When it first came on, over 15 years ago, I really liked the cable channel TV Land. Old TV shows, Retromercials, etc…
Now we get 24 hour repeats of 3’s Company. Who Gives a F**K???
There are a lot of shows from the past that they could show instead of a handful of shows. The 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, etc.!!! 3’s Company is a fine show from the past to broadcast, but there are zillions [YES, ZILLIONS!] more.
WTF???:rolleyes:
Comedy Central is the only specialized cable channel I can think of that hasn’t suffered from channel drift. Oh, it’s programming has certainly changed over the past two decades. But they still stick to comedy.
It’s not channel drift that pkbites is complaining about - it’s lack of variety in their chosen niche. I’m not sure either channel drift or lack of variety is a valid complaint, though. The link he posted says that in addition to Three’s Company, TV Land also airs (list edited by me to only pre-2000 shows):
The A-Team, All in the Family, The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Bob Newhart Show, Bonanza, The Brady Bunch, The Carol Burnett Show, Charlie’s Angels, Cheers, The Cosby Show, Fantasy Island, Gilligan’s Island, Good Times, Green Acres, Gunsmoke, Hogan’s Heroes, Home Improvement, I Dream of Jeannie, I Love Lucy, The Jeffersons, Leave it to Beaver, Little House on the Prairie, MASH, The Nanny, Roseanne, Sanford and Son, and Star Trek.
Looking at the schedule for the next twelve hours today, I don’t think the complaints have any basis at all:
8:00am All in the Family
8:30am Sanford and Son
9:00am The Jeffersons
9:30am I dream of Jeannie
10:00am I Dream of Jeannie
11:00am All in the Family
11:30am Sanford and Son
12:00pm Gunsmoke
1:00pm Gunsmoke
2:00pm Bonanza
3:00pm Bonanza
4:00pm Bonanza
5:00pm Good Times
5:30pm The Jeffersons
6:00pm Sanford and Son
6:30pm Sanford and Son
7:00pm Sanford and Son
7:30pm All in the Family
That’s seven different TV shows in 12 hours, all fitting the “Classic” description and not one of them is Three’s Company.
TVLand isn’t a big offender. I don’t mind the marathons they have once in a while, generally it’s to celebrate the anniversary of a show or commemorate the death of the star of the show. Compared to GSN, they’re pretty good about sticking to their format.
Turner Classic Movies has barely changed its programming over the years, and sticks closely to the same format.
TV Land has given up on most TV shows from the 60s and earlier. That’s because the audience doesn’t remember them and, other than “I Love Lucy,” refuses to watch anything in black and white.
That’s not true, either. Look at the schedule I posted. Out of 12 hours of programming, SIX hours are shows that aired before 1970, three hours of which are shows that had a significant portion of their eisodes filmed in black and white.
We recently discovered MeTV (Memorable Entertainment, ugh), which carries loads of TV shows from the 60s and 70s and beyond: Hogan’s Heros, Beverly Hillbillies, Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Combat, Wild Wild West, etc. To me it looks like the original version of TV-Land.
MeTV is being rebroadcast as one of our local station’s digital channels, and shows up on cable somewhere around channel 305.
And they’ve been playing those 7 “different” shows for the last decade. It’s b:oring.
There are an innumerable amount of shows from the 50’s-80’s that they could at least play occasionally but don’t. Plus they’ve stopped playing retromercials. My complaint is valid.
So your complaint is that TV Land is rerunning old TV shows, and that you want some new reruns rather than the reruns which are being re-run? :dubious:
What do you do when you listen to a classic rock station? Do you complain when they play the Beatles because, damnit, they were playing the Beatles last year.
I don’t usually have the TV on more than two hours in the evening. I like old shows, but they never mix up the schedule, and so I only see All in the Family or Everybody Loves Raymond whenever I surf past TV Land. Would it kill them to rotate the series they show during “prime Time”?
I complain that out of everything available in the ‘Classic Rock’ genre, they have about 30-40 songs that are on constant rotation and have been for the past 20 years.
I remember reading a few years ago about an oldies station that conducted a lot of focus groups to find out what its listeners wanted. The answer came back loud and clear: more Motown!
So the station added a lot more Motown and soul artists from the 60’s and 70’s. They started hour-long blocks of all-Motown. Sure enough, the ratings dropped like a rock.
They called back all the focus groups to find out what went wrong. Turns out that when people said “more Motown” they had about 10 specific songs in mind – a couple of Supremes, a couple of Four Tops, a Marvin Gaye. Aretha’s Respect was gold, but not Baby I Love You. The station eventually cut back to about 30-40 Motown/soul songs, carefully sprinkling them throughout the day. Ratings went back up.
Moral: my classics ain’t your classics, and neither of ours are TVLand’s.