It’s now just been reported that Chris Wallace is leaving CNN to “explore podcasting”. With the recent new CNN is firing hundreds of employees after going from 13.3 million average viewers in 2016 to… 800k in 2024. Comcast is looking to ditch their dumpster fire MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Sci-Fi, and Bravo networks because they’re probably putting out the same or worse decline as cnn. Peacock, NBCs streaming service has yet to turn a profit. And the icing on the cake? “According to Forbes, there were only three cable networks in 2023 with an average audience above one million viewers, down from five the previous year and down from 19 in 2013.” They’re dying on the vine, their streaming services can’t make money, and they are too useless to even keep around as propaganda rags. With the potential death of the first AAA game publisher on the horizon (Ubisoft) we are seeing largest consequences of “get woke go broke” in our lifetimes.
Update: The Guardian is no longer posting on X, Don Lemon is leaving X, expect more to follow suit. This is just hilarious.
Edit 2: numbers reflect an average from last Wednesday to Friday. That marks a 54% decrease in the network's viewership average in the month of October (1.765 million viewers) as well as a 51% decrease in the network's year-to-date 2024 average (1.655 million viewers). Additionally, on Friday MSNBC saw 636,000 viewers and 61,000 in the demo, making it the network's lowest rated non-holiday night of the year.
Someone should tweet at Elon he should buy SyFy and rebrand it back to SciFi and make good SciFi shows and movies again. It has a good back catalogue I'd imagine so you could roll it into a dedicated SciFi series. I think this would be important because it would help inspire the younger generation with good SciFi stories that aren't fantasy based nonsense. Elon has said we need more engineers and cultural propaganda is important in the creation of them.
Turn TLC back into The Learning Channel. Make The History Channel about actual history, no more Curse of Oak Island and American Pickers. Have Discovery make any show that's not about mining gold or hunting ghosts.
I remember when TLC was about learning. What happened? Curse of Oak Island is stretched out way too much. That buried treasure story is interesting but not that much.
I think the problem was that Survivor became a smash hit for CBS in 2000, and every cable and over the air network fell over themselves to try to replicate its success with reality shows of their own. From a business perspective, it also helped that they were dirt cheap to produce and get easy short-term returns on.
Of course, they all had varying degrees of success, and a lot of cable networks that formerly had specific focuses like Speed, TLC, History Channel, MTV, etc. saw much of their audience leave once these programs started proliferating their schedules.
They came the expense of more thoughtful, albeit less Schadenfreude-like programming that people tuned into those networks to get away from, alienating their core audience and only attracting fair-weather viewers that would leave when those shows were no longer the hot trendy thing.
Which brings us to where we're at now: multiple networks with no real focus or core audience desperately trying to throw anything at the wall to see what sticks in order to just barely stay afloat. It's why MTV's schedule is little more than Ridiculousness marathons all day, and History and Discovery Channel pretty much rerun the same shows and episodes all day with very little variety.
With the legend being that 6 out of the 7 people required to die for the treasure to be found, I’ve always been a proponent of playing Russian roulette till someone loses and digging at that spot.
And turn one of the national Fox Sports networks back into the Speed Channel. Then give it the documentary, digest, news, and live event programming that made it so beloved in the Speedvision and early Speed Channel years.
I also call for MTV to become an all music genre network again, Fuse to return to a focus on alternative music, and A&E to become a real arts network again. All the other networks you mentioned should revive the focuses from their early-mid '90s heydays.
MTGA- Make Television Great Again!
Elon can't do everything. Needs to be a big cultural shift that says rich people can do cool "passion project" type stuff with their money again instead of endlessly building wells in Africa that get stripped for parts by the locals.
Paul Allen funded some passion project stuff up here (Cinerama was probably the most visible one but there were others) that his advisers almost certainly told him was a bad investment. Lo and behold, when he died the estate divested from them.
I'm still sad about the computer museum.
Not a bad idea. Also do interviews with good authors and like you said there are a ton of old sci shows or anthology series they could show along with original content
Remember when they used to do blocks of different shows during the weekdays?
Absolutely. I first learned about Night Gallery from the Sci-Fi channel. Along with others like Starman and the original Battlestar. I will say the Battlestar reboot was good
I stopped watching the reboot when they got to the very special episode about abortion.
Yeah, BSG was good but I can see all the identity politics in it now.
I think many seem to agree that the best thing for TV as a whole is a return to the '90s era of specializations and a philosophy that supports programming with actual depth and isn't reliant on displaying gross caricatures of the worst aspects of humanity.
That last point is what I personally see in much of the reality TV that took over the medium in the 2000s and proliferated almost every network.
It wouldn't surprise me if those involved in producing reality TV were receiving some kind of ESG-like funding to enable and exaggerate the worst human behaviors and structure it in a way that would sort of dumb down its viewers.
Then again, that's my rather biased perspective on that topic; I totally understand if others disagree with me.