TV in the US is so weird. I mean, we’ve got all of that in Europe too (on some channels), but whenever I watch American TV, everything seems to be cranked up to 11. The aggressive of your news shows, the quantity of your advertisements, the weird rules from the middle ages (no swearing or nudity on certain channels), etc.
American here. I stopped watching “TV” about 15 years ago, and have streamed just about everything ever since. I’m also exposed to a lot less advertising now and my life is better for it.
Watching television at family/friends house feels like traveling to a foreign country. It’s exactly like you describe. I don’t recognize any of it anymore.
TV shows produced in my country are reaching cringe-levels, especially the TV mag show KMJS. I lost my trust in watching TV. And noontime shows are spewing cringe and usually controversial remarks.
All of that is on streaming, and worse.
A lot of TV has always just been a way to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible. Moving from 4 channels to 200 didn’t increase the amount of stuff you could watch, it just spread it all over the place.
It ate itself, streaming is going the same way. Maybe they’ll eventually catch on and have a service that contains every movie and TV show (once they’ve finished in the theatre, and past the Blu-ray/Pay-per-view part of their lifespan where people will pay for it individually), for like £30 a month, and it can be like Spotify and the other music services. A Kaleidescape for poor people. Until then I’ve gone back to mostly yarring it for any new stuff, and using a Jellyfin server.
Nobody wants a dozen services to look through, even if they did have more money than sense.
Unfortunately we’ll probably have to battle contracts again before that happens. As more of us rebel against the insanity by switching what services we subscribe to every couple of months, they’ll have to try to prevent frequent switching. for cable, they always pushed long term contracts and we had no choice. I’m not getting locked into a long term contract unless it’s a serious discount, and even then I realize it’s mostly a trap to get your credit card on auto-renew.
Yes! Maybe a service for flicks that streams over the internet.
✨️enshitification✨️
This is incorrect. There is also reality tv on the weather channel.
Coming up next “See which wildly underpaid
internmeteorologists bite the dust this time. Coming at you live from inside the storm”
What brand of stupid reality bullshit you think will eventually take over the weather channel? 🤔
The Gold Diggers and Gold-Diggers caught me off guard, that’s funny.
TV in good old 'murica sure got enshittified damn early.
“History” channel - Ancient Aliens
The only reliable sources about history are preserved articles and respective reliable YouTube channels.
Reality TV is cheaper to produce than scripted shows. Profit is the reason all they show is reality shows.
Yeah, but it is really funny how many people are putting out documentary quality output on YouTube.
No one has mentioned that MTV invented the reality show in 1992 with The Real World.
Cable execs: I see your point. In 2024 we’ll be introducing trash reality shows that feature the weather.
They don’t even need to feature the weather. TLC stands for The Learning Channel and no one learns anything from their shows.
The only thing you learn from TLC is that you don’t want to watch TLC
How is there possibly this much market for this shit?
I have a feeling it has more to do with low production cost than anything else sadly :/
milleNNialS Are kiLLiNg cAblE
No doubt that’s the main thing but how are there enough people to watch all these channels of garbage?
Maybe no one is actually watching, the TV ratings system is crooked somehow, and TV advertisers are getting screwed?
It happened during the 08 writers strike. Reality Tv is cheap to produce and requires minimal writing.
deleted by creator
MTV has been all over those “reality” shows and candidate shows since at least the late 90s though.
Hey, I’m Bam Magera and this is Jackass Roomraiders where Xibit builds flat screens into your entire house for no reason after we had a hot girl go through all your embarrassing shit while you waited in a car of some kind outside watching together with your adversaries who go absolutely apeshit about anything that happens, also UV sperm detection light.
NEXTMTV invented the reality format. The first few seasons of The Real World were innovative and novel. Then the execs realized how much cheaper reality was to produce and flooded the market with garbage until it was all we had left.
MTV’s downfall started when they got rid of all the Music freaks in the C suite that liked music and hired TV producers. Then we got Remote Control. We didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the downfall of MTV. Once those TV execs realized they could make non-music content, we got The Real World. It was OVER.
Remote Control was probably the first program not about music (I remember LL Cool J quipping that they didn’t have questions about the radio) but I think it was still in the spirit of the youth culture and edginess of early MTV. But, yeah, it likely marks the time at which the execs decided they had to “innovate” new programming that strayed from the format that made people watch MTV in the first place.
That said, I don’t think they knew the monster they were unleashing when they created The Real World.
I used to love A&E when it was biographies and Lovejoy.
The major TV networks were so embarrassed by being outproduced in quality by these niche cable networks that they raised the level of their programing to match. LOL, no. They bought out all the niche cable TV channels and turned them into trash. Hurray Capitalism.
Edit: and in the streaming era, the same kind of thing happened to Pluto. They had some great, quirky programs. Like the train channel. Checked them out a couple weeks ago and they look completely different post buy out. All the tech and gaming content gone. No train channel. Bunch of channels that just run reruns of one show.
Fookin ‘ell this goes hard
