I’d like to know what they hell happened to the History Channel. I mean, sure, they were a little heavy on the Hitler back in the day, but they also had a lot of great documentaries on the Civil War, the Old West, Medievel Europe, etc.
Nowadays you tune in and most of the time its yet another show on the Roswell conspiracy, bigfoot, the apocalypse or haunted houses, with an occasional episode of Ice Road Truckers or Modern Marvels thrown in.
This used to be one of only three or four channels I watched regularly, but now I can’t remember the last time I tuned in to watch an entire episode of anything on there.
I concur. They started to lose me with the UFO shows. What the hell is that all about?
The thing is, I can’t even figure out WHY they would have such a mismosh of programming like this.
Is there a particular demographic they think they are targeting? Do they think people who like carefully researched, well presented documentaries on WWII also like silly UFO shows with Mike Farrell as a host? That can’t be right, can it?
Or is it an economic thing? Methinks ‘Ice Road Truckers’ probably costs pennies to produce relative to other stuff. But what does that have to do with History? That can’t be the same target demographic, can it?
I don’t know, but I was at my parents’ last night, flipping through the channels, and my father said the exact same thing.
The good thing is, he probably won’t ask me anymore why I don’t study “real” history, like they do on the History Channel. 
I’m sick of this crap also. They were WWII heavy for so long because our national conscious still feels pretty good about that war and because stock footage is free, through in a historian and a geezer that tears up when talking about friends lost and you have a production.
I can’t even have it on in the background anymore, my girlfriend was watching the search for the El Chupicabra last night and I had to put on headphones to read, the stupid was infecting my brain.
Somewhere back I started a Pit thread about this, but I’m too lazy to go look for it.
In the UK it is simply that the same set of crap programmes filter up and down all the ‘factual’ channels. For the moment UFO’s etc are ‘history’ when they were previously the provenance of Discovery.
Same old shit on 6 or more channels and it sucks.
The History International channel now is like the old History channel.
I’m not in the network programming industry, but if I had to hazard a guess. . .
A network’s first priority is to air progamming that they think people will tune in to watch. And if that includes pseudo-science and cryptozoology, well. . . .
That finally sunk in many years ago when either A&E or History showed a several part documenary called “The Men Who Killed Kennedy,” which quite convincingly indicated that (as I recall), it was a conspiracy of French mobsters who were in on it.
OooooooK.
The Canadian version (History Television) appears to show nothing but CSI.
CMC fnord!
Quoted 'cause just stealing it wouldn’t be right!
Took the words out of my mouth.
Its annoying when you pay for a specific selection of programming and you end up with getting a mismash,much as I enjoy Sharpe and Rome they are fiction.
I love their bad-science shows and consider them a guilty-pleasure. I have fun with them when I’m bored. But I concede that they are not in any way history and do wonder what the heck they were thinking when they decided to put them on.
I still watch pretty regularly, Mail Call still plays and currently Cities of the Underworld is one of my favorite shows.
They do a decent amount of history stuff, but it seems like many of their big-time shows, the ones that play in primetime, are not history based. At least they are not the documentary type history shows. Many shows I’ve noticed, now have history built in to them but aren’t the old school History channel stuff, where you’re seeing archive footage with a narrator.
They also have a lot of history-of-Engineering Shows (Engineering an Empire, great series!, Engineering Disasters), and Archaeology (Lost Worlds, Cities of the Underground).
Maybe its because Tivo cherry picks the best shows for me, (and I vigorously thumbs-down the ghost-hunter type shows) but I think there’s plenty of good shows on the History channel that are history related.
I think that any given cable channel relies a lot on who’s at home watching TV during the day. Ten years ago, there was a much larger group of old, retired WWII vets with nothing better to do than sit around and relive the Old Days. Now, most of that group has passed on, and the largest current at-home-during-the-day demographic is stoner college kids. History Channel is just offering something different than the average cable network’s “old movies and sitcoms” format, background noise for a good wake-and-bake. But I bet that in five or ten years, as more and more Baby Boomers retire, it’s going to be all Vietnam and Woodstock, just like it was once all Hitler.
History Int’l and the Military Channel are essentially the old History Channel. I think at this point Nostradamus has surpassed Hitler as the most talked about person on the History Channel.
The final straw for me was that Jurassic Fight Club show. They took some paleontologist’s wet dreams and recreated them with crappy computer graphics and unnecessary viewer discretion warnings about simulated violence. What a crock of shit.
Remember when The Learning Channel had good shows? Now it is almost exclusively home improvement.
The Discovery Channel used to show stuff…but I don’t even look at it anymore because it was always crap when I looked…so I stopped looking.
Stations drift…and it is sad.
Sci Fi channel shows Professional wrestling and Ghost Hunters (well…one could argue that Ghost Hunters is on the proper channel called science FICTION).
History channel has drifted as well…and will continue to do so. Look up History International as someone has said…it has some interesting stuff.
Not to hijack, but the devolution of various channels has always depressed me. I know no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the North American public, but still, I yearn for a channel that will simply say “We provide intelligent, fact-based programming as well as outstanding performances; anyone who doesn’t like it can watch or sponsor something else.” They’d last a year, tops, and then they’d have to find their own way to generate an audience.
When was the last time A(rts) & E(ntertainment) showed a ballet performance? In Canada, we lost out hugely when CBC lost out the license on an all-arts channel to Moses Znaimer, who then provided us with T&A&E.
It’s all part of why I don’t watch the tube at all.
Boy, I didn’t even touch that show. I figured right off the bat that it’d be even worse than that stupid show they used to have on… Discovery? Animal Planet?.. where they’d subject you to 28 minutes of inane lab testing on how much bite force a pine bough can take before breaking followed by a crappy 2 minute CGI fanwank regarding who’d win if a moose fought an anteater.
Yeah, I forgot about Cities of the Underworld. I’ve caught glimpses of it while flipping through the channels on the weekend, but I can never manage to catch a full episode. I say they should dump all the paranormal crap and focus more on stuff on like this.
Some people mentioned the Discovery Channel. I feel they’ve kind of redeemed themselves, though, with shows like MythBusters, Dirty Jobs and American Chopper, which, even if they aren’t particularly educational, are still fun to watch, and most importantly don’t take themselves too seriously.
JFC was about the only thing on the History channel that had history attached to it. If ya’ll are complaining that it doesn’t mention history anymore and all it is is random “theorys” than I would assume that you would LIKE Fight Club.
Although I should mention that I LOVED Jurassic Fight Club. I thought it was a pretty cool excuse to have dinos fight, it gave a great reason to learn about some new dinos I never knew before.