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Is TV going down the toilet?
77lolmac77
Member UncommonPosts: 492
Can someone explain to me the fascination people have with shows on tv? Every show I watch on there, whether it's a drama, comedy, action show is just absolute garbage. Studio audiences laugh at literally anything, and the plots are so predictable it's not even exciting to wonder about the next episode. And when something unpredictable happens it usually makes no logical sense and is just a way for writers to continue their horrible story.
The only shows I watch now are tosh.0, South Park, and Sportscenter. Even Family Guy is dumbed down now, just a bunch of dragged out scenes that waste time (Conway Twitty wth?) And of those three shows I listed, only South Park has a plot to episodes.
You could draw a comparison to MMO's in a way. The people making the shows (or even more importantly, financing them) don't want to make anything unique because it might hurt their return on investment. It's easier to just make another mindless rip-off that has no entertaining qualities than try to be innovative.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic and if you enjoy watching shows on TV, hey, do your thing. I'm just trying to figure out how shows like Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Workaholics, Terra Nova (this one is especially bad), Jersey Shore, etc, even become popular in the first place.
What do you guys think about the current state of Television?
Comments
I turned my TV off 10 years ago. Last year when the Cowboys were hosting the Super Bowl for a couple of teams that actually could play. I finally went out and bought a digital to analog signal convertor for my TV antenna so I could watch the game.
I still didn't watch the game. My TV is still off.
My house was new when I bought it in the late '80s. I told them to not bother running a Cable TV cable to my house. That was the best $30.00 I ever saved.
You'd be surprised at how difficult it is to be in a studio audience, most of the time they have this dude working the crowd that does his best to clown it up for some forced laughter after every joke. Not to mention how hard it is for the actual audience members to keep laughing at things with the same intensity after numerous takes. Watching both sides work, you really get the sense of how laborious producing live laugh tracks really is, and how that poor little bastard running up and down the aisles really earns his pay at the end of the day.
Network television is largely a loss anymore though, although sometimes they'll have a good show here and there. Most of the time, the only things that are worth watching pop up in the Discovery/History Channel/Travel Channel range of things. On the off chance that it isn't a repeat, or something related to ghosts or the paranormal.
Well while i'm not a huge tv-series fan overall it's not that bad except for one genre... reality tv... Please kill it with fire. There is nothing as stupid and unentertaining as Reality TV. I know people are stupid/boring/pathetic , i don't need TV to remind me of it.
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
Also how does anyone watch that show Ghost Hunters? All they do is walk around in nightvision and ask if anyone's there. Yeah, that's what I want to spend 30 minutes of my life watching
I hardly turn on my TV except to either watch football, local news, or channel surf. I don't watch any sitcoms. I also stopped watching new CSI a few seasons ago and Law & Order many seasons before it finally died off. It's pretty much either reruns or Discovery/History/Travel/Animal Planet channels for me.
I also have a fairly extensive library of DvD's of past TV series that I very much enjoyed that I watch frequently.
Ghost Hunters is crap. They are so fake that its not even funny.
I stopped watching them easily four years ago. Especially after reading on their own forums of people actively debunking the Ghost Hunters episodes. Ghost Hunter's see a shadow in the shape of a female's head on their camera and claim its paranormal. Debunkers prove that its the outline of the statue that was quickly taped in the walkthrough earlier in the episode. They go to someplace that they hear is haunted... yet the debunkers point out that if they had just did a quick 3 minute google search they would've found out that the place was a fake and even have blueprints of where all the "ghost" pranks are at in the building.
That show is full of crap like that. That's why I stopped watching it even though I do believe that there is some forms of paranormal activity that can be considered ghosts.
I think I'm averaging out at 10 minutes per week of tv. Most of that time is spent either looking at traffic in the morning before I go to work, or weather right after traffic.
Once in a while my friends will go on about how this show or that show are really good and I should check them out, so I get on the internet and just check out the first 2-3 episodes and usually by then I realize that it's not really my thing and move on with my life.
What I find strange is how a lot of the people that watch shows nowadays start making it part of their identity. Like one of my buddies will go on and on about "How I Met Your Mother" and starts quoting it and using all the manerisms of the main character.... it's quite odd. It's great that you like something and all but you don't have to try and imitate tv in real life... which is kind of ironic since there's reality tv that's trying to immitate real life...
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
"Reality" TV, prime time soap operas, and amateur hour contests were why I shut the TV off 10 years ago.
That, and every time I saw a Tom & Jerry cartoon it kept getting shorter and shorter and shorter because they were afraid children would be corrupted by the violence.
The newest Fake show is "Finding Bigfoot".These guys are thieves pure and simple of people who can't reason
I watch a lot of TV shows (most of them are mid-season right now). Although I do watch them on a TV, I don't watch TV programming, and I don't use web-based services. I watch them "on demand" (whatever, whenever I demand) without commercials.
