Submitted 11 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c25b8e61-ca9f-4636-b845-52e7bf5ceb13.png
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”): en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_…
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.
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 ;)
My popup blocker works on streaming so no commercials there.
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.
It’s called “See which wildly underpaid meteorologists 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 is actually a lot of nuance to this.
If TTG stops producing content then their rights to the IP can expire, same reason Sony had to make new Spiderman and X-Men films last decade.
Changes in leadership and management to Cartoon Network are frequent and often produce a more straight-cut and less innovative direction for the network, the sort of people that institutional stock holders and WarnerMedia management think are the safe options: data analysts, cost minimizers, tough negotiators.
For the above reason and more, many artists stopped wanting to work with the corporation, and new artists are aware of the issues plaguing the company so they also don’t want to touch it.
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 exaggerating… That’s actually ridiculous
You know it is targeted to preteens because EVERYBODY YELLS EVERYTHING!!!
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.
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.
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 and I 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.
Watching headbanger’s ball when I got out of work in 06/07 is a fond memory.
I vaguely remember MuchMusic becoming Fuse at some point
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.
The weather channel now is ads.
The Gold Diggers and Gold-Diggers caught me off guard, that’s funny.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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 features trash pickers sorting trash”
Lmao. That’s painful.
No, that’s the new American dream… Oh wait You said painful yeah…
He’s just really into the history of World War 2.
re-run documentaries.
TLC is the 21st century version of the freak shows
Reality shows have people I never want to meet, mostly.
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.
Gen alpha: What are “TV channels?”
C-Span then: empty chairs
C-Span now: empty chairs
RIP Discovery Channel
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
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
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.
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 their good content is moved to the streaming services. why make less money being bundled on cable when you can charge people whatever for the content and make way more? At least that’s why I think the content on cable is trash at the moment
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Cable execs: I see your point. In 2024 we’ll be introducing trash reality shows that feature the weather.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They don’t even need to feature the weather. TLC stands for The Learning Channel and no one learns anything from their shows.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
The only thing you learn from TLC is that you don’t want to watch TLC
Bonehead@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
dragonflyteaparty@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I legit always thought it was Tender Loving Care.
anonymouse@lemmings.world 11 months ago
I’d watch me some Tornado Alley Trailer Park Wives.
AA5B@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Cross it with Wizard of Oz, and you can get: Tornado Alley Trailer Park Wives on Survivor Island