This is incorrect. There is also reality tv on the weather channel.
Coming up next “See which wildly underpaid meteorologists bite the dust this time. Coming at you live from inside the storm”
✨️enshitification✨️
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.
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.
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.
The weather channel now is ads.
Wasn’t Bravo originally for performing arts? I thought it used to show theater productions and stuff like that.
deleted by creator
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.
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?
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.
Reality shows have people I never want to meet, mostly.
RIP Discovery Channel
As I recall back in 2003 when MythBusters started there were still some okay shows left but it went downhill quickly from there.
I haven’t been able to find a good list of Discovery schedules by year, that would make it clear when it became reality only.
The good shows I remember from the 90s was:
- Dinosaur! and When Dinosaurs Ruled with Bob Bakker
- Connections with James Burke
- Beyond 2000
- Time Team
- WW2 documentaries
This is unfortunately not hyperbole but incredibly and sadly accurate because but neglects to mention aliens on history channel and that it’s hard to find weather on weather channel due to insane amount of ads. TV has gone the way of AM radio.
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.
Yes! Maybe a service for flicks that streams over the internet.
David Zaslav is the common denominator across all these examples, and now he’s in charge of Warner Bros…