I stopped flipping through channels to watch random TV shows a long time ago. One channel after the next became too heavily commercialized.
I'm not talking about the fact that TV shows are shorter nowadays so the networks can sell more advertisement slots. I'm not talking about the fact that commercials are louder than the shows. These agitations, and many other problems, are caused by the heavy-handed advertisement tactics in the commercialization of network television; however, I am talking about the general meaning of the term commercialism.
That is to say that they are trying to maximize profits any way they can, not just through advertising. I dread reality TV shows, and I was there when MTV started playing that crap instead of music videos. I can't stand reality TV shows because I know they are cheap to produce. Reality TV is the rudimentary paradigm of production that provides excellent profitability compared to the costs of creative processes. They surround cameramen and boom operators around a bunch of idiots and normal joes to make uninteresting productions, and I have no clue how they garner the ratings to stay on the air.
Look at the History Channel. It airs reality TV based on contemporary lifestyles (e.g. Pawn Stars, Iceroad Truckers), and it has shows that involve a bunch of credulous eccentrics speculating about all sorts of pseudohistory and pseudoscience. I miss the old History Channel programming that used to strive to be accurate. But I guess that kind of programming doesn't bring in lots of viewers.
It is similar to MMORPGs...
The FCC just passed a ruling about that a few days ago telling programmers to knock it off with the loud commercials, and within like a day and a half I noticed that all the commercials on my UVerse feed were at an equal or lower sound level than the program itself. Kind of surprised me that they'd act on that so quickly.
I'm surprised advertisers responded at all considering most channels are no longer broadcast.
On the TV thing, just look a bit better. AMC has a couple good series, and ummm... there are some good reality TV shows like Top Shot and Top Gear. Most series get stale after a couple years so its best to end them after a couple seasons instead of dragging it out.
You have to get either The Miliatry channel or History International(H2) if you want actual history related shows
Yes, the Military channel is very good. I like all the WW2 ones.
I started watching Kitchen Nightmares.....Great show.
Also the hoarding one is pretty good. Kinda grosses you out, well Kitchen Nitghtmares does too sometimes.
Gordan Ramsey in Kitchen Nightmares has me rolling on the floor sometimes. He has such a potty mouth. I wish I could actually hear all the words he says, but they bleep them out.
Oh, what's the name of the show where this guy tries all this weird food from around the world? I bet he has some hellacious dumps at the end of the day...LOL
I don't own a TV anymore either. But I seemed to be surrounded by them. And like above posters stated, it's to watch the weather/news/traffic, and maybe sometimes sports. I get all I need through the PC. I can watch anime and other shows I care about via net. I don't miss all the annoying commercials too...
btw, did you happen to see the Big Bang Theory episode where the make fun of mmo's, that one gave me a few lols.
The only reason I use a TV is for console gaming. Other than that I'll watch my shows online. Yes, I do watch some shows on food channel, travel channel, a&e, but honestly i won't mind if i didn't have a tv. Shows like the simpsons are just waiting to die, they have the worst content. I use to love the simpsons but I honestly believe their time is over.
One show i do enjoy is storage wars or pawn stars. I just find it fascinating what they find. Although it maybe fake, it's okay cause they have interested items that I may have never seen before.
I honestly don't think it's that much different than 10 years ago.
"Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security." -Norman Vincent Peale
Well TV did change a lot. Heck the amount of cooking shows we have here nowadays is really getting tiring. And it seems reality TV is becoming worse every year. (hard to believe considering it has always been horrible)
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
only shows i watch:
TNA iMPACT (MAD wrestling)
The Simpsons
(Just Funny)
Family Guy
(Again, Just Fun)
Young Dracula (Tense)
The rest just suck
Some comedians start of the show with "Oh, Sh*t."
|--Kamran--|
Ah yes, wrastlin'. Probably the one thing that single handedly did the most damage to the SciFi network.
Can't say I've ever seen anyone over the age of twelve that watched that shit.
btw dont waste money and buy a big flatscreen built in wall tv like me
all the programs SUCK
its probs called Jamie'S great britain!
The irony is that some of the shows are getting so bad that they're actually extremely entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons.
The History Channel's "Ancient Aliens" is one of the funniest shows on TV right now, without ever intending to be. One particular "expert" that's a regular on the show always has me cracking up whenever he opens his mouth, and yet, everything he says is meant to be serious.
That show is hilarious, if not outright insulting to the ancestors of the natives in the areas that they profile. Ever notice how the craziness of the hairdo seems to correlate directly to the outlandishness of the theory proposed by the experts they bring out?
Is TV going down the toilet?
No, that's where TV comes from!