Is pretty much the biggest source of nonsense on television? I must admit I like watching it. The whole series on what happens after man disappears was pretty interesting. However they present pretty much everything as if it is fact be it Christian prophecies, Mayan prophecies, ancient greek prophecies, ancient alien theories. The most absurd example I've seen was a special on the existence of dragons which was narrated by John Luke Picard. The key point they hammered home was that there is mountains of empirical evidence that dragons existed. Who knew?

only reason to watch imo

Yea, I noticed the same thing recently. They probably had to compete with the rest of the crap on tv, just to stay relevant and making money.

Oh well can you do, it's not like anything bad has ever resulted from a bunch of people believing in non existent things, like Nostradamus' great psychic powers.

This thread will be moved to the Lounge, a much more appropriate forum for this subject.

-Zeno

My favorite was watching Conan the Barbarian on History several months ago...

They show Ken Burns movies on there sometimes. I started watching the Brooklyn Bridge one once and couldn't stop. What a war that was, building that thing. But yeah, they show too much goofy ****. You'll get more history on C-Span's BookNotes every weekend (historians talking about their books) than you will on the average History Channel night.

They should start running "In Search Of" reruns and get it over with. I'm sure Leonard Nemoy could use the residuals.

Sometimes it does bug me that they will play all sorts of cheesy movies on there and have incredibly cheesy ghostbuster and Nostradamus specials on so much. They give a big part of their schedule over to the same old junk you could expect to find most anywhere, and have lost a lot of their identity and attraction doing it. At least IMO there's not any particular reason to believe there will be anything historical on it, so it just becomes a fairly random channel lost in a million others all searching for the lowest common denominator.

The History Channel in Canada was running CSINY reruns until they were told the show breached their licensing conditions as a history channel. They tried to argue that CSI New York was a Sept. 11-themed series, and as such constituted historical programming, but they were told "while an occasional episode may deal with a current or historical event, the series is clearly one that is about forensic investigations, not history or current events."

Do they show CSIs on your history channel?

In America they have really crappy reality TV shows on the "History" channel.

It's not as bad as 'The Learning Channel', which to their credit at least doesn't claim the name anymore, and is just 'TLC' and a complete cesspool.

Dumbest **** on the History Channel: MonsterQuest.

The pawn shop show goes into detail about historical artifacts that are brought in, but is admittedly pretty weak as a 'history' show. I do get a chuckle out of the fact that whatever comes in, the owner has a buddy somewhere who is an encyclopedic expert on it.

Hell, Hitler can only take you so far, as a 24 hour cable network.

I'll vote for the ghost shows being more inane than MonsterQuest. MonsterQuest actually had at least one good episode, on Asian pigs being introduced to the American woods for hunting and making pigs a lot bigger. The ghost shows are just straight suck 100% of the time though. There's really no adequate way to ridicule them to the extent they deserve.

My buddy always watches Monsterquest, and I refer to all the episodes collectively as "StinkApe", since that's the monster who supposedly lives near him in Florida.

We live in a vulgar culture of noisy, mass-marketed stupidity. It never takes long before this barren culture transforms something vertically compelling into something very horizontally boring.
It is only a matter of time.

Get BBC America instead imo, and watch Top Gear

I would love to get the BBC, but in America you can't buy one channel at a time unless it's a premium sports channel; you have to pop your bill up by large amounts to add just a little more of what you like. They make it so no one normal viewing package has everything someone would like, and the only add-on packages have a random smattering of channels, so the only choice is to pay a lot more per year to get just one or two additional channels, or just stick with what you've got. :P

can you guys get the BBC iPlayer

Lots of really good stuff on that, including Top Gear

I don't even know what that is.

google it.

I suspect it's only available for UK residents, but you know, there are probably free UK proxies...

"Cinema, simulated life, ill drama
Fourth reich culture, Americana
Chained to the dream they got ya searchin for
The thin line between entertainment and war" remember? they start to get more actually in nowadays context

Yep, good things rarely last long before selling out and watering down. Even PBS has screaming commercials now that will wake the neighbors at night, oriented toward dummies, and a huge chunk of programming devoted to repeats of oldies music and show tunes, often with a CD package to sell, or something else with a CD to sell.

You have probably noticed that even The Food Network has become the Food Entertainment Channel with all of these silly food competitions.
I imagine this mindset evolved from the Iron Chef series.
I enjoyed the original Japanese series with its kinky voice-overs, but the All-American version has never held my attention.
I enjoyed The Food Network when it first began and featured more teaching chef's.
The quality of the chefs and the menus they prepare today has diminished considerably over the last five years.
I think the network's demise began about the time they discovered Rachel Ray.

I was just thinking about how fewer and fewer shows on The Food Network are about teaching. A large portion have become just "feel good about cooking" or "enjoy thinking about flavor profiles" shows. You see chefs or pseudo-chefs dumping unmeasured ingredients in a pan or some mixing container, or glossing over really important things, and it's really hard to imagine duplicating the recipe or sometimes even cooking style yourself. There's no real take-away from most of the shows. They're at most a pleasant diversion, and that based almost entirely on how much you like the personality of the chef/presenter.

I think that's why they cycle through personalities and shows so fast. They're not offering real substance, so there's no particular reason for a show or personality to hang around. They're not offering anything concrete or that can't be easily replaced.

Last night they had on a show that was about the worst cooks. When I first saw the commercials for it, they made me think, why would I want to watch someone else's incompetence when I have so much of my own to draw upon? And what really are these guys doing in a contest? The concept guys at the network are really reaching when it comes to finding new filler.

I half-watched it a while while trying out a new video game, and saw one of the judges consistently remarking that contestants screwed up for not making their dish look exactly like the dish he had shown them. Isn't getting the precise color of a sauce or a reduction a bit beyond the pale for supposedly horrible cooks? One contestant responded by sayng he had no idea it was even about matching the look of a dish perfectly. He was going for good taste instead. And he got slammed for it. Sheesh, what a stupid show.

And then there's that dolt Sara Lee or whatever her name is, creating fabulous desserts by crushing twinkies, making sauces with campbell's soup, and going on and on about cute placemats. Ugh.

I find the best cooking shows are usually on PBS. Ming Tsai has a show where he makes a "master sauce" and then shows hot to use it by applying it to different entrees, and also pairing them with other courses to make a rounded meal. Now that you can learn from.

Still, it seems real recipes are on the decline for the most part, being replaced by some form or other of competition show or some woolly "food experience" show.

CNN has really fell into the gutter. They take one story and milk it for all that it's worth, spending a full hour on one subject and having 15 commentators. I actually prefer FOX now because they are quick and precise, excluding all the opinion shows. Both networks say the same damn thing.