Everything WRONG With Modern Television

LOL! Maybe I just love certain things about America of the 1950's more than I do today.

It's funny - on some of the really old shows the commercials were literally ON the show. Like on a variety show, they'd introduce the sponsor and they'd come out on the stage and perform their commercial. I know I sound like I'm countering my own argument, but it wasn't like the sponsor would "pop-up" in front of Milton Berle doing a skit and do the commercial.

The DVDs for "The Dick Van Dyke Show" have him and Mary Tyler Moore doing commercials in some episodes. They're actually kind of cool to watch.

I still don't get the middle of the night thing - that just seems dishonest. If you're a network dedicated to a genre, and people are paying for that as part of a package, then they should play that genre (and / or anything related to it) 24/7.

I used to do shift work where I'd get home at 3:00 am - thought maybe a little stand up on the comedy channel might be nice, but instead, nothing but infomercials of electric food processors & juice makers. And it's gotten worse - almost all the channels are like that. There are decades worth of stand up comedy they could put on (and same for science, history, animals, oldies, news, etc.). Any of these channels could just re-run their shows from the daytime... but they don't.

Do they think that someone watching TV at 3:00 am (and who's paying for the same channels as a daytime or evening viewer) doesn't deserve to watch a show? Or do they think if you're awake at night then you must only want to watch juicer commercials and nothing else? They have entire shopping networks dedicated to selling that crap, so why does almost every other channel revert to these vapid infomercials every night?

That's just fraudulent mis-advertising that discriminates against people with certain work schedules or biorhythms.

Also, why do the cable packages always include channels that I don't want to pay for?

I currently have a package deal that includes MTV, The Golf Channel, etc,. and even a bunch of foreign language channels. I shouldn't have to pay for channels that I'll never watch.

Yeah, I've been calling for Ala Carte Cable menus for customers for a long time.
I guess the tier system is less complicated, but I always wonder why most of the things I like (intellectual stuff like science, travel, etc.) are always in the higher costing tiers, never in the lower or "basic" tiers. But if you like Reality TV, you can still get a wide selection on the cheaper tiers!

I usually just get the cheapest package that includes Turner Classic Movies.

I wonder about the late night infomercials too.
Who the hell wants to buy a set of 50 knives. What would I do with all those knives? They would sit in a box somewhere taking up space

The dude actually mentioned a zombie apocalypse once as a selling point for the knives. I could maybe believe that with a sword.. not a knife though. My ideal zombie weapon would be a spear.

And they must assume that people up that late are depressed and out of shape since there are so many commercials for gym equipment.

A few channels have shows that late.. you can watch married with children or rules of engagement lol. Best bet is definitely a DVR. You can record prime time content and then watch it whenever you want.

I think we can safely assume that these infomercials are paying more money than an old rerun with commercials would generate. Otherwise they wouldn't be playing the infomercials. Why else would it happen?

a la carte is a dual edged blade. I'm not sure if it's a good or bad thing.
certain content would not exist otherwise.

I sometimes watch The Hallmark Channel at night. They run shows like "The Golden Girls", "Cheers", "Frasier", "I Love Lucy", etc. all night long.

Yes, I like TCM. I'm not always crazy about all the old movies they show, but they're pretty much the only non-premium channel that shows movies, uncut, unedited and in their entirety. Although I prefer Robert Osborne doing the intros & outros to Ben Mankiewicz. Is Osborne still doing them? Because I haven't seen him in a while.
That's one of the best things about TCM, a little trivia before & after the movie. It's a nice touch that makes it seem like the network is dedicated to the art form.

I think Robert Osborne has had some health problems in the last few years. I see him once in a while, but it seems to be mostly Ben Mankiewicz hosting recently.

Today's gripe: "On Demand" (and what they've done to it).

I really liked On-Demand when I discovered it. I used it much like folks here have said they use their TiVo or DVR's - I could watch recorded shows or movies, pause or stop them when I like, resume them and (most importantly for TV shows) Fast Forward over the commercials.

But NOWWW..... here's what they're doing... they're disabling the FF on a lot of networks & TV shows.

