If you have a rant against a cable channel or two (or 10), get it off your chest.
I sure will.
Hey, GSN. I get the fucking point! Ballbreakers is on Mondays. That means you can stop showing the same commercail over and over and over and over and over and over and over every time you go to a commercial break. Seriously, if I had a dime for every time they showed that commercial or a drink of beer every time I heard the phrase “pool on steroids”, I’d be either very rich or very drunk right now.
Attention Skinamax. What are you thinking? On MMax, some of the porno starts as early as 8pm (if you get MMax East that is, which I’m guessing a lot probably do). Most kids are still up by then on a non school night. And where were you whe I was a teen, for christ’s sakes? Heh.
VH1, can you please find something else to air other than The Surreal Life? Or Celebrity Fit Club? Hogan Knows Best? I mean, these shows are nice to watch and mildly amusing at times, but CONSTANTLY? What do they have to do with music anyway? I thought it was “music first” on your channel? The only time I get to see any videos is staying up all night to catch Insomniac Music Theatre. MTV, you’re no better. And speaking of channels that that show nothing but one show. TNT, it’s time to put an end to the daily Law and Order marathons. Please.
Going back to the VHI grips, VH1Hits, where the hell did you go? I live in Arizona (Maricopa County) and we no longer get it, which is a major bummer since it was a channel I frequently had on. It just was there one day, and up and vanished the next. What gives?
Lastly, E!, I think it’s possible now to have too many lists. After making stuff like Again Even 101 MORE Celebrity OOPS!, it’s time to stop making them.
Ahhh, I know, these are all lame and mild rants, but it feels surprisingly good to get them out. You have a try.
Oh yeah, a timely thread if ever there was one. I was just contemplating starting a thread about The Comedy Channel.
My main gripe with that particular cable channel is that it has so little content that is actually funny. Sure, i’m glued to the set most evenings at 11pm to watch The Daily Show*, but apart from that there’s hardly ever anything on that i find even vaguely amusing.
And some of the new shows they’ve started recently are just fucking dire. Yes, Mind of Mencia and Stella, i’m looking at you, you completely unfunny pieces of shite.
And they need to learn how to tell what fucking day it is. Every week at 1am on Sunday morning they have the Comedy Central Secret Stash, where they show a comedy show or movie without any editing out of the rude bits. Note when this is on: 1am on Sunday. Yet these morons advertise it as 1am on Saturday. I guess because it’s on during the nighttime between Saturday and Sunday, then it must be on Saturday, right? No, you morons. 1am on that night is 1am Sunday.
Funnily enough, the show is on right now and i’m not watching it. Tonight i plan to watch the 1am rerun.
Back when GSN was The Game Show Network, it had some entertaining game show relics. I enjoyed watching people go apeshit over a BRAND NEW CAR!! on the 70’s The Price is Right. It didn’t matter that the car was a 1977 Chevy Vega station wagon.
The only I watch on it now is What’s My Line? and Win Ben Stein’s Money. Their “original” programming sucks monkey nuts.
VH1 used to be good back when they were showing the videos MTV used to show. Then they went through their All Behind the Music era. Now they show stuff E! would reject (and probably did).
VH1 Classics (the only one of their dedicated video channels I can get) really needs to show some videos from the early 90’s now that they’re 10 years old.
Any niche cable channel that becomes popular quickly abandons what made it special in favor of mindless crap.
I bought my satellite dish in 1997 just to get the Sci-Fi Channel because they had MST3K. Now they have mostly crap.
On my cable system, VH1 Hits got turned into a jazz video station. I hate jazz.
As long as GSN is the subject of derision, what the fuck is with the overload of shit like The Newlywed Game and Love Connection? Is there anyone who really watches dating shows from the 80s? Did anybody even watch them in the 80s?
I came in here to gripe about Comedy Central myself. That channel has way, way, way too many commercial breaks. And the commercials are all so annoying, especially the ones that advertise their other shows.
I also only watch it for the Daily Show, and they really need to stretch that out to an hour long. There is hardly any time for the interviews: five minutes, commercial break, then another five minutes and that’s it.
So what if most kids are up by then? Cinemax in a premium cable channel not network TV. They can air porn at 2:30 in the afternoon. You have to pay extra to get it. Parents don’t have to order it if they don’t want to. For that matter if parents are so concerned about the appropriateness of TV content then they should moniter their children’s TV watching better or just threw away their TVs. They shouldn’t expect the government or media to act as a parent so they don’t have too.
Discovery Kids: You are the sorriest excuse for an education channel I have ever seen. It’d be nice if I could let my sister watch a single one of your shows without having to correct some inane bullshit you’ve let slide in the name of “fairness”. Guess what: giving crackpots equal time with scientists is not fairness, by any stretch of the imagination, especially when your audience is too young to know which is which.
