Stuck in time

[oldtvman]

With the arrival of my new Dell Lcd hdtv, my memories still drift back to the early days of color. Yeh, the football games look sweet on hd, but after that it's all down-hill. You have crappy programming that comes in crystal-clear.

Back in the day you watched it cause it was in color! And some of the color programs broadcast back then are still classics today.

[fujifrontier]

all in the family, for instance

[stereofisher]

I love my HDTV, a 32 in Panasonic Flat Screen. The 7 PM time segment is a total waste!!!! I hate Access Holiwood and all tabloid TV shows. Who gives a crap whoses hosing who. I dont care about what actor is living with what bimbo. They will be apart in 6 months.

Wouldnt it be nice to get a decent indiependent station in each major market not affiliated with "Foul Fox" or Warner Bros. It would be great to have an 8 o'clock movie in 2 hours. This Christmas I would have liked to have watched "Its a Wonderful Life" Its a 90 minute movie. I tuned in NBC and with all the damned commercials it was 3 hours!! Forget it.

Sitcoms today are not funny. Stupid with sexual overtones. Who cares whose getting it and whos not. Dont care. Theres so much old stuff out there they could run. TVLand runs the same old stuff.

The networks keep running their primetime shows over and over. I used to like Greys Anatomy. But ABC reruns the hell out of it. Why can they take their old shows or miniseries and run them. Games shows in primetime.They are cheap. Its crap. NBC is cheap. Reality shows. Yech.

The networks would be better off running 20 year old shows. They have all these shows and its stupid not to use them. Why not? Get rid of the bimbos om the Tabloid Show and put on some real shows!

Eric

[peverett]

Since I am not big sports fan, I have seen nothing on network TV worth buying a HDTV for. I watch Leno and Conan, but their backgrounds are always the same, analog NTSC is fine.

I have cable, and do believe National Geographic, PBS and the movie channels (TCM, etc) do have shows fit for HDTV.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by stereofisher

I love my HDTV, a 32 in Panasonic Flat Screen. The 7 PM time segment is a total waste!!!! I hate Access Holiwood and all tabloid TV shows. Who gives a crap whoses hosing who. I dont care about what actor is living with what bimbo. They will be apart in 6 months.

Wouldnt it be nice to get a decent indiependent station in each major market not affiliated with "Foul Fox" or Warner Bros. It would be great to have an 8 o'clock movie in 2 hours. This Christmas I would have liked to have watched "Its a Wonderful Life" Its a 90 minute movie. I tuned in NBC and with all the damned commercials it was 3 hours!! Forget it.

Sitcoms today are not funny. Stupid with sexual overtones. Who cares whose getting it and whos not. Dont care. Theres so much old stuff out there they could run. TVLand runs the same old stuff.

The networks keep running their primetime shows over and over. I used to like Greys Anatomy. But ABC reruns the hell out of it. Why can they take their old shows or miniseries and run them. Games shows in primetime.They are cheap. Its crap. NBC is cheap. Reality shows. Yech.

The networks would be better off running 20 year old shows. They have all these shows and its stupid not to use them. Why not? Get rid of the bimbos om the Tabloid Show and put on some real shows!

Eric

Well, we do have a station like that here in Pittsburgh on channel 59, low power over the air but it is on our cable system. It is run by the "Bruno Goodworth Group." They have repeaters all over the SW PA area too. They have a locally hosted horror movie show every Saturday night and they run old shows like "Hawaii Five-0" and "The Streets of San Francisco." When I can, I usually watch those shows but recently, Five-0 is out since I have to be at work at 6 AM so I have to get up early. The station itself reminds me of what I would find on an indy UHF station when I was a kid, circa 1975 to 1980. It is a breath of fresh air. Also since Paramount and WB collided and formed the "WB," that left one station here out in the dark, Channel 22 I think so I have seen stuff like Andy Griffith on it during the weekends.

[frenchy]

Speaking of TV not worth watching, today I saw absolutely positively the worst tv show I have ever seen in my life - "My Games Fever" on KCOP-13 in Los Angeles (they used to be a UPN station but were dropped by UPN and had to convert to the My Network TV network.)
It consists of a stupid chick walking aimlessly around an otherwise unpopulated game show set, taking phone calls trying to answer such thrilling quizzes as filling in blanks i.e. "Good (blank)". Horrid. She just keeps taking wrong answers like "good luck" and "good grief" while pacing around the set saying oh that's good but it's wrong, annoying sound effects like whistles and some guy saying "Ohhh Shnap!" over and over and over again till you want to kick the screen in. Lame prizes like 750 bucks. Or the letters of the word "exercises" scrambled around that even a two-year-old could figure out. Then she blabs for 5 minutes giving hints that nobody needs without taking a call so that thousands of people will call in with the obvious answer so they can make 99 cents on each text-messaged answer. It's on for 2 hours straight Monday thru Friday. It's just a 120 minute profit center for the phone calls with zero entertainment value. The worst EVER EVER EVER!

[bgadow]

The amount of reruns sure has seemed to gotten worse. I hardly watch any tv anyway and when I do turn it on, darn, it's still something I've already seen! PBS (or at least Maryland Public Television) seems to have just given up. Despite a schedule of 2 weeks of pledge drive for every 3 weeks off they still have almost nothing new to show. There are some programs which have been rerun, no exaggeration, 15-20 times.

