Why is most TV so lame?

I would expect from the names of TV channels like Discovery, The Learning Channel and History Channel that these would be educational, documentary, engaging, informative, deep, and rich with content. Silly me. I forgot that the mandate of most TV channels is to entertain the lowest common denominator, not to educate or engage.

With shows like “Freaky Eaters” and “Extreme Couponing”, the “Learning” Channel is the bottom feeder in the TV IQ pond. Of the 30 bathetic shows in its current lineup, four are about baking with a fifth on cooking, five are about weddings, two are about tattoos, two are about the daily lives of short people, there’s one on “freaky’ eating habits, another on “strange” addictions, a show on the daily lives of polygamists, a show on coupons and bargain shopping (“Extreme Couponing” which turns a perfectly good and functional noun into a flaccid and silly verb), and others of similarly pointless and drearily shallow content.

A whole series dedicated to a family with 19 kids? Why not a whole series dedicated to the benefits of contraception in an increasingly resource-challenged world? But that would be educational and the “Learning” Channel stays as far from educational content as possible. You will learn more from reading a single stop sign than from any of the shows this network offers.

Swimming only slightly above TLC at the bottom of TV’s intellectual pond is the “Discovery” Channel, supposedly a channel about science and technology. That is, if you you think ghosts, goblins, haunted houses, UFOs and self-described “psychics” (aka scam artists) have anything to do with science. If you do, then you’re probably a creationist and should stop reading any further because I will likely annoy you and challenge your petty, superstitious mind.

The “Discovery” Chanel’s lineup is equally impotent as far as educational, insightful or even useful content goes. Shows like Junk Raider, Cash Cab, Auction Kings, Licence to Drill, Canada’s Worst Driver and biker shows lead the low calibre content this channel offers. These shows demean the viewer by suggesting we’re not important enough for producers to craft something better for our viewing.

To add insult to injury, The “Discovery” channel offers a slew of pseudoscience and foolish shows about ghosts, goblins, hauntings, spirits and other claptrap. Paranormal? Parapsychology? Ghost hunting? Self-described psychics? Absolutely the worst nonsense a channel allegedly dedicated to facts or science could broadcast. Why not weekly shows about phrenology? Astrology? Creationism? Angels? I suspect with such shows they have only begun to plumb the depths where intelligent, adult programming is but a mere whisper of a hope.

On one of their paranormal pages, Discovery claims, “Ouija boards have been used to communicate with the dead since the end of the 19th Century. ” Huh? Communicating with the dead stated as a fact? Sure, that’ll happen when the dead have active Facebook pages (around the same time the “Rapture” happens). Communicating with dead people is about as likely as communicating with Harry Potter through your Kindle. Very depressing that this sort of superstitious, puerile nonsense is encouraged by anyone in the 21st century, let alone a channel that purports to be about science. Discovery Channel is a prime example of the dumbing down of our society.

Yes, Discovery has a science show: Daily Planet, which was once rather good when Jay Ingram was co-host, but Ziya Tong is an airhead who reduces science to bouncy cuteness and fake jocularity. Science reduced to the level of a 10-year-old is not real science. It’s a mightily light counterweight to the considerable pseudoscience they broadcast.

The idea that you can take a weak premise that could barely withstand a sound byte and turn it into a weekly series through bad production seems to have hit numerous networks simultaneously. We now suffer endless “reality” shows that give us insight about what their untalented amateur actors had for breakfast or their choice of footwear-du-jour. Enthralling, mesmerizing stuff, if your life is so completely useless that vacuous TV is the only thing between you and suicide.

Discovery and TLC have far too many of these weak “reality” TV shows that depend on bad camera work, poor acting, worse directing, amateur and wooden dialogue and sloppy editing to make it seem like they’re unscripted video slices of real life. Only the very gullible believe this: anyone with an IQ higher than his or her shoe size is aware they’re as phoney as a government promise to respect your pension.

And why do actors on so many “reality” shows depend on embarrassing or insulting each other as their main way of getting any attention? Why would anyone want to waste time watching actors being uncivil to one another?

The third of this triad of sorry channels is History. How much “history” is really being presented in such mediocre shows as Pawn Kings? What’s In a Name (a restaurant show)? Canadian Pickers (the token tip of the hat to Canadian content by cloning the already pointless and drearily repetitive American Picker series). How about Hairy Bikers? The name alone just reeks of history, doesn’t it? Likes its stars, I suspect. Beast Legends – the zoological equivalent to paranormal claptrap. Outlaw Bikers – nothing like glorifying criminals on national TV.

To be fair, History Channel does live up to its name in several of its shows, although many of their documentaries seem aimed at 8-year-olds rather than adults, with repetitive segments that break big concepts into tiny bits so the average TV viewer can digest them, elementary-school vocabularies and flashy graphics that substitute for real content. It’s not the topic of these shows that annoys me, but rather the production and editing that makes them suitable for children of all ages, but not adults.

History Channel also has a lot of movies. Fiction. It doesn’t matter how good Saving Private Ryan is, or whether it is “based on” a true story, it is FICTION, not history. It belongs on a movie channel, not sloughed off on the public as “history.” Many of their movies make no pretense to anything more than mere entertainment. Surely there’s something better and more intelligent to show, even something historical in nature? Why not slot in a BBC docu-drama instead? Or would that be too intellectual for the average History Channel viewer?

Runners up for idiotic shows, channels that insult your intelligence or offer vapid superstition up as fact are, sadly, numerous. And these are just the so-called documentary channels. Animal Planet has shows about garbage like bigfoot, animal “hauntings” and hillbilly hand-fishing. The Military Channel ruins a rather good lineup with a moronic show on Nazis and UFOs (UFOs are in the same imaginary bestiary as ghosts, angels, psychics and bigfoot: unadulterated hokum. They don’t exist. period. If you actually believe in this crap, the TV networks have won: you’ve been successfully dumbed-down.)

Don’t even get me started on the too-numerous-to-mention coma-inducing shows on Discovery’s Fitness and Health channel or the drearily repetitive lineup we see on the Food Network (however, no ghosts or psychics, at least as far as I can tell).

The Biography Channel offers mind-numbing shows about “ghost” hunters, “psychic” kids and celebrity ghost stories. Travel and Escape TV – among its too-numerous cooking and kitchen shows – has the supercilious Ghost Adventure show where “Fearless ghost hunters investigate the scariest, most notoriously haunted places in the world…” It’s easy to be fearless when you’re confronted with something that doesn’t exist. I’m pretty fearless about entering Mordor, myself, which is as real as any ghost. But all those spooky camera effects surely have the dumbed-down couch potatoes quaking.

Along this theme are such annoyingly stupid shows as Medium, Most Haunted, Ghost Whisperer, Paranormal State, Ghost Hunters, A Haunting and others (A Haunting is described as “a chills-filled series, chronicling the terrifying true stories of the paranormal…” True stories about something that doesn’t exist? It’s a baldfaced lie.) I’m okay with dramas that don’t pretend to be nonfiction – ghost hunters and “psychics” comfortably belong in the same fictional category as vampires, werewolves, dragons, angels, Wily Coyote and Harry Potter. I rebel when such superstition and pseudoscience are passed off as “fact.” It discredits the entire channel and I refuse to partake in anything they offer.

TV like this is lame because we, the viewers, don’t protest more against the garbage, the claptrap, the intelligence-reducing and the superstitious nonsense that is being foisted upon us by unscrupulous TV producers and directors. I plan to drop my cable back to the basic level this week in protest of this garbage. I’ll still be able to get TVO and PBS which offer reasonable smart programming.