![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Et tu, SyFy?
Sep. 2nd, 2009 12:09 amOnce upon a time, back in the infancy of cable television, there was a revolutionary idea for a television channel. The powers that be at one of the new cable outlets came up with an idea: "All the kids these days seem to be watching music videos. Why don't we reach this marketplace by creating a channel which shows nothing but music videos?"
And thus MTV was born, and people watched it, and it was- well, good might be an overstatement by at least an order of magnitude, but it was successful enough to spawn an MTV2 and an imitator called VH1.
Then, at some point, that changed. Maybe the demand for music television abated, or the market was saturated, or advertisers figured out that the cash open-to-buy of the target audience was pretty limited, or something, but MTV started playing programming that wasn't related to music. And with that began a long slide into oblivion.
Do bands make short-form music videos anymore? Has the music video as a media form become functionally obsolete in a televised form now in the YouTube era? Does anyone care, or actually watch them? But I digress.
MTV stopped being Music Television. Maybe it wasn't just "Beavis and Butthead" or "The Real World" or any one particular non-music introduction, but, assuming my DVR programming guide isn't completely inaccurate, what was once Music Television is now down to five or six hours of music-related programming a day, most of that between 3 or 4:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. MTV2 and VH1 fare similarly, clocking in at three to five hours a day- again, usually in those later-early morning hours. The rest of the time seems to be filled with inane faux-documentaries and 'reality' shows.
There also was a network which was called SciFi. Now, they weren't ever (to the best of my recollection, at least) 24x7 science fiction/fantasy/paranormal/horror programming, having relied upon infomercials and paid programming to fill a few hours of the day, but for the most part, aside from these blocks of dreck, they ran those genres of shows, including some original programming salted in with Stargate and X-Files reruns.
But recently, some marketing geniuses decided that SciFi wasn't a great fit anymore, and elected to rebrand the channel with the new, homophonic-yet-still-allegedly-hipper moniker 'SyFy.' Along with that, though, has come another disturbing development. At least once a week, they now show second-tier 'professional' wrestling between episodes of their new show Warehouse 13. Worse still, the wrasslin' invariably overspills its banks and runs five minutes into the hour for the second Warehouse 13.
I'm far from a fan of wrestling. Perhaps it's negative associations from my days at university, where after midnight or so on Saturday and Sunday mornings, students would stumble back from parties whether on or off-campus and the television choices in Richmond those days were professional wrestling or televangelists- each battling to be more distasteful than the other. The problem isn't automatically with the content. It's with the fact that it's painfully out-of-genre as well as being abundantly available elsewhere. That it runs up to five minutes or so into the time slot for one of the network's keystone series seems to point to an intention to establish more of a foothold. I used to know what to expect from SciFi, and where it fit. Now I wonder if it isn't going to, MTV-like, become the place for stuff which even Versus won't pick up.
And thus MTV was born, and people watched it, and it was- well, good might be an overstatement by at least an order of magnitude, but it was successful enough to spawn an MTV2 and an imitator called VH1.
Then, at some point, that changed. Maybe the demand for music television abated, or the market was saturated, or advertisers figured out that the cash open-to-buy of the target audience was pretty limited, or something, but MTV started playing programming that wasn't related to music. And with that began a long slide into oblivion.
Do bands make short-form music videos anymore? Has the music video as a media form become functionally obsolete in a televised form now in the YouTube era? Does anyone care, or actually watch them? But I digress.
MTV stopped being Music Television. Maybe it wasn't just "Beavis and Butthead" or "The Real World" or any one particular non-music introduction, but, assuming my DVR programming guide isn't completely inaccurate, what was once Music Television is now down to five or six hours of music-related programming a day, most of that between 3 or 4:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. MTV2 and VH1 fare similarly, clocking in at three to five hours a day- again, usually in those later-early morning hours. The rest of the time seems to be filled with inane faux-documentaries and 'reality' shows.
There also was a network which was called SciFi. Now, they weren't ever (to the best of my recollection, at least) 24x7 science fiction/fantasy/paranormal/horror programming, having relied upon infomercials and paid programming to fill a few hours of the day, but for the most part, aside from these blocks of dreck, they ran those genres of shows, including some original programming salted in with Stargate and X-Files reruns.
But recently, some marketing geniuses decided that SciFi wasn't a great fit anymore, and elected to rebrand the channel with the new, homophonic-yet-still-allegedly-hipper moniker 'SyFy.' Along with that, though, has come another disturbing development. At least once a week, they now show second-tier 'professional' wrestling between episodes of their new show Warehouse 13. Worse still, the wrasslin' invariably overspills its banks and runs five minutes into the hour for the second Warehouse 13.
I'm far from a fan of wrestling. Perhaps it's negative associations from my days at university, where after midnight or so on Saturday and Sunday mornings, students would stumble back from parties whether on or off-campus and the television choices in Richmond those days were professional wrestling or televangelists- each battling to be more distasteful than the other. The problem isn't automatically with the content. It's with the fact that it's painfully out-of-genre as well as being abundantly available elsewhere. That it runs up to five minutes or so into the time slot for one of the network's keystone series seems to point to an intention to establish more of a foothold. I used to know what to expect from SciFi, and where it fit. Now I wonder if it isn't going to, MTV-like, become the place for stuff which even Versus won't pick up.
