This is a rant I've been getting on for years now, and even I am sick of it.
Here's the short story:
The age of the genre/niche market network are DEAD....Dee eee ay dee dead. Murdered, even.
I could get on a nice long 20 paragraph rant about how these networks are run by know nothing idiots who want to put "I owned a network" on their resume who are literally crapping their pants because they don't know what to do with their rapidly deteriorating medium, only helping speed up its obsolesce. But I've said that millions of times by now. The only way they think they can get the big fat ratings away from everything else is to run crummy knockoffs of everything else in a slim and vain chance they'll get one general viewer, while losing the faithful regulars by the minute.
Cartoon Network doesn't want to run cartoons anymore, TV Land doesn't want to run old TV shows anymore, Channels that run nothing but movies want original programming, channels that run original programming want to run movies... and here's the worst part:
NONE of our complaints even matter.
They brush off the faithful they alienated because they're not the hipsters that watch the same 8 reality shows on broadcast. And those "hipsters" are quite happy NOT watching the specialty networks, no matter what they run. And they don't care about us. Again,
NONE of our complaints even matter. We're howling at the moon.
And YES... reality shows. The end all be all of TV. Every single network is now required by law to have at least 7 on their schedule. They;re nice little non-union shows that can toss fleeting fame and a less than 1 million dollar prize at one person... which is a lot cheaper than paying trained actors. It's TV's equivalent of the sweatshop.