IMHO, a large part of the issue is that these stations are trying to stay relevant in a world where I can watch any episode of any of the shows mentioned at any time on a streaming service. Where does a station that plays select episodes of things at times when they demand fit into this structure?
The answer is that they largely don’t, and their only niche might be to play popular shows for the “background noise” others have mentioned, and with a large number of episodes in a row, a person might tune into that because there will not be a need to change the channel in an hour or two.
That’s a decent hypothesis. But it would seem to me that this would be affecting many other cable channels, too. Do we have evidence of this?
I genuinely don’t know, as I’m one of those people who doesn’t watch regular TV. If I wanted to just run The Office or any other specific show in the background, I could just leave streaming on autoplay. The only thing TV would provide me is variety, allowing me to avoid the choice paralysis.
May I introduce you to two other channels? You may want to check out the Impractical Jokers channel (TruTV). If that’s not to your liking how about the Ridiculousness channel (MTV).
MTV is owned by Viacom which tends to have the same strategy on many of their channels. Tru TV is owned by Warner/Turner and they seem to be following the same strategy.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Comedy Central was hurt even more than most cable channels by the rise of Netflix and others. 10-15 years ago stand-up comedy specials were a big part of Comedy Central’s programming. Now all the stand-up specials are on Netflix.
Hearing from a lot of comics they don’t want to do comedy specials on CC. They censor the act. Even though they don’t have to they won’t let cursing on. Sometimes they will air it once at midnight uncensored. Then they bury it and only bring it out sometimes. Of course if the money is right a comic will do it but they know it won’t have the same exposure as a streaming service.
The knock on Netflix is they put up too many comedy “specials” from acts that don’t have a solid hour to fill or who are cranking out products that aren’t ready.