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by runlevel1
1636 days ago
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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. |
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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!)