Betrayed by the Sci-fi station!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am just so fed up with Digital Cable that I can hardly stand it! I got forced into buying it when they cut down on most of the good shows on regular cable until I was about to go insane and I kept seeing these wonderful advertisements for the Sci-fi channel that made my mouth water, so, finally, I gave in and bought it, increasing my monthly bill from $42 a month to $72.

The other night I went through 100 channels and there was really nothing worth watching on! It is no joke! By 2 in the morning, out of those 100 channels, 25 had turned into various versions of infomercials. Now, I disregard the 8 sports stations, along with the 4 news stations, so that adds 12 to the 25 no-watch channels which equals 37. Add in the two religious stations, which gives us 39 and the 4 kid stations that bring it up to 43. So, I should have 57 channels left to watch, but no! They were full of junk!

National Geographic was rehashing the days rehash of the months showings of snakes, alligators, crocodiles and fish, … again. Another station was going on about whales, again! Two stations were rehashing the days play of police stories and crime solving while two more were rehashing the earlier programming of mysteries. Four stations were showing British situation comedies that the Brits threw out something like a decade ago. One station was full of macho-men rebuilding a car whilst wearing impressive tool belts, pot bellies and plaid shirts. (I always though Tim Allen’s jokes were based in fantasy, not reality! I was wrong!) Another 3 stations were playing movies that were made before I was born in the 1940s! Two more stations were showing Cowboy movies in black and white made around the time of Hopalong Cassidy, for goodness sakes!

The biggest betrayer of all has been the Sci-fi station, which was mainly why I switched. Where are all of the great shows I expected to see on it night after night? All I get are old reruns of 1000 episode, boring flops like Quantum Leap, mind-numbing segments of 'Earth, final conflict, which suck big time, and every original star trek episode ever produced along with smatterings of piss poor little B grade movies that I never even heard of before. I hated babylon5, which lives again and again and again on the Sci-fi station and Mystery Science Theater, that crappy thing all radical pseudo-intellectuals raved about when it was on regular TV, lives again on Sci-fi and is just as crappy. Somewhere they dug up some ‘space! Above and Beyond’ episodes and tossed them in and now and then drop in B-movies from the 50s.

So, where are the Greats? The many, many good Science Fiction movies out on video and shown on screen? They don’t even show Earth2 in sequence!! Not that it matters, because Earth2 is just another soap opera gussied up for the 23rd century type of Big Brother is watching script and filmed out west somewhere with guys in bipedal costumes. (Are all aliens to be bipedal?)

What really gets me is that we pay additional money for this and are gradually forced into buying this more expensive service and Don’t Have One Darn Word To Say about it! Like sheep to the slaughter, we sign up for the local monopolies and tolerate the crap they choose to show us.

I found one ray of hope. My Mother told me that this old lady in her church moved her from up north, where her small town got fed up with the crap their cable service sold them. When complaints failed to change the programming or to reduce the prices, and talks to the city counsel failed to bring results, over 50% of the folks canceled their subscriptions. They switched to satellite TV or did without and nearly bankrupted the cable company. Several thousand families just had had it!

The cable company dropped it’s rates, fixed it’s crappy programming, did away with infomercials and improved it’s service and the people signed up again. They are quite happy with their much superior form of cable TV now.

I’ll be talking to friends about this later on and investigating satellite TV. I don’t like paying $72 to get worse cable than I had when it was $19, 20 years ago and HBO was $2.50 a month!

2

Thats basically the only show I watch.:slight_smile:

3

Um, just out of curiousity, what sci-fi DO you like? You listed off some of sci-fi’s greatest there (Star Trek, Quantum Leap, E:FC, B5) as some of the shows you hate. What would you want the sci-fi channel to play?

4

I’m with Drew here. Why sign up for it if you don’t actually seem to like SF that much?

If you are the kind of person who lists Sliders and War of the Worlds TV, and Automan as prime SF, for example, then… well, I don’t know. Your tastes don’t seem to match up with many other people, I’m guessing. Hard to program for.

5

i hate to tell you but give or take a few channels the digital cable stations are direct feeds of the satellite ones ie direct tv ect

so it sounds like your out of luck becuase and as for imfomercials thats the station themselves unless like here the cable company runs them on a channel it owns

but most people get the digital and satellite for the 5 hbos 4 showtimes ect

so unless you you want all the pay channels theres no point to digital cable at the moment unless they go the " new stations on the digital box only" route

6

Does that make sense to anyone?

7

Good Lord, if it weren’t for B5 I’d NEVER watch that channel. They do run a lot of crap.

And I get it in my BASIC CABLE PACKAGE…neener neener neener!

