< Network Decay

Network Decay/Temporary Shifts

  • Reversed by a recent trend of "vault" cable networks that went and defined a niche for themselves, when they used to be little more than rerun farms. TNT has repurposed itself as being the drama network, complete with the slogan "We Know Drama"; TBS wants you to know that everything they show is "Very Funny"; and USA has made a point of acquiring programs that showcase quirky characters to fit its "Characters Welcome" campaign.

These networks also frequently show movies that don't fit the theme — comedies like Galaxy Quest and Men in Black on TNT, dramas like the Lord of the Rings on TBS — but the ads present them as the network's genre; USA's broader "Characters Welcome" focus, and their knack for showing movies that fit the genre of their shows, lets them better avert this.

  • CBC faces a balancing act between popular American shows, which draw advertisers, and Canadian content, which tends to be less popular. Lately, it's made a larger push to get new Canadian shows on the air (Little Mosque on the Prairie, Being Erica, and so on) but you can still catch re-runs of The Simpsons. Yet the station's management still refuses to adapt shows produced by its French counterpart Radio-Canada...
  • ZTV, who was originally established as a Swedish alternative of MTV, pretty much went down the same line as MTV. In a brave attempt to counter this, however, in 2006 they decided to split the channel up; ZTV would go back to its musical roots, and the new channel TV6 would focus on the programs that had made ZTV decay. Both channels still exist to this day, and neither has decayed.
    • Similar thing happened in Finland. Just replace ZTV with The Voice and TV 6 with Vii5i. Except it was zigzagged;TV Viisi originally occupied the slot, which was replaced by The Voice in 2004. In 2008 the original channel, renamed Vii5i, started sharing the channel slot. In 2011 the channels were splitted to separate slots.
  • MSNBC started as a joint venture between NBC and Microsoft to bring a unique synchronicity between online and cable news. Microsoft pulled out, and the channel floundered for years, with its news programming in last place and prime time filled with True Crime and prison "documentaries". In recent years, these have been replaced (at least on weekdays) by left-of-center opinion to counterprogram the Fox News Channel. Thanks to shows hosted by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann (before his departure for Current), they became a big player in cable news again. Your Mileage May Vary about the actual opinions, but they're at least behaving like a news network again and not a cheesy ripoff of CourtTV.

The weekends, though...it seems like they never plan for breaking news. While CNN and Fox News can break format in a moment's notice and always have somebody ready to go, MSNBC continues to air prison docs or Dateline NBC reruns while the on-call weekend guy rushes across Long Island to get into the studio to start the coverage hours too late. There's a reason the tag #msnbcfail is popular on Twitter in these situations. Especially egregious in the case of weather events or other stories that break locally before going national: in theory they have access to the local NBC affiliate's feed.

  • Fuse TV was created in response to MTV's decay, aimed at a slightly more "hardcore" crowd than MTV's original target audience. It quickly went the same way as MTV, replacing music programming with reality shows (like what MTV did) like Rad Girls (a female version of Jackass) and Pants-Off Dance-Off, and even showing anime (like what MTV Italy did, though they gave up on that after showing only Ergo Proxy and Tenjho Tenge). At one point, there was only two or three hours of music-based programming in any given day, and some of that was an annoying Infomercial called VictorYTV, paid for by the insufferably Emo-focused Victory Records label. It got to the point where some distrusted the channel because it pandered to Victory and emo in general, at the peril of other genres. It may have been the fastest case of Network Decay ever, and it put the channel under Total Abandonment for a while.

This went about as well as one would expect, as "MTV, but still showing music" was Fuse TV's chief selling point, and losing that caused ratings to sink like a rock. Realizing where they went wrong, they made a strong effort to fix their decay, canning most of their non-music-related reality shows and bringing in new music shows — they even re-hired popular former VJ Juliya Chernetsky, whom it was thought would never agree to return after the way she had been unceremoniously fired. Even the movies that they show, like Rocky Horror and Wayne's World, are related to music. The only non-music show Fuse TV airs is Funny or Die's Billy on the Street, along with day-delayed encores of NBC's Last Call with Carson Daly, which easily meets Fuse's mission as the last half of the show consists of performances and artist profiles.