This, I find, is even worse than watching regular TV, because with regular TV, I can at least channel surf during commercials, go check the news, check the weather channel, look at the guide, etc. I can't do any of that with On-Demand with FF disabled. So you HAVE to sit through the commercials (or leave the room until they're over).

Last week I missed Fear the Walking Dead (yeah, I know, I didn't want to get into it, but I started watching, etc., etc.) so I figured I'd catch up with the On-Demand version of that episode. I found it, put it on, and text came up saying "Fast Forwarding MAY be disabled during this program." So I hit the FF button to see... Luckily, it starts fast forwarding. Good for me, right?

Good for me, wrong! Little did I know... as soon as it got to a commercial, I could not fast forward any more! It let me FF any part of the show, but NONE of the commercials.

Everyday it seems like more and more head games (and every quarter the cable companies raise the prices as they increase the commercials & pop-up ads while decreasing ease of access & programming by running info-mercials all night).

I usually just DVR whatever I want to watch, so I rarely use On-Demand, but one of the nice things that I've found with On-Demand is that when a TV show is pre-empted for some reason, it usually shows up in the On-Demand section anyway if I look for it quick enough. (It's usually there for a few hours before they realize that it didn't air and they remove it.)

I don't understand the complaint. TV shows are essentially free. If they didn't have/do these things, there would either be a) fewer of them or b) lower budgets for them. If you removed the ads (or the disabling of FF on On Demand, or whatever else), you wouldn't just have the same shows anyway.

They do these things as a response to a vastly different media landscape: DVRs that made ads less noticeable, streaming, and lots of other things. There's nothing unfair or unreasonable about any of it, and I suspect the only reason anyone would think so is simply that they got used to things the other way, and implicitly decided that that should be the baseline.

First, is your comment directed just at the On-Demand issues, or all the issues mentioned?

Second: "TV shows are essentially free" Want to see my cable bill?

Third: Do you think that channels dedicated to a specific genre running info-mercials all night is fair to people on different schedules who pay for the exact same channels as everyone else? But who cannot watch what those channels allegedly offer because those channels will not run the programs they specialize in during late-night, but instead run info-mercials?

calm down

Um... okay?
I like "calm".

All the issues. All of the things you're annoyed by enable a wider variety of and/or higher budgets for those shows.

Your complaints extend to network shows as well, but if you want to exclude those, the same economic tradeoffs referenced above would apply.

Of course it's fair, and you must think so too, or else you wouldn't pay for it. And if they didn't do that, your cable bill would be higher.

Regardless, DVR costs very little these days, and easily fixes the problem of scheduling.

The thing that gets on my nerves with modern TV shows is you have to watch all the episodes in a row to get anything out of them. With the exception of maybe Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, most shows these days don't have re-watchable stand alone episodes. The X-files, Star Trek, Red Dwarf...bring back TV shows with well written individual episodes.

I understand everything you're saying. And I guess you're making the point that, unlike old TV broadcasting which was free to the public and paid for by sponsors, modern TV requires funds from both sponsors AND viewers to supply the modern level of TV: (hundreds of channels, shows with advanced special effects, etc.) I'd add in the quality of programming but, although there is some out there, it is overshadowed by all the Reality TV and other garbage that far outnumbers programming of quality.

I take a bit of exception to the idea that if channels didn't run infomercials all night and put endless pop-ups over top the programs, then my cable bill would be higher - that's because my cable bill IS higher every few months DESPITE the excessive marketing. I don't see any decrease in disruptive advertising every time they raise the bill. Seems if anything was "fair" you would see some resulting balancing going on - like after every price increase you'd see less channels showing nothing but info-mercials after 2:00 am, but instead you only see more.

Personally, I can't afford cable AND a DVR (since I can't even afford the cable anymore). But, correct me if I'm wrong, even a DVR will not do anything about the pop-up adds that run on top of programs, will they?
I ask because just recently I watched something with lots of captions and information in text form that was part of the show - it was made virtually unwatchable by the pop-up ads that covered up the captions every few minutes - no point in even putting a show like that on the air in this TV environment.

In the end, I don't think a lot of the practices I've observed or the evolution of abuses are fair. So I'm seriously considering either going back to the bottom tier at the next price increase or discontinuing TV altogether.