a Prayer" every hour on the hour on MTV in its heyday. I remember telling my mother, "It's a great song! I like it!" before being shuffled off to Sunday catechism, which I escaped from to smoke cigs in the woods behind the church/convent. I'd ride home from catechism in the car reciting the words to "Like a Prayer" and any other Madonna song that came to mind. Plus I'd recite some Prince at my parents, another nice rebel on the MTV cable tube played constantly back then. Maybe following reality TV is a new form of subversion. Maybe it exposes the meta of celebrity. People are hip to this, especially very young people. Very young people are so aware of the meta everything and know how to use it for subversion.
Their parents or grandparents might, like I'm talking about. I'm middle aged and I don't have cable. I wouldn't have cable if I lived back home in the USA. I'm not talking about young people who are old enough and employed enough to live on their own. You totally overlooked the point I'm making (which, ummm, also connects with Netflix having reality shows, too?). Also, my point about cable being considered trash since it was invented went over your head. That's an undeniable historical fact you can look up. Cable programming has always been considered trash since its inception.
Since the Youtube algorithm blessed me with this nostalgia hit, I figure this is the right time to share it. Behold, hours upon hours of old Weather channel footage with music:
Cable execs: I see your point. In 2024 we'll be introducing trash reality shows that feature the weather.
They don't even need to feature the weather. TLC stands for The Learning Channel and no one learns anything from their shows.
The only thing you learn from TLC is that you don't want to watch TLC
Well, in fairness to them, I learned I don’t want no Scrubs. Which is good as I think that aired on ABC
A scrub is a guy that thinks he's fine
That's absolutely not true. I've learned that I may be messy sometimes, but at least I'm not walking through goat paths of garbage. I've learned that I may be a bit of a fuck up that enjoys recreational drugs, but at least I'm not walking on sunshine. And I've learned that I may be bit overweight, but at least I'm not bed-ridden and disappointing my doctor. I always feel better about myself after watching a TLC show.
I legit always thought it was Tender Loving Care.
I mean, it was definitely a play on the acronym
I've definitely learned how exploitative it is to force people in terrible life situations, many suffering from mental illness and/or some sort of past trauma or are just in a bad spot all around, to broadcast their lives for all to see and gawk at.
Oh you have a severe eating disorder that is extremely dangerous to your health? What a Freaky Eater you are! You also clearly have your Strange Addiction so we can exploit you twice for the same effort! Oh you're not even living paycheck to paycheck and are dumpster diving behind the grocery store to feed your family? We got an Extreme Cheapskate over here!
I'd watch me some Tornado Alley Trailer Park Wives.
Cross it with Wizard of Oz, and you can get: Tornado Alley Trailer Park Wives on Survivor Island
Apparently, folks don't realize that even The Weather Channel has already dabbled in trash reality TV.
Some famous enough to have their own Wiki pages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospectors_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Riders_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Thru_Hell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyros_(TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeguard!_Southern_California
Big list (pay attention to the ones marked "long form"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_The_Weather_Channel
I certainly wasn't. I guess the enshittification is complete.
Nope, you neglected the worst offender.. SciFi, that they renamed to SyFy (and I pronounce "siffy" or "siffylis" now) that used to have good science fiction but decided WWE and ghost hunting was the way to go.
I still haven't forgiven them for cancelling MST3K after only 3 seasons.
Or Dark Matter!
The full list of good shows they cancelled or cut off early is long and painful to read.
They went steaming: https://www.twitch.tv/mst3k?sr=a
I know, but the rest of the history of the show is kind of bleak. They had two Netflix seasons before Netflix shitcanned them, then crowdfunded a successful (and terrific IMO) 13th season. This year, they had another crowdfunder, but they did it outside of Kickstarter and put minimal effort in, so it failed. I have no idea if the show will continue at this point. There is Rifftrax and The Mads, but they aren't really the same. I need my puppets at the bottom of the screen!
