My nominee: The Bondage Channel. It could rerun all the classics: The Avengers, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. , Sky King, Superman, The Adventures of Lois & Clark, She Spies, Xena: Warrior Princess and many, many more. (But, surprisingly, not Charlie’s Angels, which was not very productive.
For movies, it could mine those old 80s Gorean movies like Deathstalker, Barbarian Queen and weird old films like Tor the Mighty Hunter. And it could also get some programming from the Lifetime network, well known for their penchant for showing women in jeopardy, with such classics as Lifeline and Murder In Mind.
And late in the evenings when the kiddies are in bed … hentai (Japanese adult anime). Lots and lots of hentai.
So what channels would you like to see and what should be on them?
Since the Horror Channel is supposed to start Oct 31, the rest are …
the Paranormal News Channel- UFO, Cryptozoology, Conspiracies, Miracles- investigative reports on all of these
the Jiggle Channel aka TNT- bikini volleyball, cheerleaders, warrior princesses,
women’s aerobics- just 24/7 of hot scantily clad women (for guys who want to watch hot babes but not porn)
Religious C-SPAN- Coverage of serious religious events- Denominational conferences, the Dalai Lama’s visits to the US, real theological debates, book discussions, etc.
There was a cable channel in Brasil for a number of years that I watched, that was all Asian fantasy/sci-fi/horror/action. Everything from all those types of live-action group fighting shows the Power Rangers were based on, to anime, to things I had no idea at all what they were. It was a pretty silly reason to want to sit inside a hotel room, but a great channel for kids and adults.
I think some “decade” channels would be fun. You know, if you were in an 80s mood, just turn to the 80s channel. It would be great too if they could recreate some actual tv listing grids to send someone into serious flashbacks. The decade channels would be all inclusive, from kids shows to movies-of-the-week to talk shows and late night.
A silent film channel would be nice. I’m not really big on silent films but this would probably be a good way to get into them.
Is there an action channel out there? All action movies and tv shows all the time. Isn’t this one a no-brainer? But I’d have to suggest a blackout on anything involving Steven Segall. USA can keep his complete library of unimportant works. It won’t hurt the Action Channel!
The No Superfluous Bullshit Documentary Channel - of course someone, somewhere would have to start making documentaries containing little or no superfluous bullshit in order to give them some programming.
How about a science fiction channel? You know, it could play classic old science fiction TV shows and movies. And it could develop some interesting new series that would appeal to hard-core science fiction fans…
Well, to be honest, another cable channel I’d enjoy is a REAL men’s channel. I don’t think Spike gets the job done with their lame-ass programming. The only really good thing they’ve come up with is MXC.
A real men’s channel should have
Naked women, or nearly naked women. Actual naked women would call for it to be a premium channel, which I have no problem with. But if you go with a standard cable channel, I’d say go with women wearing sling thongs, which are pretty durned close to naked without being naked.
Humor. Now here is a place where I differ with the Spike Network. I think crude humor is just PART of the pantheon of humor, and that guys in general like just about anything that makes them laugh. Some intelligent humor about religion, sex, politics or what-have-you would work fine for most guys, I think. Let the Man Show be the Man Show, but don’t stop there.
Adventure shows, right. Maybe do their own line of adventure shows where things are a little different from more general fare. Like, if the guys get stranded in the desert and are picked up by a band of nomadic bedouin, and one of the slave women does a belly dance for them, have her do a really hot, really or semi-naked belly dance (see: sling thong) for them. Anybody ever see Howard Hughes’ Son of Sinbad? That kinda dancing, updated for this century. Yum. Point is, keep it sexier than your standard adventure movie where everybody’s worried about Junior seeing a hot babe in action.
You can fill out programming holes with sports, all of which have to involved winning by actual points earned by scoring goals or outrunning, outfighting or outjumping the other contestants, rather than judges awarding points based on “merit.” And no silly sports like that jive-ass version of basketball with trampolines that Spike went with. What the hell were they thinking?
You can also fill out with “how-to” series that get down to the nitty-gritty on how to build, assemble, disassemble or otherwise do things.
Actually, I think the SciFi Channel has done a pretty good job with some of their in-house sci-fi TV movies. Epoch, for example, was pretty durned good. I’ll grant you, Jonathan Edwards has nothing to do with science fiction and also sucks. But I think they do OK with their limited budget. I do wish they’d given Lexx and Farscape more time, and of course, they should never have cancelled MST3K. But on balance, they are what they say they are.
The Anglophile channel. Tours of British houses and castles, practicums in serving afternoon tea and knitting fairisle sweaters, inspired quests for the best fish & chips shops, and a late-night Britcom lineup.
