Dinky Donuts may or may not be a real donut shop, but it was the name of a cereal in the 70s/80s.
And I just realized I don’t care enough to look up the rest of them. Sorry.
I’ve been to Mendy’s. Don’t know if it is still there.
And how can you forget Jerry constantly plugging Superman?
I would’ve thought Superman to be a top, not a bottom.
Dude, you are soooooo going to hell for that one! (But damn, it was funny.)
One reason for seemingly worse TV in the US is dilution. A standard US television show’s “season” is around 22 episodes. (“season” roughly corresponds to what you Brits call a “series”).
When you compare that with British shows where the average “series” seems to be between six and ten episodes, you have a lot more license to cherry pick good scripts if you are only doing six episodes vs. twenty-two.
Example: “Red Dwarf” had 52 episodes spaced over eleven years (1988-1999), “Vicar of Dibley” has 18 episodes spaced over five years (1994-1999).
Stargate SG-1 has 174 episodes over eight years, Enterprise has about 100, and even shows like “My Wife and Kids” have around 120 episodes in 5 years.
I won’t say that the UK has better television though… in my trips there, I’ve seen some things that amazed me- I’ve seen “Patton” and “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” on during prime-time there. I’m guessing if they’re digging up 40+ year old American war movies to show during prime-time, that there’s a real shortage of programming.
I watch a lot of television, almost none of it Canadian. Honestly, I think it’s quite rare for Canadians under 40 to have any significant amount of their programming be Canadian content. The news? Sure. Corner Gas? Maybe. Rick Mercer or This Hour? On occasion. That’s it.
Most of our channels just replay American TV and we all get the US stations anyway. I can’t complain to much. I think the majority of our programming is crapola. I’m not into this reality TV thing either (excepting Amazing Race), but I still find something to watch on a fairly regular basis. The Daily Show is rebroadcast on CTV , I watch the various Law & Orders I have the movie channels specifically for Six Feet Under (new shows start June 6th).
I have never watched The Bachelor or Survivor or Fear Factor. Most comedies I pass on as well (excepting Scrubs and Arrested and various animated offerings). In short, watching almost exclusively American television, I think there’s a lot of decent programming.
For the most part, I’ve moved on to other things. The only thing I ever watch regularly anymore is the Cartoon Network Friday lineup, and it usually takes me at least two days to even get to it (I still haven’t watched what I recorded last Friday). And since I’m the first person to make any noise about it, I’d like to say that Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi is a really average show, and I have a hard time understanding all the hype CN put into it.
I missed the entire last season of NFL Primetime without the slightest qualm, a show I used to follow religiously.
How bad is it? Depends. I do believe that most reality TV is garbage, but that’s just a case of starry-eyed producers going completely overboard with a then-hot concept. The problem, IMHO, is that once the novelty wears off and later participants wise up to how things work, it becomes just another flawed contest. Often this results in the whole game becoming too predictable (Big Brother, Amazing Race) or the producers introduing all kinds of out-of-left-field changes and tweaks and quirks to the point where no one can take the game seriously anymore (Survivor, that one dating show). Sitcoms, eh, they fulfill the cheap yuks quota, same as ever. That 70’s Show has gone way downhill, but that was probably inevitable. Heard 24 is pretty good, although I’m not into that kind of frenetic-paced action. And yes, there are a lot of variants on Law and Order.
Overall, I’d say that television is pretty bad, but there are enough alternatives now that it’s no longer a problem.
OBLIGATORY SIMPSONS COMMENTARY: I strongly believe that the single biggest reason for this show’s incredible longevity is good timing. Consider: It was a hip, edgy cartoon which aired in primetime, an absolutely shocking concept in 1989. It had a ready-made rivalry with The Cosby Show (which was actually pretty close to “jumping the shark” by then); tons of free publicity. It really started hitting its stride during the Clinton administration, which was much too busy with, er, other things to harp about the evils of a subversive cartoon. And then came the inevitable, massive anti-PC backlash (which manifested in, among other things, the most repulsive cartoon I’ve seen in my life…uh, that’d be Beavis and Butthead 
); more material, very easy to look wholesome next to B&B. Then the Internet era began in earnest…i.e. tons more publicity, not to mention about half a season’s worth of episode ideas just harping/praising/tearing down this new medium. And now it’s years past its prime, but the general state of TV is so pathetic that it’s still able to survive.
There have been some great episodes, to be sure, but no one can deny that The Simpsons has very often been in the right place at the right time.
Well, American T.V. is pretty much crap, but there are some real gems if you take the time to sort through the dross.
HBO has both The Sopranos and Deadwood, and while Carnivale didn’t do anything for me personally, I know it has a good fanbase. The only problem with HBO is, as was mentioned earlier, its series tend to be limited run (The Sopranos ended a season in mid-2004, and won’t air again until sometime in 2006)
Since Battlestar Galactica was remade, the Sci-fi channel sucked me back in. While I was never originally a fan of Stargate as a TV series, I’ve since been hooked, but I’ve so far resisted the draw of Stargate: Atlantis. How I long for Farscape.
Other than that, FX’s The Shield and FOX’s Arrested Development are the only netwrok draws I feel compelled to watch. I liked Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU but I’ve drifted away from them; if you watch them long enough, one episode becomes hard to distinguish from another.
