Remember when it used to be a channel with educational programming? They’d show operations, talk about history, medicine, all sorts of general knowledge.
What happened?
At any given point, TLC has become Lifetime 2, the sluttier, less informed little sister of the original. You know the one, the really cheery one who’s always pregnant and never stops gossiping, then says something REALLY stupid. At any given time (really, go ahead and check this yourself) TLC is running one of threefour things.(Edited because yep, somehow I’d left that at three. Thanks for the hate, MxMx)
Jon and Kate Plus 8
I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant
A Baby Story
Little People, Big World
You’ll also catch a ton of What Not To Wear and Say Yes To The Dress, or Wild Weddings. Plenty of Table for Twelve and Five under 5 too.
So what’s our common theme? Baby baby baby small people who we project child-like tendencies onto marriage marriage baby baby.
ONE of these shows has some educational value, and not much, but fashion is something one learns at least, so What Not To Wear has a mildly redeeming value if you put a gun to my head, but barely raises itself from the absolute ticking biological clock glurge of clown car vaginas and worn out uteri.
Protip:Most of these families are not good people. Especially Jon and Kate. It’s very clear the latter is a HORRIBLY controlling person, probably would be abusive if not for cameras, and just look at the hair. It screams “control freak.” I never knew hair could do that, but there it is. Well, that or “MASSIVELY BIPOLAR”, with the long on one side, short on the other, shaved in back. It’s a haircut that allows her just enough to look feminine, but the rest will do exactly what she wants and fuck you if you disobey while screaming “PAY ATTENTION TO ME!!!”.
Okay, maybe that’s a little far, but I doubt it. And I digress.
Wait, nevermind, it’s not. UPDATE FOR THE LULZ from Us Weekly:
Kate Gosselin says her spiky bob hairstyle reflects her feisty personality. “It’s my attitude! Everybody wants it. It’s work,” she tells Entertainment Weekly. “I have very, very thick hair, so it’s not going to work for everybody,” she says. “I’ve seen people come through the book line with thin hair and it just won’t work. My hair stylist gets calls from all across the country.”
The Learning Channel sucks. I don’t want to watch horrible people who got famous for a lack of self-control and condoms all day, I don’t want to see catty fashion talk(if I did, I’d watch Ugly Betty). I want learning, not overpopulation.
TLC, either change your format back, or change your name to Lifetime 2. Your call, but you can’t keep the name and the programming, it’s false advertising.
8 comments ↓
A lot of stations are getting worse about this. There’s even a subject on <url=”http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay”TVTropes.org about it.
It’s network after network. SpikeTV at one long ago point was the Nashville network. It started out showing music videos for country. Then it got programming, and started showing Dukes of Hazzard reruns, and became the “National” network, then Spike. :p CMT is going the same way.
The Military channel USED to be Discovery Wings. Because Wings was such a damned cool show, and it deserved tobe on more for the number of planes it showed. Now it’s nearly gone from there.
History… they’re not there yet, but they’re moving that way. The channel of endless WWII documentaries now is on speculative future bullshit about what would happen if humanity died tomorrow. (it won’t), and reality TV! Ice Road Truckers and Axe Men aren’t historical in the least. Nor is “Tougher in Alaska”. They’re interesting as documentaries, but that kind of stuff should be on Discovery, or, dare I say it, on the LEARNING channel. Not on History. But Discovery is too busy showing the nature shows TLC isn’t, when it isn’t trying to discover what makes the coolest explosions or looks coolest on video when destroyed (Mythbusters and Smash Lab), or what is funniest to watch (Pitchmen).
At least Spike changed the name of the network, though, from TNN to Spike. They didn’t hide the network decay.
History, how far it’s fallen. Too much reality. At least it’s less Hitler now!
But damn it, Discovery is still great. Explosions are WAY cooler than babies. It takes skills and science to make a good explosion, any idiot can make a baby. The proof is the people with eight of them!