I dunno, I find almost all their movies really boring. And there’s waaaay too much horror. And then there’s all the really stupid stuff like “Mad Mad House” and “Scare Tactics”. And some stupid new reality series they keep advertising with guys who are plumbers by day, ghost investigators at night. :smack: The only thing I ever watch anymore are the Stargate series (which are workman-like at best) and Farscape reruns.
I was gonna say I’d like to see and all-Western channel with endless reruns of Bananza and Big Valley but the Family channel pretty much does this anyway. Iv’e heard there’s an anime channel out there but it hasn’t reached wide-distribution. Same with the International channel. Let’s see, if there was gonna be a channel that catered exclusively to my tastes it’d be the “So you wanna learn Japanese” channel with some anime (in the original Japanese), Japanese soaps, and programs designed to help you learn. But the market for that would be small (tho’ probably bigger than the all-bondage channel audience)…
It would show every single film of any type, nominated for any Oscar ever. I would program it to run in chronological order, starting with all the movies nominated in 1927-1928 up to the most recent, and over and over again. Each movie would be introduced with a short credit that explained exactly who and/or what was nominated from the film and whether it won or not.
Also, the IMDB 250 channel. It would show the IMDB 250 in order from #250 to #1 (about 3 weeks of programming), then start over again based on the most current rankings.
I would like to see The History Channel, Discovery, and The Learning Channel reclaimed. None of them are about what they’re supposed to be and it’s highly frustrating.
Also, I would like to see the SciFi channel get the Trek shows away from Spike.
I don’t really care to see anything else created but if those four things were to happen, I’d have no reason to watch anything else.
How about the science channel? Yeah, I know that’s what the discovery channel is supposed to be. But how exactly is Monster Garage, Junkyard Wars, American Chopper, Monster House, etc, science shows? Don’t get me wrong, those are perfectly fine shows, and deserve their own channel, the Gearhead channel. But I’d like to see actual science shows. Old episodes of Nova. All those PBS science and science history series…Cosmos, Richard Attenborough, James Burke, the Body in Question, Bill Nye. And more original series of the same type. Even Mythbusters which is kind of a hybrid can stay, it doesn’t all have to be serious guys with british accents. Move all the “America’s Funniest Alligators” and “Tigers Biting Idiots in the Nuts” type shows over to Animal Planet though.
Oh, and how about “The History Channel (except 1938-1945)”? Let the current history channel show nothing but WWII shows, and the new History channel could show everything else.
One thing I’d like to see, but I suppose would have a pretty limited audience would be “The Paleontology Channel”. 24-7 of nothing but dinosaurs, genetics, evolution, mammal-like reptiles, the RNA world, continental drift, and the unique mammals that evolved when South America was an island continent. We’d have to dig up Stephen J. Gould, re-animate him, and give him his own weekly show of course.
How about The No Bullshit News, a news channel that did nothing but measure statements made by political figures against objective truth? No partisanship, and no attempts to determine the “truth” of things that aren’t really determinable … sorta what journalists are SUPPOSED to do in the first place, but have now almost entirely stopped doing.
Oh! I just thought a really cool obscure channel that’d interesting. How about the slash/yaoi fangirl channel? You could run all those kinda slashy series like “The Sentinal”, “Due South”, “Highlander”, “Starsky&Hutch”, “Stargate:SG1”, “Smallville”, “Sportsnight”, etc. (there’s more series I know I’m forgetting too) You could also run yaoi anime like “Gravitation” and well-slashed anime like “Gundam Wing”, “YuYu Hakusho”, and “Weiss Kruez”. And slashy and gay-themed movies like “LOTR”, “Pirates of The Caribbean”, “My Beautiful Laundrette”, “Maurice”, and “Bishonen”. And I’d love to see an origianl series developed where the writers acknowledged and played into the slashyness with subtle encouragements. You’d probably have a small but insanely fanatical audience…
Let’s see what all those other viewpoints are so we can figure out why Country X is behaving so inexplicably.
I haven’t watched TV much in the past couple of years, not do I have cable any more, but I remember a couple of attempts that got close… Newsworld used to have international roundups during the night, but of course it was mostly CBC. The local Toronto cable news channel Pulse 24 (sister of City TV) would run foreign news in the middle of the night: I remember watching China Central Television News one night at 4AM when I couldn’t sleep. But both of these were shoehorned into underused timeperiods in existing schedules.
I’d subscribe to your science channel, Lemur866. That was what TVOntario was supposed to be (it started out as the Ontario Educational Communications Authority, and had high-school classes and all back in the seventies), but later it turned into a mini-PBS complete with pledge breaks. <shudder>. Nowadays it’s known for its commercial-hype-free children’s programming.
How about The Language Channel? (It’s Thursday night! Let’s learn French!) And preferably at least one channel in every language The Language Channel teaches.
My own Improbable Dream: The Esperanto Channel. It’s slowly happening, as an internet broadcast, but it’d be nice to see it on Regular TV.
