[allo37]

Hey, I remember when the "L" meant "learning" too (I think they changed it to "Life" now).

I don't think consuming "stupid" entertainment makes us stupid or is even a solid indicator of intelligence (if you can settle on a definition of it). TLC just saw a market and pivoted, imo.

[runlevel1]

I agree with you to an extent. I think stupid entertainment is fine in moderation. Sometimes it's nice to mentally checkout for a while.

Collectively, however, I think it's a bad sign.

TLC isn't the only one who saw a market and pivoted. Sticking with TV examples, the History channel has shows about monsters and aliens now. Discovery's content is almost as bad.

It's not just that there's a market for stupid entertainment. It's that the market for non-stupid entertainment seems like it's shrinking.

[allo37]

I don't really have any evidence to make a counterargument, so you might be right.

I could present an alternative viewpoint though: Cable access has steadily been losing marketshare to streaming services for a while now, so they're aiming for as much mass appeal as possible. It might not be that there is a lower proportion of people looking for educational entertainment than there was before, but that declining viewership has made it unprofitable to produce content for that niche. I see a lot of documentaries on Netflix, for example, and then there's CuriosityStream which is a service just for that, right?

Also a lot of "edutainment" is and always has been sensationalism...I remember watching a documentary about how solar storms were gonna wipe out humanity any day now, and "top 100 things removed from the human body" on old-school TLC (spoiler: #1 was a petrified fetal twin!)