By Lisa de Moraes
Friday, October 30, 2009
Starting Friday, the Weather Channel will interrupt its coverage of whatever tsunami, blizzard, hurricane or tornado is making life a perfect hell for folks in some neck of the world to bring you . . . an old movie.
And in January, GSN will divert its unending stream of vintage and new game shows to bring you the newest iteration of the Carnie Wilson Is Trying to Lose Weight Again reality series.
It's the latest round of highly targeted niche networks looking to beef up -- or young up -- their audience by veering off point. It seems to be a rite of passage played out over and over again.
Remember when the letters TLC stood for The Learning Channel and the network brought you educational and informational programming as opposed to Jon and Kate's divorce-o-rama? Remember when A&E stood for Arts & Entertainment and competed with PBS for sumptuous British-made crunchy-gravel period dramas like "Vanity Fair" and "Horatio Hornblower"? Or when AMC stood for American Movie Classics and aired movies that were actually "classic" and not cut up with commercial breaks? When Syfy was Sci Fi? When MTV meant Music Television and was the destination for medicated viewing of rock videos? Good times.
Sadly, those networks' original identities are long gone and they've become part of the Great Cable Gobbledygook, bringing us a steady stream of inexpensive reality series, reruns of broadcast TV series, old flicks, more reality series, an original scripted program or two, and did we mention reality series?
