BeigeJournal

Back when I was a lad, in the nineteen-eighties, TV listings would be marked (R) in those cases when the show was a rerun. Nowadays, to save ink, I suppose, rather than marking reruns, new episodes are marked (N). My impression is that this is less a matter of a lack of new programs than a much faster growth in the number of channels (around 10 back in my youth, but well over 100 now) than in the amount of programming to fill them.

The Discovery Channel group comes to mind. It used to be just the Discovery Channel and TLC. Now it seems they have Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Health, Travel, Times, Kids, BBC America, Science, Home and Leisure, Wings, Español, HD theater, and FitTV. With fourteen channels, there’s gonna be some reruns. I suppose it is useful to have specialized channels. If they had only one channel, there would probably almost always be something new on, but not necessarily something you want to see. With fourteen channels, if you are in the mood for an aviation rerun, well, they have a channel for that. How about some more specialized channels?

• Cute Fuzzy Animal Planet
• Big Sharp Teeth Animal Planet
• Discovery Bull Crap Channel (for Atlantis “documentaries” and the like)
• Discovery Naked Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Naked-but-with-digital-fuzz Rainforest Tribe Documentaries
• Discovery Motorcycles
• Discovery Building Wacky Machines Out Of Junk Channel