Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich for July 10, 2010

It’s only an upgrade to a certain point.

it might be good for sports. Or movies. Television itself hasn’t had much to offer for about 40 years. But people keep buying it. What does that say about the average consumer?

TV is both better and worse now than it’s ever been. Cable dramas and comedies can offer more challenging material than the networks have ever been allowed to present, and they can survive with much smaller audiences than would be allowable on the networks. But “niche” programming also means that many shows can be targeted directly to the wider pool of passive, undemanding morons…

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of excellent movies that could be shown on tv channels, but the same ones are shown over and over, from one station to the next. Too bad! The rest is mostly garbage.

cdward, you haven’t been paying close enough attention. There are still between 1 and 3 series that are worth watching every single season, you just have to sift through a lot of bleeep to find them. Why, just within the last 10 years, we’ve had Firefly and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and we currently have The Big Bang Theory… Not to mention the occasional special or miniseries from such luminaries as Charles Kuralt and Stephen Hawking.

Jolly1995, try channels like Sundance and IFC, or if you want older Hollywood-type films try Turner Classic Movies or American Movie Classics. HBO and Showtime are specifically designed to provide home access to the recent blockbusters…

So much bandwidth, so little content.