TV wasteland

[johnridley]

OK, our old Dish Network receiver was hidden behind the MythTV box, and for the last several years I really hadn't been cruising the channels looking for stuff, I've just been watching the same 2 or 3 shows plus downloaded docs and such.

With DirecTV in place now, I've been browsing for the last few days, and I must say that even my previous cynical view of the state of TV was vastly insufficient. Honestly, nearly everything on there is utter shit. There's a good reason to have a DVR - with it you can actually watch a couple of hours of TV a day - because among 300 channels, two hours of something worth watching is about all there is.

I now know why they renamed the channel SyFy - because what they're running isn't science fiction. Crap, I went through their schedule for the next week, and there's no more than one hour a day of anything I'd call science fiction. The rest is all horror movies and woo woo bullshit. Fucking Galaxy Quest is better sf than 98% of what's on there (I *love* Galaxy Quest, but hey, it's mostly just a bit of fun). They've done some great stuff in the past (their Dune miniseries were pretty good), maybe they've been tanked for years, I haven't really tuned to that channel for 3 or 4 years now at all.

I knew that TLC went off the deep end a few years back and you have to go to Science Channel to get anything that you might actually learn something from anymore. But the vast breadth of drivel on any given channel is simply unbelievable. 300 channels, and out of 7 or 8 times that I sat down and went through every channel on the receiver to find something to watch that was actually on right then, I didn't find a single thing.

Even the documentaries are pretty repetitive and derivative. You can only hear the same guys talking about the same topics to a slightly different script so many times. I've heard all these guys talk about string theory like, 15 times already. Nothing new is being said.

Comments

[tceisele.livejournal.com]

Yup. That's exactly why we pulled the plug on our DISH network years ago - we just weren't watching it. It was much more effective (and significantly cheaper) just to get TV series on DVD through Netflix or Family Video, rather than wading through all the cruft trying to find them. Especially since the shows that looked good always seemed to be on the higher-tier channels that we would have had to pay extra to get.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Well, unfortunately the only real way to get sports channels that are wanted here is through cable or satellite, and I don't think you can just get the sports channels without the rest of the package. Or at least, not without spending about as much anyway. Not at all with satellite.