Man last I recall checking up on them is when they were just replaying star wars between random episodes of star Trek
NOw it’s Disney+ for Star Wars and Paramount+ for Star Trek. I was excited to find the trove of new Star Trek series the Pat for various reasons I didn’t watch in several years
I’m kind of afraid to know the answer about whether I was fooled by marketing ….. when CBS tried to kick off their own personal streaming service with the new Star Treks, I refused to play that game. You’re not getting a subscription for every tv network. Now that the service is Paramount+, I’ll pay (for a while) to also get a studio’s worth of new and old movies. Please tell me there’s a real difference, and I wasn’t just fooled by re-marketing the same old shit
Cable shifted to low information viewers across the board decades ago. Dumb people watch commercials I guess.
They're making people watch commercials on the streaming services now too. There's really only one solution left, matey.
No sir, I am a good Christian Man, raised right.
Whats my favorite Veggie Tales song, you ask?
We are the piiiiirates
Who dont do anything
We just staaaay here
And lie around
Er um. Yes. Just a catchy tune! Nothing relevant about my online activities here sir, nope ;)
Look, I'm just asking you to do anything
And I'm just telling you, we don't do anything
And I've never been to Boston in the fall.
Fine.
bathes in yogurt while licking a sparkplug
Kinky
I mean Larry is a cucumber, and I have heard that country gals make do with what theyve got.
Spastic
My popup blocker works on streaming so no commercials there.
That doesn't stop, for example, Amazon showing you commercials for other Prime shows before showing you what you want to watch.
That was one of the reasons why I was watching pirated versions of the Amazon shows even when I was paying for prime.
There's a skip button and at least it's for their own content. If they remove the skip button and start advertising unrelated products then fuck em
Paramount+ doesn't have a skip button, but I already gave them up.
Worse, Hulu advertises the fucking show I'm currently watching.
Your popup blocker?! What year is this, 1999?
This chair be high, says I!
All the people watch commercials, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a correlation between the kind of person that can watch stupid reality shows for hours on end and the kind of person who watches those ads and it actually translates into them spending money on the things in the ads.
Probably so. I don't know if home shopping channels are still on the air, but there were people who watched those religiously. I remember when TV switched over to digital broadcast, there was a big to-do in the town I lived in because a bunch of people watched a low-power broadcast station that broadcast a home shopping channel 24/7 and they wouldn't be able to watch it anymore since it couldn't afford the upgrade.
This is incorrect. There is also reality tv on the weather channel.
Coming up next "See which wildly underpaid
internmeteorologists bite the dust this time. Coming at you live from inside the storm"✨️enshitification✨️
This is the best use of this emoji, ever.
Cartoon Network then: cartoons
Cartoon Network now: Teen Titans Go! on repeat
Jesus Christ, I just looked at their schedule there's a total of 7 hours of TTG per day. Where's the Adventure Time? Where's the Billy and Mandy? Where's Ed, Edd, n' Eddy!?
It's seriously infuriating, the catalog they have at their disposal and they just rerun TTG, a show that at the time caused TT fans to be legitimately upset. No one wanted TTG.
Holy shit, I've seen the memes but I just naturally assumed they were exaggerated... That's actually ridiculous
A big part of this was Garnet and international markets. What with being an open lesbian relationship it had to be...edited for some markets. Which was a cause of struggle and tension. The wedding episode supposedly is what killed it.
You know it is targeted to preteens because EVERYBODY YELLS EVERYTHING!!!!!
Enshittification IRL
Enshitification is just a symptom of capitalism. It's been happening in real life forever.
The only thing new about it is the name.
Reality TV is cheaper to produce than scripted shows. Profit is the reason all they show is reality shows.
Yeah, but it is really funny how many people are putting out documentary quality output on YouTube.
It's also really funny how many people are putting out trash reality show quality output on YouYube
No one has mentioned that MTV invented the reality show in 1992 with The Real World.
