They’ve been advertising Top Gear coming to History Channel for weeks now. How does this make sense?
Is it the US version?
I’m not sure how or even if it’ll work without Jezzer, May and the Hamster.
Because the show’s soon to be history.
does anyone expect the History channel to have actual history anymore?
It’s because the demographic works and they were interested. History Channel isn’t necessarily strictly about history, it’s about guy geek stuff (which includes history but also cars, etc.). Similarly you will find shows that you might think belong on Food Network on Nat Geo or Travel Channel (Andrew Zimmern, right?). Other than not putting Top Gear on Lifetime, there are a lot of overlapping demographics among channels/formats.
What next? Top Gear on Food Network?
Right, it’s always been a bit of a shorthand/misnomer. It’s never been less than 75%++ war-related stuff (we called it the Hitler Channel, and I’m sure you know the drinking game). You were never going to see a lot of shows about the Congress of Vienna or the development of the Umayyad Caliphate.
Well they do have a v8 blender.
That’s what I’m wondering.
SyFy shows wrestling and this morning the Tom Cruise classic Cocktail was shown on the Biography channel. And most NBC shows don’t even have peacocks in them any more. And the God channel is full of people I am pretty sure are going to hell.
I long ago stopped assuming that the name of a network is anything more than a vague indicator of what might be found on it.
it was a lot better when it was the Hitler channel. now it’s just ice road truckers and pawn stars and other lame reality crap. and then all the made-up stuff like Nostradamus and Ancient Aliens.
it’s like every TV channel these days is intentionally making itself worse.
at least I get the Military Channel now, which can accurately be called the Hitler channel.
That stuff is cheap and relatively mindless to churn out.
Another pet peeve with their shows is that most of the hour-long ones have half an hour or less of actual content – before and after every commercial, they pad it out with “coming up . . .” and “[as we saw before] Steve has gotten bogged down in snow with only six hours to make his deadline. His rig is stuck on the shoulder of the road, and with night coming, the temperature’s only going to get lower” type bumpers.
Much of the footage ends up making two or three appearances in a given episode.
I’ll give it a watch. Don’t watch the original version that often but it’s pretty good.
Yes, having Top Gear, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars on The Hitler Channel is a misnomer. But then so is having Lawrence Welk on PBS. At least with these reality show, you have a slice (although I’m sure they are edited) into how people work for a living in often difficult situations from my own. That is worth something.
But yeah, something on the Congress of Vienna or Ottoman empire could be very interesting but never seems to be done.
All of these specialty channels have had to broaden their appeal because that’s what the market is dictating. Usually, they try to keep the show at least marginally within the theme of the network - ‘Pawn Stars’ works just fine on a history channel, because most of the show is about old items, and are usually accompanied by a little history lesson. It’s actually quite educational.
I suppose you could stretch ‘Top Gear’ into that category because (at least the UK version) they often do talk about classic cars and some history of the automobile industry. Who knows, for the American version on the History Channel maybe they’ll work more of that into the show.
Frankly, I don’t care which network a show lands on so long as it’s a really good show. What annoys the crap out of me is when networks ostensibly devoted to science start airing shows about psychics and UFOs and ancient astronauts, as they are antithetical to the whole purpose of the network.
They show wrestling on SyFy (previously Sci-Fi) IIRC.
Here in Sweden I get police shows like “Road Wars” on TV4 Sport. Well, I guess chasing the guys in their cars is kind of a sport …
Still don’t get it. This is like having Boat Mechanics of Ecuador on the Gay Sex Channel. Completely unrelated and bizarre for just existing on there.
Who’s gonna think to check GSC for BME?