"norml" wrote in message
...
The media corporations keep telling us that more channels mean catering to
niche audiences. But cable and satellite TV have mostly given us multiple
channels feeding us programs from the same tired library of action movies
and off-network reruns whether we pay or not.

Give up on TV. Radio is where it's at!

TV progammers have learned to cater to the unimaginative. Did much of the
"Leave it to Beaver"'s audience consider the possibility that Ward and June
had taken Eddie Haskell under wing because Eddie's dad (the guy who was
continually sleeping late or clobbering Eddie) was an abusive alcoholic?
That's just one of the subtleies of that show, brilliantly written about a
boy who was becoming dimly aware of the of the world and who idealized his
parents. Did people think June really got dressed up to do housework? Talk
about TV's pearls before swine.

Had the show been written twenty years later, a "very special" Beaver would
have had the Cleavers doing an intervention on Haskell Sr. and fixing him in
half an hour. Well, that one might have had to have been a two parter, but
I'm sure they could have made Fred Rutherford less of a pompous ass in only
one episode. Such was the understated reality of TV as the color era
matured.

Should 3-D TV ever be developed, I'm sure complete morons will be the most
appreciative.



Shopping channels and infomercials take up the rest of the time and space.

The stock corporation business model applied to media is the problem.


In previous times in our economic history, there weren't enough skilled
factory workers. Now we have the New Economy, and perhaps these now surplus
workers could be retrained to productively program all those stupid
repetitious TV channels. I've seen the schedules. Hardly any apocolyptic
cold war dramas, cape canaveral monsters, flesh eaters and the like. Months
can go between two-headed transplant movies. Well, I know what I'd put on
my cable channel. But, then again, we all should get out and be more
active. Or at least watch one of the fifty excercise equipment
informertials running an any one time.

Frank Dresser