Why is Time Warner excising all Viacom channels? I post this before I go a-googling, which I promise to do post-haste, but I’d like to see a conversation anyway.
In a nutshell:
Viacom wants more money to provide their channels to Time Warner.
Time Warner didn’t want to pay.
They got in an ugly public battle of words resulting in Viacom publishing an ad telling parents “Time Warner wants to take SpongeBob away from your kids”
Time Warner caved and they reached an undisclosed financial deal a few hours into 2009.
Here’s a Pit thread started a couple of days before New Year’s:
Thanks guys. I love the term, “Sponge Bob Blackout”, though the world would objectively be a better place without Sponge Bob. That is the stupidest show ever and has lead to some of the worst programming. I guess Ren and Stimpy is really to blame, but Sponge Bob is truly awful.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/business/media/02viacom.html?ref=business
I’m going to have to respectfully disagree- along with Fairly Oddparents and a few others, SpongeBob (at least in its first few years) is one of the few modern TV cartoons whose writing and characters stand up next to the all-time greats. Compared with the Minow-worthy vast wasteland of dreck that is modern kids TV, it is hardly “the stupidest show ever.” (SpongeBob himself’s a little lacking in the IQ department, but that’s a whole different story.)