Channel Wipe-Out

I know that television is no great bastion for people of consciousness. In fact, I find that one of its great appeals is its simplicity, at least when it comes to channels. There is a golf channel, a news channel, a men channel, a woman's channel (two actually, three if you count Soap Net), a science channel, a sci-fi channel, and multiple movie channels. What you see is what you get. You never have to ask, "Oh, Country Music Television, I wonder what that channel is about?" The answer is self evident: crappy music sung by semi-literate yokels.

Lately though, there has been a frightening and disturbing shift in TV: airing programming whose content has nothing to do with the premise of the channel on which it is being shown. I first noticed this phenomenon years ago when I saw "Goodfellas" airing on Oxygen, the Oprah channel. I let it slide because I thought maybe women actually have an appreciation for awesome mob movies, plus I don't really watch Oxygen, so it did not really impact my life. What a fool I was. My refusal to nip this problem in the bud would soon spread to my home turf in the worst way imaginable.

I love History. I study it, I live it (well, we all live it), and breathe it. As a result, the History Channel is one of my personal favorites. I'm not going to say that everything they do is the best history lesson, but at least you get what you expect. Not anymore. The channel, now simply known as "History" has forsaken me, the penultimate fan, in favor of a broader appeal. What kind of appeal? Just today, I saw a show entitled "Sex in Space" that was all about the possible ways to bump uglies in zero gravity. Now I'm not going to say that this is a rediculous idea. I've thought about that scenario since I was fifteen, except for one little problem...IT'S NOT HISTORY! Not a single part of it! This is just the tip of the banality iceberg though. You'll have less success finding an actual documentary in a typical History programming lineup than a myopic amputee would at a braille edition of Where's Waldo.

Some of these shows don't even sound real. I'd expect to find a show called "Jurassic Fight Club" to be a parody on a sitcom, not a legitimate (and I use that term loosely) television program. The most obvious thing is that the channel is attempting to compete with Discovery by expanding the definition of history to include natural history. This leads to shows like the aforementioned dinosaur frag-fest, plus "The Universe" and "Monster Quest," shows about everything under and beyond the sun and things that do not even exist (except Bigfoots). Now I like to keep an open mind, but Natural History is not proper History; it's Science. History is the human historical record started around 5,000 years ago in the fertile crescent of east-central Asia. No dinosaurs. No cavemen. No black holes. No giant salamander monsters that inhabit the jugles of Djibouti. It's simple. And I'm not even going to give "Ice Road Truckers" the decency of a rant, sufficed to say that if I wanted to know what these people did for a living, I'd pick up a job application.

I know documentaries aren't everyone's favorite thing to watch. They are the brussels sprouts of the entertainment world, but there are people who like them, including me. It's a shame to see decent informative material get sidelined by populist trash that has less educational value than watching a chimp jerk itself off (that's the kind of stuff you get on Discovery). Luckily, the good stuff has fled to the relative safety of niche channel History International, but it's only a matter of time until this plague of basic cable spreads to the premium package. And if it does happen, we won't know what to do because nobody will have watched that awesome documentary on the Black Death.