I don't have a problem with the concept of reality shows, I have a problem with reality shows being like 90% of all content.
TV in the US is so weird. I mean, we've got all of that in Europe too (on some channels), but whenever I watch American TV, everything seems to be cranked up to 11. The aggressive of your news shows, the quantity of your advertisements, the weird rules from the middle ages (no swearing or nudity on certain channels), etc.
And the Pharma commercials?! It's insane, if I want a pill I go to the doctor/pharmacy say I have a headache they will prescribe some shit and I will pick it up, why would I need a commercial for that?
For-profit healthcare.
Prescription medicine advertising is illegal elsewhere.
American here. I stopped watching "TV" about 15 years ago, and have streamed just about everything ever since. I'm also exposed to a lot less advertising now and my life is better for it.
Watching television at family/friends house feels like traveling to a foreign country. It's exactly like you describe. I don't recognize any of it anymore.
TV shows produced in my country are reaching cringe-levels, especially the TV mag show KMJS. I lost my trust in watching TV. And noontime shows are spewing cringe and usually controversial remarks.
MTV has been all over those "reality" shows and candidate shows since at least the late 90s though.
Hey, I'm Bam Magera and this is Jackass Roomraiders where Xibit builds flat screens into your entire house for no reason after we had a hot girl go through all your embarrassing shit while you waited in a car of some kind outside watching together with your adversaries who go absolutely apeshit about anything that happens, also UV sperm detection light.
NEXT
Yep. Although it still did music videos for at least a few hours a day until the 2000s. VH1 was a holdout for a longer time. Does that Canadian MuchMusic channel even exist anymore? We got that when I used to have DirecTV. It had a fun early low budget MTV feel to it which I knew was not destined to last.
Watching headbanger's ball when I got out of work in 06/07 is a fond memory.
I used to record Heabangers Ball and 120 Minutes and edit together my own vhs mix tapes. About 15 years earlier )-;
I vaguely remember MuchMusic becoming Fuse at some point
It was a fun channel. My favorite memory is having the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies come in and play foosball with the VJ. They said he could request any video he wanted, so he requested Mr. T's Commandments, which is an (I think unintentionally) hilarious video where Mr. T does a Christian rap about honoring your parents while beating people up.
MTV invented the reality format. The first few seasons of The Real World were innovative and novel. Then the execs realized how much cheaper reality was to produce and flooded the market with garbage until it was all we had left.
MTV's downfall started when they got rid of all the Music freaks in the C suite that liked music and hired TV producers. Then we got Remote Control. We didn't realize it at the time, but that was the downfall of MTV. Once those TV execs realized they could make non-music content, we got The Real World. It was OVER.
Remote Control was probably the first program not about music (I remember LL Cool J quipping that they didn't have questions about the radio) but I think it was still in the spirit of the youth culture and edginess of early MTV. But, yeah, it likely marks the time at which the execs decided they had to "innovate" new programming that strayed from the format that made people watch MTV in the first place.
That said, I don't think they knew the monster they were unleashing when they created The Real World.
The weather channel now is ads.
Wasn't Bravo originally for performing arts? I thought it used to show theater productions and stuff like that.
It did. After A&E stopped.
Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It's all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.
I'm actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can't think of any who have successfully broken into more "traditional" media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there's something else entirely going on.
That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.
^1^ used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.
Nickelodeon gave Fred their own TV show+movie and YouTube bankrolled some popular creators to make a few YouTube red originals, that's about as far as I can think of
I vote for the insular, navel gazing/ narcissistic reason.
How is there possibly this much market for this shit?
It happened during the 08 writers strike. Reality Tv is cheap to produce and requires minimal writing.
I have a feeling it has more to do with low production cost than anything else sadly :/
milleNNialS Are kiLLiNg cAblE
No doubt that's the main thing but how are there enough people to watch all these channels of garbage?