Unfortunately, Arrested Development may be heading the way of Firefly.
Used Depends.
Scott_plaid Err?
Thanks people, informative stuff (at least up until we got sidetracked by Seinfeld/Superman).
I suppose I was expecting this sort of thing:
Sometimes it feels like that here too, tho’ I suppose you can watch plenty of ‘new’ programming if you’re prepared to watch World’s Worst DIYer or Watercolour Challenge.
What is the viewing experience of a decent new show like? (say: Monk – it’s still fresh here). Monk was***** broadcast on BBC2 which means no adverts. It would drive me up the wall to watch a show like that with a whole bunch of inane breaks in it (like I said we’re spoiled).
Some of my favourite shows are American, it’s just that I don’t know if I could bear the US TV experience. And I dread that it might spread here.
***** and I hope will be, they stopped showing it half way through the season 
IIRC The last show was the one with all the TV detective in jokes and the closing gag about the theme tune.
Now, jokes are never funny once explained, but nonetheless I am putting the TMI (Too Much Information) answer in a spoiler box below. I shoulda’ used the ™. In post 27, DKW said that it depends on your point of view, whether or not american TV sucks. Personally, I thinks it does, and when I saw the words “How bad is it? Depends.” in his post, I was immediately struck by the comparison of diapers, such as the brand know as Depends, and modern American TV. Now, I understand shows nowadays have many more intricate plotlines then in the past, but that doesn’t make them better.
Spoiled? That’s not the word I would use. I have grown up on the American television experience, and I daily fantasize becoming president and signing a bill making it a crime to interrupt programming with commercials. I sincerely think commercial interruptions should be barred by the full weight of the law.
add in a rider banning reality tv in all it’s forms and you’ve got my vote…
I’ve experienced TV at length in a few countries. UK, US, Germany, and Japan.
Of the four I’d say the UK and the US are the only ones worth talking about. German TV was horribly bad and very boring. Japanese TV, well I don’t know. I think some of that was culture shock, I just didn’t “get” almost anything on it.
The US is pretty lame TV-wise, often nothing is worth watching. But there is a huge variety if you have cable. Nickelodeon is one the best channels, at night when it becomes Nick @ Nite. Mainly because they show some extremely great television (shows like Cheers and Three’s Company, amazingly I dont’ find the fact that they are reruns detracts from them, they’re shows I could watch over and over again my entire life.)
Some channels are really stellar from time to time HBO puts out some really good stuff, FOX has amazingly generated a lot of cool sitcoms but many of them get cancelled. The ones they now have that are good: Family Guy, King of the Hill, that 70s Show, the Simpsons. A few of these shows are on their last legs but all were very good at one time. Futurama was very very good.
Cartoon Network’s adult swim block is some very interesting animation and great fun to watch, until they put on old anime reruns at about 1am.
Overall I’d actually say I prefer the US to the UK as far as TV goes. Really great shows are sometimes hard to come by in the US but due to the sheer variety you can typically find something that is “actually pretty good” almost any hour of the day.
In the UK you have really good shows or programs that could never happen in the U.S. Stuff like documentary miniseries and other miniseries which just don’t catch on big in the U.S., the series that has a determined end before production even begins just isnt’ popular in the U.S. for whatever reason.
UK programming in general is pretty good with better news shows, and there are certain specialty shows that you just wouldn’t find on the air in the U.S. (unless you are watching BBC America maybe) but I think with the sheer variety of U.S. cable it still comes out ahead.
In all honesty TV in general I fin to be vastly overrated. There are good shows out there but I just tend to prefer doing other things instead of watching them.
I’ve noted one characteristic of U.S. sit-com programming that arose sometime after Seinfeld. It’s pretty much a given that any comedy that has even a hint of intelligence or promise as a quality show will be cancelled within a few months of airing – Grosse Pointe, The Tick, Undeclared, Freaks and Geeks, Greg the Bunny, Andy Richter Controls the Universe – the list of shows that actually got to air and broadcast several quality shows and then were mercilessly chopped off midstream – it’s absolutely staggering. The knife has been hovering over Arrested Development since the day it began. It’ll be surprising if the U.S. version of The Office makes it past its introductory run. The only quality sit-com I can think of that started airing in the last couple of years and hasn’t been cancelled yet is Scrubs, and who knows what the reasons are for that.
You’d have to add Wonderfalls to that list, even though it wasn’t technically a sitcom. It only aired four episodes, but was funny, intelligent and well-written. I can’t imagine why it was canned after just four shows aired. It wasn’t even given a chance. Thankfully, they’ve released all thirteen episodes on DVD.
Another good show (but obviously not a comedy) that got dumped after one season was Boomtown. It started out good - but the viewers had to think a little. You had to pay attention and use your brain. Apparently, that was too much work for Joe Average.
When it came back for the second season, they revamped it and made it just another cop show, and took away what made it special and what made it stand out, and lost all the regular viewers. I think the second season only lasted three or four episodes.
As for Scrubs, they have been moving it around on the schedule a fair bit, which can usually mean the kiss of death for a show, but so far it’s been holding on. What is this, the fifth season?