What's On? - February, 2008

“What are you watching?” my favorite sister inquired one night.

“I’m switching back and forth between the Soul Train Music Awards, a salute to George Gershwin on PBS and a Yankee game,” I replied.

Yes, my taste in television is more than a little eclectic. At any given time I’m as likely to be watching a documentary on the Kennedy assassination as “Make Me a Supermodel.” When I hear people say, “There’s nothing on,” I always think. “Not for me.” If there is a show about building a cruise ship, a basketball game (I watched five last Sunday) or a new episode of “Men in Trees,” I’m set.

So for me, there is a lot on television, but it is getting harder to figure out what is on where. While there are far more channels, the choice of programming has become stranger and more disconnected from the original intent of the network broadcasting it.

Take, for instance, the Biography Channel, where you can watch four hours a day of “Murder, She Wrote” with only an occasional interruption for a bio of an important historical figure – say, Bruce Willis. Is this the Angela Lansbury Channel? (By the way, if you really can’t get enough of “Murder, She Wrote,” you can also catch it on the Hallmark Channel. There must be some real die-hard Angela Lansbury fans out there for this show to air so often each day.)

My impression of the venerable National Geographic magazine, the august, yellow-rimmed journal showing outstanding photography of far-flung locations and people, doesn’t exactly match the National Geographic Channel. Instead, in addition to actual programs about exotic locations, we are treated to “Outlaw Bikers – Hell’s Angels,” “Bounty Hunters” and a variety of programs about prisons.

Of course, MTV years ago stopped showing music except on off-hours, instead presenting a range of so-called reality shows where an entire subculture of “stars” is established and recycled through “Real World,” “Road Rules,” and the “Real World-Road Rules Challenge.” I can’t help but wonder: Is being a participant on a reality TV show now a bona fide profession? Some of these people either have very understanding employers with generous sabbatical policies or they get paid to wander from show to show, competing in a series of odd physical challenges that have nothing to do with “Music TV.”

MTV isn’t the only confusing channel. The Country Music Channel’s “Trick My Truck” takes a page from MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” in performing extreme makeovers on vehicles. And what does this have to do with country music, I wonder. No more than VH1’s “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew” or the same network’s “Celebrity Fit Club,” which features has-beens and people you never heard of trying to lose weight and regain whatever show biz career they apparently once had.

Headline News no longer dishes out news headlines, instead featuring a bunch of programs that blur the concept of news. The Discovery Channel has “Dirty Jobs,” where poor host Mike Rowe (featured in a series of TYLENOL commercials over the years) is asked to take on the kind of jobs you can’t imagine someone else doing but are glad they’re not your job. Try sweeping up at a zoo, making pots out of cow pies or making roof shingles for a living. This is Discovery?

The Travel Channel sometimes takes me to exotic locations and on beautiful cruise ships. But the same channel can spend a day televising a bunch of men in a room playing poker. I guess the tie-in is that the players had to travel to get there.

Even A&E – the Arts and Entertainment channel – no longer bears much resemblance to either art or entertainment. Really, does anyone want to watch “Parking Wars,” a program about people trying to find or fighting over a parking spot? Or how about “Airline,” where in every show someone is bound to miss a connecting flight?

American Movie Classics no longer limits its showings to “Citizen Kane” and movies of that ilk. You can often find a recent comedy with Martin Lawrence when you are really in the mood for a Humphrey Bogart classic.

Some networks have gone the route of changing their names to more closely match the content. Court TV is now “Tru,” which doesn’t make it any more credible to me. Is Tru true? Somehow, I doubt it.

And could someone please tell the Weather Channel that we don’t need to see shows on how weather affected history? I just want to know how much snow we are going to get.

As far as I can tell, only Animal Planet lives up to its name, broadcasting programs that feature animals around the clock – or at least until the infomercials take over in the wee hours.

Thank goodness I have my fallbacks; as long as I can watch anything on Home & Garden, the Food Network or a game (substitute baseball in the non-basketball season), I always have something to watch.

I’m not saying that all of this stuff isn’t interesting to someone, but consider this an advisory: Don’t judge a cable network by its name if you are trying to figure out “what’s on?”