My wife leaves the TV on for company. I walked in the room the other night and couldn't believe my eyes. "What about Jim" (or whatever that crap show is called) is still running on ABC. That dribble should have been cancelled after the second episode; now it is one of their longer running shows. Who watches this stuff?

Stereofisher offers several good points. If a local station had a TV Land style lineup I would glue the knobs on my TV sets to their channel. Oftentimes I think of how I would program a station & I could easily fill up a full schedule with shows from the fifties-eighties.

Speaking of NBC taking 3 hours to show "It's a Wonderful Life"-one of my all-time favorite movies is "Airplane". I had seen it plenty of times on network television back in the eighties and it always took 2 hours. Then one Sunday afternoon one of the local stations aired it. I guess they had some time to fill, and this was before infomercials were big. They aired "Airplane" in 90 minutes with just station breaks & a few commercials.

[stereofisher]

Originally Posted by bgadow

The amount of reruns sure has seemed to gotten worse. I hardly watch any tv anyway and when I do turn it on, darn, it's still something I've already seen! PBS (or at least Maryland Public Television) seems to have just given up. Despite a schedule of 2 weeks of pledge drive for every 3 weeks off they still have almost nothing new to show. There are some programs which have been rerun, no exaggeration, 15-20 times.

My wife leaves the TV on for company. I walked in the room the other night and couldn't believe my eyes. "What about Jim" (or whatever that crap show is called) is still running on ABC. That dribble should have been cancelled after the second episode; now it is one of their longer running shows. Who watches this stuff?

Stereofisher offers several good points. If a local station had a TV Land style lineup I would glue the knobs on my TV sets to their channel. Oftentimes I think of how I would program a station & I could easily fill up a full schedule with shows from the fifties-eighties.

Speaking of NBC taking 3 hours to show "It's a Wonderful Life"-one of my all-time favorite movies is "Airplane". I had seen it plenty of times on network television back in the eighties and it always took 2 hours. Then one Sunday afternoon one of the local stations aired it. I guess they had some time to fill, and this was before infomercials were big. They aired "Airplane" in 90 minutes with just station breaks & a few commercials.

Great movie--Airplane. Oh if they would let us program a local station. Loads of good TV shows out there. Seems like the networks take the worst and run the crap out of it. How many different Law and Orders do we need? Then Dennis Ferrinno quits and they bring in this teenybopper girl detective in a lead role. I liked it til then. I am outa here. Damned shame Orbach died. He helped make the show. This snotnosed kid is a joke. How can someone that young is a detective????? Law and Order must have a moron for a casting director or she is the boss' kid. Damned poor choice.

As I have said before, the equipment is better than the crap coming through it..Eric

[jln1966]

I generally just buy the shows I like that are out on DVD. That way I can watch what I want when I want and no commercials. They have shows like the Cosby Show and movies like Ghost into the ground.
John

[andy]

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[Eric H]

Between old shows on DVD and new shows I like such as 24, The Office, My Name Is Earl, Desperate Housewives... I don't have enough time to watch it all!

A cheap alternative to buying the DVDs is to get a Netflix subscription.
I read recently that 20% of their business was TV shows.

[Duane]

[QUOTE=bgadow]The amount of reruns sure has seemed to gotten worse. I hardly watch any tv anyway and when I do turn it on, darn, it's still something I've already seen! PBS (or at least Maryland Public Television) seems to have just given up. Despite a schedule of 2 weeks of pledge drive for every 3 weeks off they still have almost nothing new to show. There are some programs which have been rerun, no exaggeration, 15-20 times.

[QUOTE]

PBS is a joke,IMO.Their arrogance boggles the mind.They regurgitate the same crap over and over and beleive that the viewing public will rush to the phones and beg them to take our money...every 2 months???? I refuse to watch..programed the tv tuner to bypass the channel.My favorites used to be the New Yankee Workshop and This Old House,but don't even watch them.

The fact that other broadcast stations force feed us with reality show garbage,I prefer the catch anything that's older than 5 years.I can see why television shows on DVD are becoming more popular.Have purchased a few personally.

[jln1966]

The dvds seem to be going down in price too. I got the first 2 seasons of I Dream Of Genie for 19.99 each. I also have the first 3 seasons of Bewitched. Those are 2 of the funniest shows made. I especially like Dr Bellows and Gladys Kravitz. Good buys can be found on Amazon too.
John

[Chad Hauris]

I think there is a misguided strategy at PBS itself as far as getting people to pledge with corny musical specials and such....part of the problem is, at least in the past, the PBS network would not even feed the regular shows on the satellite during the pledge weeks. The local station would not even have the choice to do pledge spots around the usual programs. (I used to work at a public television station at one time and even hosted the on-air pledge breaks)
I do believe though as I did then that PBS in general still does have a quite high quality of programming (except for some of those pledge specials), much more so than most cable networks, etc.

[stromberg6]

Yes, much of the programing available today is, in my opinion, crap. I don't watch too much tv, mainly History channel, news, South Park (I know), etc, but hope to have a CTC-4 operating for Super Bowl Sunday. If not 2007, 2008 for sure. Not too much spare time right now.