If you remember how A & E started out, it was rather highbrow (IIRC there were
some operas on there once), kind of like a cable version of PBS. Now we get stuff
like Criss Angel’s Mindfreak.
If you remember the early days of the SF Channel, they actually made an attempt
to put REAL SF on there. Now it’s endless reruns of el cheapo C-level monster
movies (tho we do have Battlestar and Dr. Who).
The list could go on and on (won’t bore you): Discovery Channel, History Channel,
even, for a race fan like myself, Speed. In each case they started out with the best
of intentions, aiming for a rather intelligent audience, only to eventually succumb to
the lowest common denominator.
The odd things is that one thing I heard from pundits when cable first came out was
the concept of narrowcasting. I heard that we don’t have to worry about getting
endless reams of lowbrow schlock on cable (like we usually did on network TV, even
tho a lot of shows on the networks were fairly intelligent), that channel owners
would be able to afford to shoot for a narrow audience because there’d eventually
be hundreds of channels for every taste.
Now of course we have hundreds of channels of schlock (with some exceptions).
I guess you still need to make money on the cable landscape, and that means
shooting for the largest audience possible. More of a rant than anything else
because in hindsight what has happened seems very obvious, but it still seems
like a series of missed opportunities.
It is much easier to start a narrow cable channel than a broad-based one. There are only a few subjects that truly appeal to everyone and those get taken first. Starting a channel with a distinctive base can build an identity and viewership.
An identity is not the same as profitability. The cable market is a trap. Most narrow channels should be premium channels and not part of the general cable package. However, there is no indication that the public would be willing to pay for those channels. Therefore the only long-term business model that makes sense is to start narrow and go wider with time. This keeps the base that found the channel attractive in the first place and adds enough viewers to allow the channel high enough advertising revenues to survive.
And don’t forget that those viewers who are the audience for the “intelligent” programming tend to watch less tv overall.
There has always been much more “schlock” programming than “intelligent” programming. There will always be more viewers for it. There have always been prognosticators talking about “intelligent” television. They have always been wrong in their estimations of the size of that audience. Always. Since the 1950s. Cable changed nothing, because there was nothing to change.
I remember when TLC was The Learning Channel, and tried to be educational. Now I watch it for What Not To Wear. Which is also educational, but a less highbrow way. I think it runs a lot of stuff like A Baby Story, A Wedding Story, and so on during the day. I haven’t seen anything remotely related to higher learning on TLC since about 1995.
Okay, I pulled that date out of nowhere, but I hope the idea’s clear.
Any channel which wants to make money is going to try to get programming which appeals to the largest possible number of viewers. The reason why some of these channels started out with more “highbrow” programming is because those shows are cheaper to air than orgininal programming. As the station becomes more popular and gets a bigger budget, they put that budget into attracting more viewers. A show on the social and economic ramifications or the Pelopennisian War appeals only to a small segment of viewers but a show on monster trucks will pull in lots of people, so that’s the one they’ll feature.
I remember when some of the cable stations like Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, and even (god help me) FX started out. What the three had in common was that they had very little in the way of original programming when they started out. One of Comedy Central’s best show was Short Attention Span Theather where they simply showed clips of various stand up comics for 30 minutes. Sci-Fi had a lot of bad science fiction programs that were cheap to put on the air though I can’t remember all of them. FX started as some sort of family channel showing older programs and they had live hosts throughout the day.
They did have some original programs. Sci-Fi channel had a good show called Sci-Fi Buzz but does anyone remember a show called Mysteries from Beyond the Other Dominion starrting Dr. Franklin Ruehl? What a horrible show that was! Comedy Central had some equally bad programming and FX had nothing like Shield back in the day.
So instead of saying lowbrow I’d say that many of the channels changed their focus. Comedy Central still shows comedy but they gave us good shows like Politically Incorrect, The Daily Show, and others that were quite good. We get lowbrow stuff like The Man Show and Drawn Together but those are funny as well.
