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.
I legit always thought it was Tender Loving Care.
I mean, it was definitely a play on the acronym
I’ve definitely learned how exploitative it is to force people in terrible life situations, many suffering from mental illness and/or some sort of past trauma or are just in a bad spot all around, to broadcast their lives for all to see and gawk at.
Oh you have a severe eating disorder that is extremely dangerous to your health? What a Freaky Eater you are! You also clearly have your Strange Addiction so we can exploit you twice for the same effort! Oh you’re not even living paycheck to paycheck and are dumpster diving behind the grocery store to feed your family? We got an Extreme Cheapskate over here!
Apparently, folks don’t realize that even The Weather Channel has already dabbled in trash reality TV.
Some famous enough to have their own Wiki pages:
Big list (pay attention to the ones marked “long form”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_The_Weather_Channel
I certainly wasn’t. I guess the enshittification is complete.
Cable shifted to low information viewers across the board decades ago. Dumb people watch commercials I guess.
They’re making people watch commercials on the streaming services now too. There’s really only one solution left, matey.
This chair be high, says I!
My popup blocker works on streaming so no commercials there.
That doesn’t stop, for example, Amazon showing you commercials for other Prime shows before showing you what you want to watch.
There’s a skip button and at least it’s for their own content. If they remove the skip button and start advertising unrelated products then fuck em
Paramount+ doesn’t have a skip button, but I already gave them up.
Worse, Hulu advertises the fucking show I’m currently watching.
All the people watch commercials, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a correlation between the kind of person that can watch stupid reality shows for hours on end and the kind of person who watches those ads and it actually translates into them spending money on the things in the ads.
Probably so. I don’t know if home shopping channels are still on the air, but there were people who watched those religiously. I remember when TV switched over to digital broadcast, there was a big to-do in the town I lived in because a bunch of people watched a low-power broadcast station that broadcast a home shopping channel 24/7 and they wouldn’t be able to watch it anymore since it couldn’t afford the upgrade.
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”
✨️enshitification✨️
This is the best use of this emoji, ever.
Enshittification IRL
Enshitification is just a symptom of capitalism. It’s been happening in real life forever.
The only thing new about it is the name.
Cartoon Network then: cartoons
Cartoon Network now: Teen Titans Go! on repeat
Jesus Christ, I just looked at their schedule there’s a total of 7 hours of TTG per day. Where’s the Adventure Time? Where’s the Billy and Mandy? Where’s Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy!?
It’s seriously infuriating, the catalog they have at their disposal and they just rerun TTG, a show that at the time caused TT fans to be legitimately upset. No one wanted TTG.
there’s a total of 7 hours of TTG per day
Holy shit, I’ve seen the memes but I just naturally assumed they were exaggerated… That’s actually ridiculous
Reality TV is cheaper to produce than scripted shows. Profit is the reason all they show is reality shows.
No one has mentioned that MTV invented the reality show in 1992 with The Real World.
I don’t have a problem with the concept of reality shows, I have a problem with reality shows being like 90% of all content.
The weather channel now is ads.
How is there possibly this much market for this shit?
It happened during the 08 writers strike. Reality Tv is cheap to produce and requires minimal writing.
Lowest common denominator does better, casts the widest net and the morons eat it up
Most people don’t have standards.
Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It’s all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.
I’m actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can’t think of any who have successfully broken into more “traditional” media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there’s something else entirely going on.
- Hollywood1 is so insular that they don’t even realize these people exist.
- Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
- Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.
That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.
1 used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.
Nickelodeon gave Fred their own TV show+movie and YouTube bankrolled some popular creators to make a few YouTube red originals, that’s about as far as I can think of
I vote for the insular, navel gazing/ narcissistic reason.
Oh, don’t worry, the same cancer is destroying fun on the internet, only worse because of the techniques they use to keep your attention that TV can’t replicate because it’s not an interactive medium.
Weather channel has trash shows about surviving weather events
Yeah I get that the weather channel is the punch line here but let’s not act like it hasn’t also gone to shit
C-Span then: empty chairs
C-Span now: empty chairs
I actually do watch C-Span (streaming) from time to time if there’s an important bill up for a vote. But that’s a pretty wonky level of keeping an eye on what the government is doing. I’d still rather have it than not.
Gen alpha: What are “TV channels?”