G4: I like videogames. No, seriously, I do. I’m in the 18-24 bracket and have a genuine appreciation for the culture of gaming, past and present alike, built on years of being a lazy piece of shit with nothing better to do. I have, currently, a not insignificant amount of disposable income for your advertisers. I like to know what’s going on in the gaming world without having to check 40 different websites. However, your programming is shit. I don’t need your MTV attitude and don’t appreciate being yelled at whenever I forget that you’re worthless and turn you on for five minutes. Tone it the fuck down.
Is GSN only gameshows or have they added sports as well? Because whoever that is, advertising their new GSN, needs to hire a someone who can actually enunciate when saying the name. The first time I caught the add, I nearly got whiplash jerking around to look at the screen. I would have sworn on a stack of bibles he said Gay Network. Well all right people! No more depending on Bravo for your quality gay programming. But damn, not so subtle of a name, you know. Here and queer though. Then I caught on it was Games and something something. I’ve seen it half a dozen times and I’ve never caught the name.
A&E? What happened? Very little arts and virtually no entertainment.
And nobody in here gets to complain about porn channels. Our cable company doesn’t even offer them. Walk a mile in my seven inch platform fetish pumps, folks.
The fact that Comcast of NW NJ does not offer Turner Classic Movies in any form or fashion. I’ve already ranted on what I think of their alternative - AMC - so I will refrain.
I’d like to nominate for asshathood every cable channel that has incredibly intrusive “bugs”. At first, bugs were fairly noninvasive static images that sat quiet and still in the corner of your screen to identify the channel you were watching. No big deal, right. You eventually stop seeing it, really.
Until management decided that “stop seeing it” thing was unacceptable and started using moving “bugs” with sound to advertise upcoming shows during a show in progress. Basketball players dribbling across the bottom of the screen, cheerleaders jumping around down there, sharks attacking, insects crawling, every imaginable distraction spends time in the space at the bottom of the screen now. It’s grrrr-making…
If it wasn’t for Good Eats, Barefoot Contessa, Paula Deen, and Sara Moulton (who’s shows have been cancelled ), I’d give up on The Food Network altogether.
There are too many non-cooking shows; Unwrapped, Secret Life of…, Roker on the Road, that kitchen makeover show. I also think they go out of their way to hire the most loathsome (Bobby Flay, the low-carb guy, Sandra Lee) or annoying (Rachel Ray, Tyler Florence, Emeril) hosts they can find.
Another prime example of a niche network trying too hard. I’m surprised they haven’t started showing food related movies.
What??!? All of them? Please tell me that *Good Eats * and Paula Deen have NOT been cancelled! When did this happen!?! Does anyone have a paper bag I can breathe into?!?!
Oh yeah. Discovery Channel, TLC (which used to stand for The Learning Channel) - I loved learning interesting stuff from television. TV is a fantastic medium for teaching people - visual and aural, with story lines and graphics and stuff. But no, let’s just use it for Monster Garage and Monster Bikes and Monster Racecars and Monster Garage Bike Racecars, et freakin’ cetera. The only thing I bother to watch on either channel now is Mythbusters and How Things Are Made (surprisingly fascinating to watch how any old thing at all is made).
If I were a country music fan, I would be pretty disappointed at the country music channel turning into the Dukes of Hazzard channel.
I watch them. Sometimes. I find them strangely calming.
But they pale in comparison to The Match Game.
MTV : The only non-music programming you have that’s worth anything are the VMAs and the MTV Movie Awards. Reconfigure your schedule accordingly.
Cartoon Network : Show more Venture Brothers. There’s still an episode or two from the first season that I haven’t seen, and that you never air. How do I know? I check every week.
Law and Order has become to TNT whats Wings was to USA and Buffy (briefly) was to FX.
Fox : You are hereby forbidden to cancel a show without giving it at least a 13 episode run - IN the proper order, thank you. Nice try, Mr. Murdoch. Take the gum out of your mouth and sit down.
Scifi: I have no problem with you putting the saturn-scifi gray logo in the bottom right corner of the screen during the Twilight Zone. But when a big, red advertisement for “Ghost Hunters” starts off in the lower right and zooms to the left of the screen, it’s damn near impossible to pay attention to the black-and-white show anymore.
Oh, fuck, this annoys the crap out of me. And Sci-Fi Channel isn’t the only offender.
Even worse, sometimes these animated promos actually have their own sound, which drowns out the sound of the show you’re watching. It’s absolutely fucking unconscionable, IMO.
), I’d give up on The Food Network altogether.