8

Farscape! Farscape! Farscape!

Fridays at 9! And again at 12! And soon they’ll be re-running old episodes Mon-Thurs at 8!

It’s deeply fabulous. So worth your time. Rich characters, inventive plotlines. Periodically very funny. Willing to deal with Sex In Space! It’s the only show I watch regularly.

And that John Crichton is a hottie. Woo.

9

Gee, that’s odd. I tried to find something on tv the other night, and flipped through all eight of the channels I get from the bunny ears on my TV, and I didn’t find anything worth watching, either, and I don’t even have to pay $72 a month…

10

Maybe he pines for the glory days of Incredible Hulk re-runs?

11

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Hey, i met him last weekend at Wizard World Con in Chicago!

12

I’m with GrandfatherTrout. Farscape rules. I started watching in the last few years, so I’m looking forward to the reruns next week. I’ll have to wrestle the remote from Ralf Jr., but it’ll be worth it. Or maybe I’ll just tape 'em and watch when it’s quieter…

The other thing you can try is to talk to the town council, or whoever grants the cable franchise rights in your area. Lots of places have become fed up with poor cable service, and let a 2nd cable company into the same market. The results - better service, better programming, lower prices, every time. Make some noise, it can’t hurt!

13

You have to admit, though, that SciFi Channel has made a recent change for the craptastic as of late. Last week, I think I remember seeing “Peggy Sue Got Married” being showed twice in one weekend.

14

Remember, the Sci-Fi Channel was established long after most SF movies were sold for broadcast. That, plus a low budget, adds up to slim pickings on the movie front.

Still, they have some very good original series (primarily “Farscape,” but “The Outer Limits” is worth watching, and most of the others are worth some time), and they rerun some of the best SF shows ever (B5, QL, and ST:TOS). They even ran the Paul McGann “Dr. Who” movie a few weeks ago. I don’t think anyone could do better.

A question for Laser: don’t they have TV listings where you live? Didn’t you look at them before committing to cable? How is it possible you were suprised by what they were showing?

15

“57 channels and nothin’ on… 57 channels and nothin’ on”

what a great coincidence.

Oh, and not to quibble too much, but…

It seems that any show that runs 1000 episodes (yes, I do understand the hyperbole) is far from a flop.

16

I will agree that the Sci-Fi channel has definitely taken a turn for the worse lately, but I absolutely fail to understand why the OP is whining. Sci-Fi shows Farscape, a richly plotted show with characters one cares about (and that John Crichton is on my laminated list, for sure!), as well as B5, the Outer Limits, and The Chronicle, which is growing on me weekly. In addition, anyone who disses MST3K displays an utter lack of humor or intelligence.

This makes me insane! Are we to throw out Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, ** and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre** because they are black and white films made in the 1940s? Lookahere, Poindexter, not all movies have to feature car crashes, explosions, and killer robots; some movies actually attempt to explore the frailties of the human heart in conflict with itself, and many of the most insightful and moving dramas ever made were made in black and white before you were born. You might consider that old movies are not boring, but that you are too unsophisticated to understand them.

The OP strikes me as the kind of person who would order a hamburger in a Chinese restaurant because “Chinese food tastes weird.”

17

On reviewing my previous post, it comes off as WAAAY too flame-like, and I apologize for the unnecessary personal comments.

18

It was warranted anyway. I hate it when people dismiss fantastic movies just because their puny brains can’t deal with black and white film.

19

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Laser45 *
I found one ray of hope. My Mother told me that this old lady in her church moved her from up north, where . . . the cable company dropped it’s rates, fixed it’s crappy programming, did away with infomercials and improved it’s service and the people signed up again. They are quite happy with their much superior form of cable TV now.

[quote]

Damn old church ladies spreading lies again.

Cable companies have no control over infomercials, those are sold and scheduled by the individual networks. Also, cable companies have little control over the quality of content on their stations, all they can do is drop networks and add new ones. However, if this cable company made significant revisions to its lineup, it probably did so by adding stations that you are already getting in your 100 station lineup.

Maybe the old church lady can give you directions to this magical happy land of cable nirvana.

I think it is save to say that the 100 channels you receive now are mostly in the top 100 of the 250 networks available. When you switch to satellite you are just going to get 150 channels that weren’t good enough to make the cable offerings. And there will still be tons of infomercials in the middle of the night. And the Sci-Fi channel will be showing the same shows.

If you are so unhappy with the TV offerings, why not just turn it off and go do something else?

20

Have you considered getting a library card? They’re free, you can check out as many books as you like, and the pictures in your head are much more entertaining than the ones on TV.