Yes, I know it’s been on the air for years, but one of the stations here in Tucson just acquired this network for one of their subchannels just last week. To my delight, it has reruns of shows originally shown on the USA Network, such as Psych and Burn Notice. I spent most of yesterday watching Monk. They also run other shows from the NBC/Universal stable such as Criminal Minds and Law and Order: Criminal Intent, including the USA first-run episodes with Jeff Goldblum and Chris Noth. My decision to drop cable and go strictly over-the-air keeps looking better and better.
It is a great re-run channel. I wonder how many people “get” their tag-line: “Positively Entertaining.”
I watch a great deal of Psych and Monk on ION. I love it, too.
Positively. Entertaining.
My only complaint is their relentless self-promotion. Is it a good idea to have three promos for L&O CI, say, DURING an episode within a marathon of L&O CI?
I know all the promos by heart. Even Julia Ormond’s weird inflection: “Some people lie, a’some people don’t…”
But it is nice to have all those shows regularly available.
Well, “Negatively Entertaining” could also go with ION, but I believe that slogan was rejected by the focus groups.
Ion’s flaw (which doesn’t really affect me, so I shouldn’t complain) is that they have insufficient variety of shows and so are forced to run them into the ground. They mus be playing 20 or 30 episodes of Criminal Mind a week, for instance. But except for Monk I adore each show they air and wish I had time to actually watch them.
I can see how audiences can get tired of marathon programming. ION TV does have a large pool of shows to draw from, though. They’ve shown dramas such as Boston Legal and NCIS in the past though. And being owned by Universal, they have rights to that library of programs. I have hopes that someday they’ll run In Plain Sight and House M.D., for example.
They briefly had House, MD a few months ago, and I was able to see a few shows that I had missed during the original run. Unfortunately they ran many of them out of order so that hurt the continuity. It disappeared pretty quickly so I suspect these shows cost a lot more than Monk to run.-
I love this channel. They also show Canadian dramas too, like Flashpoint and The Listener, which were pleasant new discoveries for me.
I think they’ve dropped Flashpoint, which makes sense. There are fewer than a hundred eps of the show and they had it in heavy rotation for over a year. I liked it, but the vein was tapped out.
They should have just gone with “Anode Entertainment” to avoid any confusion.