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:
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.
there’s a total of 7 hours of TTG per day
Holy shit, I’ve seen the memes but I just naturally assumed they were exaggerated… That’s actually ridiculous
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.
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.
NEXTYep. 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.
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.
- Hollywood1 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
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.
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.
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).
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?
“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?
re-run documentaries.
