Due to your dedication, you’ve been promoted to network executive in charge of programming. You now have the largest corner office, a secretary, a key to the executive restroom, and a salary that would make Donald Trump jealous, and of course, an expense account.
As your first official act, you pull the plug on a currently running show. A show you feel is a total waste of production time and assets. Which show do you chop, and why?
My first act would be to send Honey Boo boo back to the south 40. That show puts the “s” in stupid IMHO.
Eisenhower was surprise to learn that half the people in America had an IQ below 100. I suspect it will be more than half if that show is allowed to continue.
Dance Moms, reality tv people deserve each other, but involving children in your grotesque display of humanity scars them, no matter how often you tell them it isn’t real off camera. It’s the Child Abuse Show and it needs to go. The fans will just have to settle for Honey Boo Boo, where only one child is being exploited and destroyed.
I would dump all reality shows and replace them with The Hot Women in Microkinis Dancing To Various Kinds of Music (Rock, pop, hiphop, jazz, rap, etc.) With A Streaming Twitter and News and Sports Feed Running Underneath shows and watch the viewers and the bucks roll in. I mean, I don’t watch TV at all right now, except for news shows, and frankly, the visuals on news shows are rarely worth even glancing at.
This is terrifyingly prescient. I think it’s a very small amount of time we have to wait until every show has a twitter feed running live underneath it, regardless of genre or content. It will be the last gasp effort of networks to combat DVRs, online viewing and other efforts to thwart real-time viewing that eliminate the potency of commercials.
I actually think dracoi has something here. A little off topic, but YouTube could probably get itself a cable channel that just showed the hottest clips of the day and make bucketloads. I mean, I don’t tool around YouTube very much, but I’ll check out something if someone mentions it on this site or at work…why not have a channel that features the trending videos for easy consumption. (Though part of me hates the idea of it, since we’ve increasingly become accustomed to having our culture cut up for us in little bite-sized pieces.)
Eh, Tosh.0 does ok with web clips but I know other attempts (Online Nation and Smash Cuts) were pretty miserable failures. The problem is that conventional networks cannot keep themselves from attempting to control the virality.
Goodbye, Big Bang Theory. Because, unlike 2 & 1/2 Men or Dads or 2 Broke Girls, which are merely hacky pieces of shit, BBT is a hacky PoS that had the potential, given the premise, to have been intelligent.
Please, may I call dibs on the History Channel? I would dearly love to axe at least 90% of their current lineup, but especially Ancient Aliens. Stupid, stupid, stupid show makes me use the word “bullshit” a lot if I happen to flip past it. And then the toddlers pick up that word. And then my mother-in-law asks why the babies are using that word, and I start foaming at the mouth while trying to explain my anger at this utter bullshit masquerading as history/infotainment, and my poor husband has to take his mom aside and try to reassure her that I’m mostly not crazy. Mostly.
Admittedly, there are many, many popular television shows that are far worse, but most of them only claim to be entertainment, and I’m certainly not the arbiter of what you find entertaining. But if you’re pretending to be an educational series, viewers shouldn’t actually become more ignorant while watching!
That way I can just leave things as they are and go take a nap.
It must be a winning strategy because it’s remained unchanged for years. Just show endless repeats of anything with the word “Ramsay” in it, Star Trek, Torchwood, Dr Who and Top Gear. Throw in BBC News at 7, then long, boring old American movies on the weekends and bang: Bob’s yer uncle, job done.
Why this channel is even in most US cable packages is beyond a mystery. Is it a space-holder until something worthwhile comes along?
I know that. But how exactly can they “control the virality” of the videos? If it were possible, believe me, it would be happening right now, every marketer on the Internet would LOVE to “control the virality” of videos. It’s like those idiots who say that the particular book they are selling will be 'the next Fifty Shades of Grey." Why is it a bad thing that they would want to? Would it affect the channel, or youtube videos, negatively?