It's so cheap to produce that it doesn't need as many people watching it to be deemed profitable. And many people watching it probably just let it run in the background because it doesn't need any close attention. Basically like soaps, but soaps need writers so are more expensive.
Yeah, that’s my brother. Every time I visit, he seems to have some new reality show he watches. Somehow he’s always surprised I’ve never heard of I t and am not interested in it.
It’s always on in the background and no one pays attention unless the ice starts cracking under the truck, or the survivalist misses his airdrop, or some manufactured drama hit the fishing boat or whatever. He’s a pretty active guy, so I’ll bet most of the time these reality shows are going, there’s no one even in the room
Maybe no one is actually watching, the TV ratings system is crooked somehow, and TV advertisers are getting screwed?
Lowest common denominator does better, casts the widest net and the morons eat it up
Most people don't have standards.
Weather channel has trash shows about surviving weather events
Yeah I get that the weather channel is the punch line here but let's not act like it hasn't also gone to shit
Gen alpha: What are "TV channels?"
The weather is pretty trash, but it's not the weather channel's fault :/
And when they're not showing weather reports, they're showing off dope tornadoes and hurricanes and shit.
The history channel also has Nazi documentaries.
Edit: I just checked their line up, as I haven't been anywhere cable was playing for years. They're doing one show per day now, it's an all day marathon of either Ancient Aliens, Pawn Stars, The UnXplained (bigfoot, etc.), American Pickers (literally a reality show about trash) or Mountain Men (seems to be a reality show about some dudes in Alaska).
"trash reality show that feature trash pickers sorting through trash"
Lmao. That's painful.
No, that's the new American dream.... Oh wait You said painful yeah...
They're just interested in that period of history, okay?
I remember when the criticism of the History channel was it was the "Hitler channel." I'm old.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of before I went over and checked their line up. In the wee hours of the morning they have something called "paid documentaries" without any further detail. I'm very curious what that is. Is it an infomercial? Some unholy cross between an infomercial and a documentary? Are they selling imitation Nazi gold?
re-run documentaries.
Oh, don't worry, the same cancer is destroying fun on the internet, only worse because of the techniques they use to keep your attention that TV can't replicate because it's not an interactive medium.
I used to love A&E when it was biographies and Lovejoy.
The major TV networks were so embarrassed by being outproduced in quality by these niche cable networks that they raised the level of their programing to match. LOL, no. They bought out all the niche cable TV channels and turned them into trash. Hurray Capitalism.
Edit: and in the streaming era, the same kind of thing happened to Pluto. They had some great, quirky programs. Like the train channel. Checked them out a couple weeks ago and they look completely different post buy out. All the tech and gaming content gone. No train channel. Bunch of channels that just run reruns of one show.
A&E stands for Art & Entertainment. Before it was biographies it was cultural programming, like An Evening at the Improv, Breakfast with the Arts, and Live by Request (concerts). Same with Bravo, with fine arts and film.
Reality shows have people I never want to meet, mostly.
TLC is the 21st century version of the freak shows
Say what you will about the entertainment merits of Real Housewives and Kardashian shows, at least the stars of those shows signed up to have their drama exploited for ratings. The producers of shows like Hoarders and Intervention are morally bankrupt. TLC is basically an entire network devoted to turning people's mental health and addiction crises into spectacle for cheap entertainment, and it's absolutely disgusting.
RIP Discovery Channel
In the 80s, if you got up really early, like 5 am, Discovery would sometimes just put a camera on a professor giving a lecture. It was pretty cool. I guess we have YouTube for that sort of thing now, but you even make a suggestion like that to a Discovery executive now and they'd probably try to murder you.
As I recall back in 2003 when MythBusters started there were still some okay shows left but it went downhill quickly from there.
I haven't been able to find a good list of Discovery schedules by year, that would make it clear when it became reality only.
