Warning this is going to be long, boring, pointless, probably naive, and certainly poorly thought out...

MTV started out showing 24-hours of music videos. In order to fill that much time, they had to play whatever videos they could find. So you could see videos from any band that had the cash to put one together. You could see bands you'd never heard of before ! You could learn about new music. They did that for a couple of years. Then they started segregating the music: metal shows, rap shows, dance shows, interesting stuff at midnight on Sundays, etc.. Then, they started adding their own internally-produced stuff: game shows, then cartoons, then reality shows, celebrity gossip shows, movies, awards shows, etc.. Now they rarely show videos at all, and whatever else they show is all narrowly-focused on things that are already popular. As a way to find new music, or to find music at all, it has essentially zero value. But, everybody knows that.

And most people know how VH1 followed pretty much the same path as MTV: It started out showing primarily videos, but of a more lite-rock / 'adult contemporary' blend of music than the teen-focused MTV. But soon it too was showing nothing but game shows, movies and endless shows like I Love The 70's/80's/90's and the Top 50 Greatest [whatever] Songs of the 90's. These nostalgia shows are all apparently assembled from clips from a handful of interviews given by a dozen or so C-list celebrities and has-been musicians. It's always the same group of people making the same kind of dumbass comments, regardless of the show's ostensible point. And, like MTV, it's now worthless as a music resource. It's a worthless waste of cable bandwidth.

Then there's VH1Classic, which I never grow tired of bitching about... It started in 2000, and, up until about a year ago, it showed, without much organization or filtering, all those videos that MTV and VH1 abandoned. You could see anything from Elvis to My Bloody Valentine, from the Doors to Devo, from Pink Floyd to Phrank. They played everything they had, as long as it came out before the early 90's. As a music resource, it was fantastic. Then, of course, they started segregating the music: dance shows, metal shows, rap shows, etc.. Now, all you can see are movies, endless repeats of the same concerts from has-beens and their all-star guests, and metal videos. They'll show 80's metal videos for 3 days straight. You can watch The Kiss Story any day of the week. And, so it's now a worthless waste of cable bandwidth, too!

So, there's a pattern with MTV channels: start off showing relatively unfiltered music, start segregating it, start adding shows that are kind of about music, start adding shows that have nothing to do with music, eventually push the music away in favor of the meta-musical or non-musical stuff. Does it happen anywhere else?

In a way, it happened with Comedy Central. When that channel started (as the Comedy Channel), it would show non-stop stand-up and comedy movies. There weren't any game shows or original content. They'd do a couple of minutes from one comedian (captioned MTV-style), then another, then another. But, it was kind of dull. So, after a couple of years, they started adding shows of their own, like South Park, and the Daily Show. Now stand-up is only on for a couple of hours Friday nights.

You can see the same progression in The Discovery Channel, which used to show a lot of documentary science and nature stuff, but now shows things like Monster Garage and MythBusters and Dirty Jobs - it's more entertainment than education. The Learning Channel, too, started (decades ago) as an educational channel, very similar to the Discovery Channel. And now, of course, it's all about stuff like Trading Spaces, Miami Ink, American Chopper and Psychic Witness. You won't learn anything from the Learning Channel, though you can watch people argue about stuff while doing unusual jobs.

So, that brings me to the reason I started thinking about this stuff in the first place. Over at Rhulman.com, guest blogger Anthony Bourdain laments the Food Network's decline from a channel that used to show quality "stand-up" cooking shows to one that shows nothing but neutered celebrity chefs, game shows and informationless informational shows about food. And, I feel the same way every time I flip past the Food Network.

When I got engaged, I moved across the state to live with my future wife, but stayed with the job I already had. I telecommuted, for a year and a half. So, I'd sit in front of my computer all day, working, with the TV set to the Food Network. This was 1995/6, when Bobby Flay and Emeril and Mario Batali weren't celebrities, hamming it up in front of giant studio audiences or getting paired-up with giddy amateurs in "cook-offs", but were just chefs expertly cooking interesting stuff in small studio-kitchens for the cameras. They'd explain what they were doing, and why. I learned a lot about cooking from them. But, eventually, TFN followed the same path all those other channels followed: they stopped doing the informative and practical stuff, and moved towards flashy, dumbed-down, content-free, entertainment. Now, every time I turn of channel 70, I see Emeril looking worn-out and bored in front of his giant coached-to-shriek audience, or the thrilling story of a team of BBQ'ers getting rained-on at a rib cook off in a giant parking lot somewhere, or Rachael Ray making up cutesy names for stuff and chattering away about how you can buy pre-sliced peppers or whatever.

I suppose all that's my way of coming to the conclusion that I'm just not in the fat part of anyone's target demographic. Oh, and that I watch too much TV.