Forgive me for this, but I’ve had a headache for the last few hours that doesn’t want to go away, and I’m in the middle of an allergy/sneezing attack, so I’m feeling a bit pissy.
What the ever-living fuck happened to cable TV?
I probably know the answer (or answers). But I haven’t seen a company rocket so hard under its own power to total self-annihilation since Tumblr a couple years ago, or what Twitter did to Vine once they bought it.
So aside from my equipment and service woes we’ve had since moving to Michigan and our local Comcast Xfinity provider giving us satellite boxes that rely on wifi to get a signal instead of the good old trusty coax lines that cable has always been known for, and how shitty the boxes have been, how the remotes seem to suck batteries dry faster than a ten-year-old goes through a CapriSun on a hot summer day, how one of my boxes now just refuses to connect to anything and won’t get through the welcome screen, and how I had to get a Mesh wireless system for an 1100 square foot house because their router/modem combo that i still have to rent from them because of their phone service I’m subscribed to even though I’ve never used it once… BESIDES ALL OF THAT.
The fuck.
No. Seriously. The actual Fuck.
RIght now the MTV Video awards for 2020 are happening. And do you know how I know? Not because I was paying attention to what was on MTV. Because that channel has been dead useless to me for more than 15 years, mostly due to the fact that it has the gall to claim a Music Video Awards Show like it has some fucking authority on the matter when it gave up the Music Television of its namesake for things that “starred” people named things like Snookie and The SItuation.
But there are currently, as far as much channel flip-through on my cable menu, eight (count ’em, EIGHT!) different channels that are airing the MTV 2020 Music Video awards. At the same time. TWICE IN A ROW.
TBS, TNT, Comedy Central, Nick At Night I think is moving to them as soon the SpongeBob movie finishes up. Other channels too, I’ve gotta assume VH1 is part of the fucking conspiracy.
It’s not enough that MTV doesn’t give a single fuck about music (or television) any more. But the one time they pretend to out of the year, they have to force fuck you with their lame ass attempt on seven other networks that also don’t have anything to do with music (VH1 can go feed itself off the army of dicks that MTV should be eating and shitting directly into its figurative mouth Human Centepede-style, just like it did with its regurgitated “reality show” content).
This is what these cable networks consider “programming” now. And it’s a fucking wonder that they’re upset that people are flocking away not only to paid streaming services, but to podcasts and YouTube reaction videos and Twitch gameplay streams. Because there is nothing there.
I watch an unforgivable amount of HGTV and DIY network (right now. DIY will soon be replaced by the Magnolia Network because I guess playing 20+ hours of Chip and Joanna Gaines reruns each week on HGTV wasn’t enough for them even though the show stopped recording over two year ago). My fall-back after these is the Food Network and Cooking Channel, almost exclusively because of Alton Brown and his Good Eats program(s). I love me some Home Town and Good Bones. I certainly liked the Gainses on Fixer Upper. I will play the reruns of the Mike Holmes stuff on whatever channel its on (is Destination TV a channel? Travel Channel maybe? I don’t know, something with a name like that plays about 20 hours of his ten year old show every Saturday night). I have watched and rewatched all these show and sat through some shit I’m not technically into because it’s just safe programming that I don’t have to feel too invested in, like Property Brothers or Beat Bobby Flay. Some things I just can’t stand, so I will change to almost anything else.
But these channels play about two commercials, at best, per break that are actually paying the bills, I’m pretty sure, and then another five to seven commercials that are just for their other shows, between the couple of networks owned by Discovery. How many times do I need to hear Scott say “Nailed it!” on his full or edited down commercial for his Vacation Property program? Or how about Victoria screaming “Show me the money!” at some poor soul off camera for a show that was basically a dressing up of reruns of old HGTV shows that aren’t even in production any more, like Dessert Flippers and (I have to assume) Boise Boys? Or Christina complaining how hard it is to have three kids and living on “the Coast” while doing designs for her friends who all want the same white kitchen I guess.
A lot. I have to hear these things a lot. Every commercial break for every half hour slot for the entirety of the broadcasting day. Over and over.
I don’t know what it costs to run one of these cable networks at this point. I’ve often wondered how much do the designers and builders on these shows get paid, and how much of a kickback do the homeowners get for being featured. But I can’t imagine that Wayfair or Overstock, the only two advertisers that seem to exist for the channels, can be paying that much. Although I did hear something about the MyPillow guy and how much he must pay in advertising to keep Tucker’s belligerent piece of shit ass on the air, so who knows.