The good shows I remember from the 90s was:
Discovery showing Time Team made me a lifelong fan. Most of the old episodes are on YouTube now. They have a Patreon to fund new episodes. They aren't as good because Tony doesn't host them, but they're still fun.
And one show being split up across multiple streaming services with only a few seasons on each service is why i have a jellyfin server now
Cable also ruined streaming services
C-Span then: empty chairs
C-Span now: empty chairs
I actually do watch C-Span (streaming) from time to time if there's an important bill up for a vote. But that's a pretty wonky level of keeping an eye on what the government is doing. I'd still rather have it than not.
Also, insane people calling in on the phone.
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
This is unfortunately not hyperbole but incredibly and sadly accurate because but neglects to mention aliens on history channel and that it's hard to find weather on weather channel due to insane amount of ads. TV has gone the way of AM radio.
All of that is on streaming, and worse.
A lot of TV has always just been a way to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible. Moving from 4 channels to 200 didn't increase the amount of stuff you could watch, it just spread it all over the place.
It ate itself, streaming is going the same way. Maybe they'll eventually catch on and have a service that contains every movie and TV show (once they've finished in the theatre, and past the Blu-ray/Pay-per-view part of their lifespan where people will pay for it individually), for like £30 a month, and it can be like Spotify and the other music services. A Kaleidescape for poor people. Until then I've gone back to mostly yarring it for any new stuff, and using a Jellyfin server.
Nobody wants a dozen services to look through, even if they did have more money than sense.
Unfortunately we’ll probably have to battle contracts again before that happens. As more of us rebel against the insanity by switching what services we subscribe to every couple of months, they’ll have to try to prevent frequent switching. for cable, they always pushed long term contracts and we had no choice. I’m not getting locked into a long term contract unless it’s a serious discount, and even then I realize it’s mostly a trap to get your credit card on auto-renew.
Yes! Maybe a service for flicks that streams over the internet.
David Zaslav is the common denominator across all these examples, and now he's in charge of Warner Bros...
I love you weather channel, never change weather channel
I lived for Local on the 8's
Back when we had cable, my wife would just leave the Weather Channel on as background noise.
My wife says her mom used to do that and now she can't hear Santana's "Smooth" without thinking of The Weather Channel.
Ugh the nostalgia, takes me back
It's mostly ads now !
I'm old enough to remember when discovery showed space stuff like, all the time. It was great!
It really changed in the 90s when congress pulled public funding for educational TV
It was trash long before that.
Discovery, History and TLC used to all show educational programming. TLC actually stands for The Learning Channel.
Mythbusters may have been one of the single greatest programs ever.
I miss Modern Marvels and How It's Made.
Those were all great.
Also, A&E (Which stands for Arts & Entertainment) used to show opera, ballet and classical music concerts. Maybe it wasn't hugely popular, but my family would watch.
the og a&e/nick (when it was a shared channel) used to be what the family room tv was tuned to for 'noise' when no one was watching.
They also aired reruns of Twin Peaks which was pretty rad.
Myth busters was one of the shows that signaled the end honestly.
It was a good show but it was a signal that pure educational television no longer worked. Myth Busters was a quasi intellectual show but it rarely followed any scientific method other than “we tried it this way and will extrapolate all results from that”
Great show, lots of entertainment but it was definitely part of the “we need to be flashier and shinier and louder”
Plus all the filler. I love the Streamlined Mythbusters project, but it's absurd how short some episodes get when cut down. Iirc there was one that was cut down to 11 minutes of actual content.
cable is still the cash cow for companies that own content, have networks, and streaming services (comcast, disney, etc), who cannot apparently make a profit off their streaming services. imagine that, selling your content on the open market made more money than locking it all behind your own paywall.
Gold-diggers have it real good, two areas of influence
No they don't. There is an ever increasing amount of gold diggers, and not a lot of gold havers to go around. So a few gold diggers are happy, and many are endlessly searching and wondering why they aren't getting a proposal or commitment.
