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Remember when Republicans justified slashing the PBS funding because there were so many educational channels with quality programming on cable? Boy are those days long gone.
Pick which educational cable network you think has gone the most to crap and give some examples if you like. Bonus points for snark.
Personally, my vote goes to The History Channel. They seem to be in some kind of competition with TLC as to which one can become the televised version of The Weekly World News, but the show where they presented "evidence" that bigfoot is an alien put them a little over the top.
Wow -- difficult to vote for the bottom of the bottom, when the competition is fierce! But I voted for Other -- since I really miss the Health channel (Discovery Health?). It fell so far, it fell off the lineup!
Some of the choices I never categorized as "educational" -- Animal Planet & Court Tv. I don't get the Science Channel, but the lineup looks like what the Discovery channel used to look like -- still very educational.
I'm going to put forth my vote of the Learning Channel; once upon a time you could learn to speak a foreign language or learn computer software on this channel.
What can you learn now? How to be trashy?
By the time I got cable, the History Channel already had turned into the World War II Channel -- although, initially the breadth of material it showed was somewhat impressive.
but the show where they presented "evidence" that bigfoot is an alien put them a little over the top.
Pay close attention to the script of the narrator. Every sentence contains "may be" or "could be" or "it is possible". At least, these kinds of shows have some glimmer of entertainment value, compared to the guys bidding on the contents of storage cubicles .
Not to defend the genre of programs, but there is nothing wrong with "presenting evidence". Such shows do not say they prove that Bigfoot is an alien, they present the kind of evidence that police and prosecutors present when they try to convict an innocent man. It's up to you, the jury, to decide whether the evidence they have assembled proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. In all fairness, they leave out the summation that states that they have proved their case, which puts them a notch above criminal prosecutors on the morality scale.
The whole "aliens created modern civilization" thing seems to have taken over History Channel and it's leaking over into its more respectable cousin, H2. Between that, "Life Without People," and the aforementioned Bigfoot crap, they ought to change the name to "The Speculation Channel".
TLC, bless your heart*, you not only put your educational roots to rest, you put a stake through its heart and buried it in a chained coffin. Totally Lame Crap, anyone?
Not mentioned above, but A&E could fit in this category, too. I recall the "Arts" half of the title used to mean PBS-style plays and operatic pieces telecast live from international theaters. Now the channel is home of procedural crime dramas and "___Wars" (fill in your own blank and get a development deal).
* "Bless your heart", roughly translated in Southern, means "you stupid idiot"
Not mentioned above, but A&E could fit in this category, too. I recall the "Arts" half of the title used to mean PBS-style plays and operatic pieces telecast live from international theaters.
And Bravo likewise. Bravo's last gasp, IMO, was reruns of The West Wing. When those were gone, it became just another channel to skip over.
Wow -- difficult to vote for the bottom of the bottom, when the competition is fierce! But I voted for Other -- since I really miss the Health channel (Discovery Health?). It fell so far, it fell off the lineup!
Some of the choices I never categorized as "educational" -- Animal Planet & Court Tv. I don't get the Science Channel, but the lineup looks like what the Discovery channel used to look like -- still very educational.
Court TV used to show a lot of live and taped trials. Then they switched to showing mostly true crime documentaries like the ones that currently run on Investigation Discovery. Some of the older stuff that runs on ID actually ran on Court TV first. I knew it was going downhill when they started running crackpot conspiracy theories and the "stupidest criminal" security video footage shows hosted by washed up D-list celebrities.
Animal Planet used to be pretty much all nature documentaries (mostly imported from the BBC) and Steve Irwin. They gradually shifted toward showing more human-oriented shows like emergency veterinary hospitals and tagalongs with animal control and rescue organizations. Now their tagline is "Surprisingly Human" and half the shows are about domestic animals and focus almost entirely on the owners. The other half is totally unrelated to animals. If it's not idiots running around the woods hunting for bigfoot (again) it's idiots trying to pan for gold in Alaska, occasionally sprinkled with fake documentaries about mythical animals. They ran a show on discovering MERMAIDS. Wonder how Steve would feel if he were alive today.
The Science Channel still runs mostly documentaries, but they've started to slip. They're now running science fiction shows like Firefly.
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