There was a channel I watched when I first moved to Michigan two years ago that played old comedy sitcoms. The same ones every weekdays in several hour blocks. That 70s Show, Night Court, Spin City, Third Rock from the Sun, over and over and over. Some of these shows, like Spin City in particular, didn’t have a ton of seasons. But you’d see it blow through the entire archive in about a week’s time and then start it up again. Now I do think they added some more dreck to their arsenal, like According to Jim. But as I sat through these shows (I was bored, broke and unemployed), I saw two advertisers over and over. Both of them were non-profits. The Wounded Warrior Foundation and the Shriner’s Children’s Hospital. And I am super happy and grateful that they got featured so much to get attention to their causes, certainly. But I was both surprised that they could pay to run basically a whole TV channel by themselves, and that a TV channel could exist with only six or so shows, none of them with new content made in the last ten to fifteen years, running on it. Granted, I was pinned to it (at least until they started playing That 70’s Show or Home Improvement in the late afternoon), but I was practically a stoner without being stoned. I was just that bored. It still feels like it was more energy put into a channel that simply pads the numbers of “options” cable offers users without being anything people are actually wanting to watch.
I follow HGTV on Facebook (god, there’s another stream of nothing but waste a lot of the time) and every day now they post what’s going to be playing for the day in the morning. And people are… well, they’re on Facebook. Facebook is middle-line in the human centipede chain with Twitter at its back door and Reddit already in the landfill. The people who post replies to HGTV’s posts are pissed off because it’s just telling you, “Hey, we’re going to be rerunning the same 20 episodes of ‘Property Brothers: Forever Home’ you just saw on over the weekend. But we may give you a new House Hunters or two tonight at ten. Choke on it, ya vermin!” And yes, Covid means there’s not a bunch of new stuff being filmed, so we’re kind of stuck with the reruns, or the regurgitated reruns edited to look like a new show that I mentioned earlier. And Food Network gets even more heat for the one new show they’ve been able to put out with Amy Shumer and her husband because, let’s be frank, she’s divisive as a comic already, and I don’t know if she was ever going to fit the FoodTV demo. But at least they tried something.
But the Disovery Network, and then the Viacom Network (I think that’s still who owns MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, etc) are the lion’s share of what makes a cable package. Then you have the pay movie sites, your local channels that you would get for free if you lived some place that could get a signal over the air with a newer antenna because they said fuck you and the old way, now go buy this new piece of shit and hope it works when things went digital. There are channels dedicated only to selling you shit, so you pay for the privilege to pay for more useless shit. And then the 24 Hour News stations which, I think you may have picked up on this, I have zero respect for.
A few months ago, I noticed my cable company had taken away one of my premium channels without telling me. Cinemax. Now, I don’t watch anything I can think of on Cinemax (I really loved Banshee when it was on, but that ended years ago), so I don’t know that i care that it went away. But I did care that they took it away without telling me, without lowering my bill, and felt like it was all just fine. So I called and complained. And it used to be that you would call the cable company and they would make some restitution, although not nearly as much as if you were a brand new customer, because they knew you could just cut the TV and get all you needed through the internet (something they’re very aware of and why they meter your internet use so you have to pay for how much you download. This was on its way to being fixed, but some asshole with a giant coffee mug fucked shit up for everyone and I have a human centipede line-up ready that can steep his java for him).
I am a nice person and I respect people are just doing their jobs as best they can. When you call Comcast (in my case), you’re not actually talking to Comcast. You’re talking to the poor schlub that Comcast highers to listen to people scream and whine and generally complain all day, as they insult you, offer you up death threats, and tell you unkind things about your familial heritage. I worked in customer service for a long time. I don’t like to treat people that way.
But I was really lead down the path of, “Look, sir. I get that you think we’re giving you shit service. And I completely agree with you. But your time of value to us is over. We don’t care if you give up your TV. It would be a blessing to us now. We’ve got our own streaming service, Peacock, on its way, so we can give you that for free with your TV subscription or charge you for it separately. But we’re your only option for high-speed internet. You know it, we know it. So no matter what, we’ll get $150 out of you a month, and then raise prices and drop back service and features, for the foreseeable. So you can bitch about your Cinemax all you want. Let me put you on hold now so I can go mock you. I’m kidding of course, I don’t care enough about your feelings to mock you, I just want to watch something on Quibi.”
That’s a joke too. Nobody is watching Quibi.
So I did get my Cinemax back, but I don’t watch it. And i was trying to catch up on Big Brother episodes with Erin, but our DVR was running like shit and kept pausing like it was YouTube from ten years ago. And I look and I see that eight of the channels that I do get are playing a five hour block of the exact same thing, Epix is playing the two Charlies Angels movies back to back for the billionth time this month, most of the other channels are playing things that are available through my Netflix or Hulu pr Amazon subscriptions anyways. And I came up here, with a headache, sneezing, because it’s preferable to try to type up a rant through my allergies than it is to look at the bullshit that counts as “entertainment.”
So thank you, Comcast, AT&T, Warner Media, Disney, Fox, and fuckall, for motivating me to do the thing that i honestly could have skipped tonight. You sucked out loud so massively, I actually did the right thing.
I suppose tomorrow night I’ll have to find a bone to pick with terrestrial radio. Shouldn’t be too hard.