You make valid points
Not that streaming is any better though.
Depends on your definition of streaming. I love me some debrid streaming.
Ahoy, matey!
"we thank the Lord for our daily debrid..."
Isn't the weather channel just mostly ads now?
Always has been.
Trash reality shows that feature clouds.
Yeah I remember when the cable tv folks pitched cable like there wouldn't be ads, vs. public airways that had to be ad-supported because there wasn't any subscription for it. When they turned cable into ad wasteland I felt that like the fucking betrayal it was
It’s only a matter of time before the weather reality channel featuring weather
We don't have tv anymore since around 2000, before we just watched VH-1'n'stuff, not because "it's all so bad for the kids" - it is, but that wasn't the main reason, it's just shit) we watched SpongeBob over Internet with our (at that time) little daughter in English, not our native tongue german, she had an easy entry into studying internationally because she just spoke English almost better than German. She told me once she even dreams in English most of the time, so we speak our own little germish/engleutsch mix during the day here, it's partially more efficient to communicate that way (including some family neologisms)
So disappointed to hear about what happened to Discovery channel. Though their Youtube channel is still amazing!
Tuning to G4 and there's a 90% chance it's either COPS or Cheaters
Television is shit
YouTube is shit
Social media is shit
Wait...
The fediverse is a Social Network not Social Media.
Pew, thank god.
There were still some okay shows on animal planet, last time I checked, when I stopped at a hotel and turned on a TV. They had a treehouse building one that was cool... Don't know why it was on animal planet, but still
What brand of stupid reality bullshit you think will eventually take over the weather channel? 🤔
What the hell happened, now everything is a TLC knockoff
I'm an expat American who has lived outside of the US for 17 years. Last time I went back there was 8 years ago. 2 years ago I got a pen pal from the US who just LOVES talking about these trashy cable shows. I'm also kinda 48 years old. So, I remember when cable became a new thingy. People said cable programming was trash since cable programming came into existence. Sure, the programming wasn't all realities. MTV had music on it. You know what the adults said about MTV (including my parents?) They said, "All that sex in the music videos. So perverted." Just imagine the scandal of playing Madonna's "Like a Prayer" every hour on the hour on MTV in its heyday. I remember telling my mother, "It's a great song! I like it!" before being shuffled off to Sunday catechism, which I escaped from to smoke cigs in the woods behind the church/convent. I'd ride home from catechism in the car reciting the words to "Like a Prayer" and any other Madonna song that came to mind. Plus I'd recite some Prince at my parents, another nice rebel on the MTV cable tube played constantly back then. Maybe following reality TV is a new form of subversion. Maybe it exposes the meta of celebrity. People are hip to this, especially very young people. Very young people are so aware of the meta everything and know how to use it for subversion.
Young people don't tend to have cable.
Their parents or grandparents might, like I'm talking about. I'm middle aged and I don't have cable. I wouldn't have cable if I lived back home in the USA. I'm not talking about young people who are old enough and employed enough to live on their own. You totally overlooked the point I'm making (which, ummm, also connects with Netflix having reality shows, too?). Also, my point about cable being considered trash since it was invented went over your head. That's an undeniable historical fact you can look up. Cable programming has always been considered trash since its inception.
Is it because she kisses a black guy? It seems like a very non problematic music video, I don't get the scandal.
"History" channel - Ancient Aliens
The only reliable sources about history are preserved articles and respective reliable YouTube channels.
TV in good old 'murica sure got enshittified damn early.
Since the Youtube algorithm blessed me with this nostalgia hit, I figure this is the right time to share it. Behold, hours upon hours of old Weather channel footage with music:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=wmGd-cx-dXc
https://www.piped.video/results?search_query=weather+channel+retro
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Fookin ‘ell this goes hard
In all fairness reality shows are pretty much what we watch on YouTube too