Competition reared its head as well. American Movie Classics (AMC) used to be the non commercial home of excellent movies. Turner Movie Classics (TMC) saw a good audience, and outbid AMC for the rights to a lot of classic movies. Now AMC is home to classic films like “Bachelor Part” and “Blues Brothers 2000”. Sure, you still get “The High and the Mighty”, you just have to sift through a lot of “House II, the Second Story” to get to it.
Let’s face it, 90% of everything is shit, and you have the same amount of good programming spread among more channels. It’s like pitching in an expansion team year, the pitchers you have don’t get worse, you just have to fill in the gaps with new pitchers that are worse.
Bill Buford’s piece in the New Yorker has a fascinating history of the Food Network and the various pressures put on it to gradually move away from high brow, content filled cooking shows to what it has become today.
IIRC, BET cancelled its nightly news programme due to low ratings, replacing it with booty videos or some such, so I agree with the OP, yes, channels do become more lowbrow (if they were highbrow to begin with), but they need to, because to stay on the air they need viewers, and the average viewer wants lowbrow. Let’s face it, how many viewers would “The Shakespeare Channel” get?
I agree with your post and your obaervations about cable channels. I have heard that A&E has the highest viewership that it has ever had. It doesn’t include me, though. I went from a very loyal watcher of the channel, to a mostly indifferent one, to now it could be months between even stopping on the channel. For me, the death knell was not Criss Angel, it was that stupid Gotti reality show.
Not to mention the fact you also have to sift through a lot of commercial interruptions in order to watch it. Watching movies on premium cable stations has spoiled me. Unless it’s a movie I badly want to see, I rarely bother watching it on local, network, or basic cable any more.
The decline of AMC is one of the saddest and most infuriating stories in the history of cable TV. Beyond taking up space in the cable or satellite TV line-up there’s really very little that justifies its existence. It’s become a pallid version of the USA network and TNT (which also used to be a lot better when it started).
Here’s a counterexample: Spike, the Men’s Channel. Originally conceived as a venue for T&A and beer commercials, it’s now my primary source of Star Trek reruns.
Hell, it was TNN the so called Nashville Network then it became The Nation’s Network before finally becoming Spike. When the last Star Trek movie came out I was sure the dune buggies was TNN’s influence.
It can swing both ways. Last year there was an article in “USA Today” about a growing number of subscribers who no longer want to pay for “basic” cable channels they don’t watch. More and more people are fed up buying packages of 35 or 60 channels, the majority of which they find uninteresting or objectionable.
The FCC has been doing feasibility studies on a la carte cable TV. If anything comes of that, then you may start seeing an improvement in the broadcasts… 24/7 genuine “classic” movies, or sf, or whatever you desire.
It would probably make the average person’s total cable bill go up though.
Turner Classic Movies (TCM). I should know, it’s one of the default stations I turn to first when I want to watch something and I don’t know what’s on in specific. They have a lot of good stuff: Earlier tonight, they showed The Adventures of Prince Achmed, a German silent movie made with black paper backlit and stop-motion animated.* It is graphically stunning.
*(I am working to bring down the language from the inside by constructing sentences as awkwardly as possible. Soon, the language of Milton and Shakespeare will be as turgid and purple as the first bruise of a prizefight that, while initially fixed, has become a stirring testament to human indomitableness and the rantings of a somewhat drunk, but ever-lovable, coach who refuses to let his man go down without a fight.)
I’ve been waiting for them to dumb down, but it hasn’t happened yet. They still show silent films late-night Sunday and they still have long marathons dedicated to semi-obscure actors and directors and they still allow their two hosts to rhap geeksodic about obscure points of obscure movies.
Quite apt: They’re both run by and show movies featuring fucking gremlins.
It’s sadder because they refuse to become one with the schlock and transform themselves into BMC, the B-Movie Channel. They could show movies that are either public domain now (Night of the Living Dead is, and I’m sure they could find others) or are so cheap to license they could cover costs by showing K-Tel commercials. In other words, make a niche with all of the budding MiSTies in the world.