Where do I start? Seriously? TLC was introduced to me in 1996 (I think) with one of the best airline-disaster series called Survival in the Sky. Then, all of a sudden, in 1998, came these stupid wedding shows and it was all downhill from there. G4 also went this way, with only two shows surviving the origin of the channel (Attack of the Show, used to be the EXCELLENT The Screen Savers, and X Play, which used to be the lousy Gamespot TV…X Play is still lousy) and Discovery and History have both become the scripted-reality TV channels. Both suck ass. Really. I don’t care about the so-called MythBusters, because I can actually debunk what they’re debunking (please, fire a gun in a pressurized 747 in the sky and see the result, or go ahead and put foil in the microwave, to give a few lying examples of their show). I get more research and information from Showtime’s ultra-Libertarian Penn & Teller Bullsh!t show. When a learning show did come on, like David Pogue’s It’s Geek to Me, Discovery placed it at odd hours. And History is an all around joke. The SAME TOPICS ALL THE TIME! A&E made tons of documentaries. I see the tapes at the library all the time! None of these are shown. Bravo became the homosexual channel, A&E…Arts & Entertainment. Where is the artsy-fartsy programming? That’s gone. E! used to do The Soup (as Talk Soup) daily. MTV used to play music videos…okay, I’ll stop and state this:
Hollywood now owns all of the cable and OTA networks. At one time, this was considered a good thing, but it’s not anymore. Very few channels are outside of this Marxo-Liberal anti-American Leftist [CENSORED] monopoly that is Hollywood. Hollywood also complains to no end about no making any money on any TV shows. Really? Think about it, Hollywood. All of the shows suck. People are renting/buying DVD-on-TV like mad, or watching old recordings, or buying TV shows on iTunes, Amazon, and Xbox 360, etc. and watching what they want to watch. There’s a reason, like Showtime and HBO learned, that well-scripted shows, like Big Love and Weeds gets high ratings. Yet, the very same companies own all of the low-rated shows. Think about it, Hollywood. Cable is lucky to pull in a million people onto a show. High ratings are two million viewers in a nation of 300 million people. That’s low. Considering that one-third get pay TV of some sort…when I worked at a TV station, we discovered only 400 people watch these channels. So, there’s no audience. In the beginning of pay TV, networks used to split time amongst each other. For instance, Nick, A&E and Bloomberg used to be on one channel. This is better and should work…okay, I’m out of here. I can fill 29 1000-page volumes and 2000-paged index easily with how to fix American TV.
Here is a quote from your rant :
“At any given time (really, go ahead and check this yourself) TLC is running one of three things.
Jon and Kate Plus 8
I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant
A Baby Story
Little People, Big World”
Yeah… people who cant count to FOUR annoy me….dipshit
Oops. The joy of coming up with another example after a hyperbolic statement. Thanks for hatin’!
I can’t believe how boring TLC has become. They used to have “learning” related shows, now it’s about strange people with boring or twisted lives. This (little chocolatier) show made me yell at my tv because TLC has lost its focus with poor reality shows about people with boring lives. Shows about people raising kids teach us nothing – and we used to watch TLC religiously for many years. I don’t mind what not to wear because it actually teaches you something. Please get your focus back and strive to return to quality programming. Thank you.
I think TLC ROCKS! Their reality shows are so fine. People who diss TLC need to get a life. I litterally cried when Jon and Kate’s marriage ended in divorce. That was so painful. I feel sorry for the poor kid’s, but Kate will make it after all. She’s very intelligent, gorgeous and incredibly talented. I never miss Little People Big World. It is real life, not fantasy. I’ve followed that show from the beginning and laugh and cry trough their day to day struggles and joys in their hectic life. I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant is an incredible show. It is a real eye opener to what some people believe as bogus. It surely is not bogus. What a cool show. Baby Story is very touching. And possibly my favorite is What Not To Wear. A lot of men don’t put fashion first, but I certainly am very much atuned to prudent dressing. I adore and greatly admire a well dressed man, casual attire and formal. TLC is the coolest cable channel aside from Bravo. If you don’t like the shows then change the channel. TLC and Bravo wouldn’t be so successful if people weren’t watching the shows. You go TLC! Rock on TLC!!!!
“She’s very intelligent, gorgeous and incredibly talented.”
Well, she’s certainly good at exploiting her children and handling situations in the most histrionic way possible. Not sure I’d call that intelligence or talent.
I’ll just go with “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, for the second part of that statement.
“Real life” is one thing, trashy reality TV is another. Try an actual documentary, try PBS, hell, try Vanguard on Current or the Documentary Channel if you don’t want fiction.
And don’t call your channel “The Learning Channel” when educational content has taken a backseat to cheap trash with uninteresting people.
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