The History Channel - What happened?

[Soviet Heavy]

Not the History Channel for me, but Discovery Wings? What happened to it? It got turned into The Military Channel, complete with a propaganda blast. That's nice, taking a channel dedicated to the history of human flight (not just military aircraft) and turning it into a "LOOK AT THIS AWESOME SHIT YVAN EHT NIOJ"

But as for the History Channel itself, you need only look at the Dinosaur shows. In 1999, we got the greatest Dinosaur Documentary ever filmed: Walking With Dinosaurs.

On the Modern History Channel, we got a million derivatives and at least one "who would win in a fight against T-Rex?" shows. And all of them have worse CGI than a show that came out 14 years ago.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

I miss it when their big H logo stood for Hitler.

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

Megalodon fiasco, what?

Like others have said, it was a mock-umentary with cgi and a very brief disclaimer.

Pawn Stars started all of this

It goes back farther than that, at least back to the Real World. Maybe farther.

 

[frizzlebyte]

What happened?

The same thing that happened to ZDTV.

You may be wondering what the flying squirrel I'm talking about, so let me clue you in:

Once upon a time there was a television channel called ZDTV, that ran programming on all things technology. It featured luminaries such as Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak, who waxed informative on all things TECH, and were arguably instrumental in turning technology into something the average user enjoyed, and could understand.

The channel was eventually renamed TechTV, and with this change came the Golden Age of television-based technology journalism.

In 2004, the Powers That Be at Comcast announced a merger between their own G4TV (TV for Gamers), and TechTV. Technology show enthusiasts still remember where they were when they heard the news, so great was the terror swelling upon the horizon.

Though assurances were made that TechTV and G4TV would live together on the same channel in perfect harmony, 'twas but a promise made through lying teeth. Slowly, but surely, the programming that once had been the crown jewels of TechTV faded into the aether, and the likes of Morgan Webb, Adam Sessler, Kevin Pereira, and Kristin Adams, took the helm to host programming that ensured mainstream TV tech journalism would perish from the Earth forever.

But in the end, those who decried G4TV's sins were vindicated, as the same cruel fate of TechTV was once again visited upon the head of G4TV, with the announcement that Esquire Television would put out of her misery the languishing remains of a once proud, if misguided, G4TV, which had long been afflicted by pernicious reruns of Cheaters and COPS.

But, seizing upon the opportunity to hunt down weaker, more fabulous prey, Esquire Television turned its for-the-straight-guy queer-eye to the Style Network, consuming its mascara-encrusted corpse instead, leaving G4TV to wait, withering in the executioner's dungeon, praying for that sweet release from this mortal coil that can only come from the embrace of Death's pale, skeletal arms.

EDIT: TL;DR: It's the ratings, man.

 

[Abomination]

On the bright side "Vikings" has been a huge success and I hope it inspires them to create more like it.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Maybe it's because they covered all the exciting and good stuff already and all they are left with is the afore posted tripe?

 

[Yopaz]

It's expensive to run a network and History Channel have used to be running old documentaries the they have the rights to and label them new. The profit from buying and running historical documentaries doesn't offer enough profits to be sustainable so they start showing something with low cost and decent popularity. Which sadly is reality TV and we end up getting more of that than anything that relates to history.

 

[endplanets]

Yea, the History Channel used to be something I would watch religiously every day as a kid. I didn't notice it at first but the channel died a slow death. If I remember correctly it was Monster Hunter and UFO Stories (or something similar) starting it off. I remember from brief viewings that UFO Stories focused on old sightings. I guess that those shows started the decline.
Over time I remember more and more semi-historical crap like The Nostrodoumous Effect, Life After People and The Bible Code appearing. You don't really need to do research when you can just make shit up. You will notice that these shows have nothing to do with History and in fact, are the literal opposite of history.

Apparently History Channel was the one who started the whole 2012 ending the world nonsense.
Supposedly it was The Deadliest Catch which triggered a deeper decline. Watching rednecks run around in circles apparently brings in the big bucks at a low cost. So the History Channel made Ice Road Truckers (redneck truckers), Mountain Men (redneck lumberjacks), We?re The Fugawis (rednecks on motorcycles) and Swamp People (rednecks um... being rednecks). The most baffling is IRT: Deadliest Roads. Its ICE ROAD truckers without the ice road.

When I was little I was considered a nerd for watching the History Channel. Now, I don't tell people I used to watch it because for fear of being mocked.

http://www.cracked.com/funny-98-2012/

 

[Fox12]

The original CEO left, and they replaced him with a reality T.V. producer. He immediately changed the programming to shows like Pawn Stars. All the original history related material was scrapt, as it was decided that history related material wasn't lucrative enough to be on... the history channel. The ratings are currently higher than they have EVER been before so... yeah. It's not changing back.

 

[Stryc9]

Pawn Stars started all of this

Nope. It just piled on. What really started this is that fucking writers strike back in the mid 2000's. The networks needed something to fill the holes in the lineups and reality shows are super cheap to produce and don't require writers. Also, people lap that shit up like a cat at a milk dish, especially when there's some sort of drama to get hooked on.

