The History Channel - What happened?

[JaceArveduin]

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

I'm 90% sure Deadliest Catch came first.

 

[Berny Marcus]

It's a disgrace, 75 percent of TV is now reality shows. It's sad to see History channel surrender it's titular programming, in the pursuit of an worthless attempt at ratings. It shouldn't be called History anymore, the title is now a brand name, instead of actual shows based on history.

Hell I have a good solution to this problem, History should instead make scripted television programming based on periods of history, that would be awesome.

Not garbage like Larry the Cable guy.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

My one and only concern is that they'll eventually run out of dangerous or controversial jobs, or of corners of the world that have a sufficiently high idiots-per-square-foot ratio to populate a Reality TV show's cast. Then what?

"Tune in at 7, for another riveting episode of Canadian Copy Editors! In the next episode, John wrestles with OpenOffice's sudden refusal to generate page note numbers! See Sarah's insane blowout, when the printer gets jammed!"

 

[Dirge Eterna]

For me the new history channel is the Military Channel since it has a lot of interesting things about wars as its name implies but also other stuff fro time to time when they aren't showing World War II in Colour for the tenth time that day. As for the History Channel I watch it from time to time if old Pawn Stars or American Pickers are on since those shows actually do show some interesting history with the items they feature inbetween the forced reality skits that I feel have taken up way too much of the latter seasons.

I love the military channel and I am scared for it as well. With shows about the bible ,the Mafia and America Fact or fiction it seems as though they are dipping their toes into the same BS as other networks. Make new Future Weapons and shows about the military world wide. I love watching shows about the US and our tech but other countries have some awesome stuff too!

 

[Demongeneral109]

Network decay.
To be fair though, before they started this new campaign, the History Channels alias was 'The Hitler Channel', and for good reason.
They didn't need to turn into what it is now, but they sure as hell needed to realize history is more than WWII.

In their defense, it was the hitler and stalin channel, not just hitler

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I think The History Channel (or rather, the spirit of The History Channel) has moved on to channels like The Science Channel, Smithsonian Channel and...I think there's a third, fourth and, probably fifth...The History Channel itself however has kinda gone to Hell...History 2 might still be watchable I think...

That bolded part? That's what happened to the History channel. See, before the Smithsonian channel existed, most of the programming on the History channel was documentaries produced by the Smithsonian institute. When they spun off their own channel and took their documentaries with them, the History channel effectively lost their own back catalog and most of the new material they would have otherwise gotten in the future. The rest of it came along for the same reason reality shows have taken over all the other channels -- they're cheap to produce, and if it's all that's on on any channel, you just have to be slightly better than the other crap to stand out, as opposed to needing to actually be good. Which is daytime TV in a nutshell.

I do enjoy Pawn Stars, though, if for no other reason than to see the cool old junk that keeps winding up in the shop. Same reason I'll watch American Pickers if there's nothing else on: at least they talk about history. And it's mostly the history of how ordinary, unimportant people used to live, which is something that tends to get left out of the history books, with their focus on important people doing important things.

 

[aPod]

The History Channel is living proof that Idiocracy is not satire but a documentary of a prophecy.

I used to love that channel, i could never get enough of it even as a wee 12 year old boy. I'd almost always choose to watch some interesting documentary over cartoons, and I loved it.

Oh well, I don't even know why I have cable anymore.