The only decay still lingering at the network is what was left over from their transition from MuchUSA into Fuse TV. Even then, on June 20, 2010, Fuse simulcasted the 2010 MuchMusic Video Awards, marking the first time the station has aired content from MuchMusic since 2002. The network also added Video on Trial in the fall of 2011, indicating that the channel may once again become the new American simulcast of MuchMusic.

  • MTV UK's genre channels (MTV Base plays Urban, MTV Two plays indie rock & alternative, to give two examples) have their own programming, but it's related to the music that the channel plays — interviews, that sort of thing. These have recently been cut back in favour of playing more music videos, thus creating the first known instance of MTV being criticised for playing too many music videos.
  • CBS, during the period when it was overseen by CEO Laurence Tisch (1986-1995), found themselves finishing in third place (behind both ABC and NBC) during the 1988-89 season. This includes the once dominant nightly newscast. For the next few years, CBS for better or for worse, arguably gained a reputation (when compared to other broadcast networks) as being the "old folks network". It was also during the Laurence Tisch era that CBS lost the National Football League package (which they had since 1956) to a fledging Fox Network in December 1993. This in the process, helped cost CBS many affiliates (who switched over to Fox shortly thereafter) and viewers. Meanwhile, CBS wound up losing approximately $500 million off of a $1.2 billion, four year long (1990-1993) contract with Major League Baseball. Eventually, things started to turn around for CBS by the end of the '90s. They regained NFL coverage (outbidding NBC for the American Football Conference package in 1998) and debuted Survivor and CSI. Ultimately, according to Nielsen, CBS has been the top-rated network since the 2008–2009 and season.
  • Discovery Health, one of the few Discovery-related channels to remain completely true to its concept (medical and health-related shows), eventually focused their programming on childbirths to the point that they were nicknamed as "The Childbirth Channel", with about 3–4 hours of shows that actually made it into the day's programming that didn't show only childbirth. Jon and Kate Plus Eight started out on Discovery Health before moving to TLC. It was eventually replaced in 2011 with a network devoted entirely to Oprah Winfrey. Yes, you read that correctly — an entire channel dedicated to Oprah. Fortunately, Discovery Health made a comeback one month later, by merging with FitTv (becoming Discovery Fit & Health), and taking most of the programming hours, ironically restoring the original format that FitTV took over when it was brought by Discovery in the late 90s.
  • CNN suffered a slip for a while around 2007 when it decided to leave its neutral viewpoints in an attempt to appeal more to Fox News viewers with a nightly lineup featuring right-wing commentators Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, and Nancy Grace (the last two on HLN back-to-back with Larry King (in his final seasons) after that. With its new intentions, ratings plummeted and CNN lost a lot of faith among viewers more interested in non-biased viewpoints. After Beck was fired and Dobbs and King retired, CNN wouldn't fully recover from this programming change until Piers Morgan came in 2010. Arguably they still haven't recovered as the only time their viewers come in is for the most breaking of news and seem more enchanted with playing with their on-set toys like the "Magic Board" to show the news.
  • SBS in Australia was originally created to show foreign language programmes to Australians who spoke languages other than English. Since there are so many of them (at the very least it would need to do Chinese, Italian and Greek), it couldn't dedicate itself to them all, and since pay TV services like RAI and ANT 1 launched later did it much better, it gradually became more a mix of documentaries, sex, soccer, and South Park. "SBS" is sometimes colloquially called "Sex and Bloody Soccer".

However, new management has decidedly taken SBS back to its roots. It began by producing a slew of programs exploring the cooking and cultures of other countries through the eyes of minority-ethnicity Australian chefs, including Luke Nguyen's Vietnam. Then came the documentaries about Australian immigration, such as Go Back To Where You Came From and the English/Vietnamese language Once Upon A Time In Cabramatta. SBS has started a weekly Australian Mandarin-language news bulletin. Despite its history of changes, it still broadcasts in more languages than any other broadcaster in the world, with more than 68 languages on radio, more than 60 on television and more than 50 online.

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