I'm guilty of it too, I like to watch Pawn Stars once in a while. Also Cutthroat Kitchen on the Food Network is fucking hilarious. However, a lot of the shit on History these days is total garbage that has fuck all to do with history. For a while around the time garbage like Ancient Aliens and some of the other conspiracy laden trash came on they were running a lot of Scientology adverts as well so make of that what you will.

 

[rcs619]

When I was younger, I loved TV shows about history. The world wars, ancienty history, and anything in between was something I had a great passion for. So, naturally, the History channel was one of my most frequent sources for my favourite shows. As I got older however, I started to drift away from such shows and pretty much abandoned the channel.

I recently started to rekindle my interest in history and as such decided to go back and visit the old channel once more.

And what did I find?

Ice road truckers. Storage wars. Ax men. Deadliest roads. And a multitude of other shows that have virtually nothing to do with history.

What happened? This was supposed to be a channel devoted to talking about the past, and yet recently it seems to have been taken over by shows that don't have any place anywhere near the word "history".

What are you views on this?

The issue is the competition, I think. Discovery Communications owns, well, pretty much all the Discovery Channels, TLC, Animal Planet and others. Starting a few years ago, they began to make a focused effort across their channels to appeal to a wider audience. The Discovery Channel started doing shows about building motorcycles and hot-rods, and doing fake "speculative" documentaries about dragons, mermaids and megaladons. TLC did a bunch of random crap that culminated in unleashing Honey Boo-Boo on the world, and Animal Planet became more about things like the Dog Whisperer than actual shows educating people about wildlife.

And it worked. I believe the second part of the fake Mermaids documentary was one of the most-watched things they've ever had. The fake documentary about how Megaladons might still exist (in that fictional scenario) was the most watched thing on shark week ever.

I think the History Channel is just trying to compete. Discovery, TLC and Animal Planet are all doing reality television, so they start doing things like Pawn Stars, Swamp People and... err... Cajun Pawn Stars. And blue-collar shows about Ice Road Trucking, and giving Larry the Cable Guy his own show. And they jumped onto the fake-science bandwagon in full force with shows about Ancient Alien theories (which is interesting, if often silly, speculation) and Cryptozoology. They're trying to attract some of the blue-collar, reality TV and crazy conspiracy-nut crowds too.

But, it's nothing new in the grand scheme of things, sadly. A lot of great networks have died by trying to 'broaden the appeal'. Sci-fi channel stopped showing sci-fi after putting a guy in charge that actively hated sci-fi nerds, and wanted the channel's viewership to be 'more than people living in their parents' basement'. So we got professional wrestling (blue collar), game shows about being special-effects artists or superheroes (reality TV) and shows about UFO sightings and alien abductions (crazy conspiracy-nuts). It's really a very similar pattern.

Let's all have a moment of silence for those shows we lost...
Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge
Mythbusters (They barely even show it any more it seems like)
The Universe
Modern Marvels
Wild Discovery
Dirty Jobs (Hey! It was actually pretty informative)
All those shows about Hitler and/or World War II

And many more...

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

Let's all have a moment of silence for those shows we lost...
Junkyard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge
Mythbusters (They barely even show it any more it seems like)
The Universe
Modern Marvels
Wild Discovery
Dirty Jobs (Hey! It was actually pretty informative)
All those shows about Hitler and/or World War II

And many more...

The Science channel airs a lot of Mythbusters. I dunno whether there's new ones or they're all reruns, but it's on quite a bit usually in hours-long blocks.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Its just an open and shut case of Network Decay [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay].

Just remember what they were, rather than what its become.

 

[tangoprime]

Spoiler: A Brief History of The History Channel

So with that out of the way, the image is pretty accurate. I used to marathon on The History Channel in the 99-02 range. Legitimately lost entire evenings/nights going from one interesting topic to the next. As with all television networks, ratings eventually win out. And while I would spend days watching just about anything on The History Channel of 1999, most people skipped right past it the way I skipped MTV. You don't get ratings, you don't make money. You don't make money, you don't stay on the air. So they altered the format to get ratings, despite undermining the name.

That's a great image, and my viewing of the channel followed yours pretty closely. I think I gave up on it ~2003 when it became The Hitler Channel, and just recently tried to tune in again to find that it was the 2012/Aliens channel, and as soon as the 2012 thing was a bust, it went back to being reality tv about truckers, loggers, and people finding old stuff in barns and selling it.

...at least the crazy hair aliens-did-it guy spawned a good meme and led to this excellent debunking video:

Spoiler

 

[Atmos Duality]

It's not even "MTV syndrome" as some have mentioned; if you want the original offenders in networks betraying their intended purpose for better Nielsen Ratings it was the major news networks.

Same principle applies though, whatever you prefer to call it.
Pandering to the fucking morons of the world is more profitable than providing anything of use, interest or value.

 

[Pseudonym2]

The entire network was sold to a different company and replaced with a different CEO. I think there might have some changes in tax laws too but I don't feel like looking it up right now.

 

[ISearchForTraps]

Three words: Ice Road Truckers. Or is it Deadliest Catch? Basically the first 'Documentary' based on a dangerous or racy job.

 

[Mestraal]

I always really enjoy how they justify all the crap reality stuff they show with the wonderful line 'History: Made every day' (or something to that effect)