TV ... Boring?

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I've grown so bored with TV the last few years. Most of it seems just a rehash of other shows. Even movies are struggling to come up with something original. And series that start out good end up in the same old wallow. Reality TV is dead, they just forgot to bury it. Action movies end up the same old car and helicopter chase. The spectrum is flooded with cop shows. Who murdered who is the nightly diet. Rom-coms all follow the same formula. People being idiots seem to be popular, though I don't understand why. Some things that pass for entertainment seem to need to fill a quota on F-bombs to justify their existence.

I'm no wowser, and I like some almost mindless stuff if I want to relax. But I also like things to be clever or make you think. I also like something to provoke my emotions. But rehash, repeat, gratuitous, contrived, narcissistic and art for commercial sake just leaves me cold. If you're gonna be formulaic, at least have something uniquely interesting, like Big Bang Theory, or Best Hotel Marigold, or Second Hand Lions.

Enough of my thoughts... What are yours?

yeah, i find tv to be pretty boring. haven't deliberately watched it in a long while. not much variety with what you can do, and i can't stand commercials.

i live with my parents, and i wonder how they don't get sick of watching Caso Cerrado all damn day long.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD9pJzZ1XGI[/youtube]

I haven't watched TV in years, and I find most movies boring.

French TV is equally boring. I've got around 20 free to view channels. There are lots of imported American series, dubbed into French - endless crime scene investigators, police series, FBI series and variants of all three. There are even some American reality shows imported too - they are absolutely dire; I don't know who watches them - maybe young teenagers? Dunno. There is no point paying to view any other extra channels, even for movie channels because within a year or two all that content will appear on the free to view channels anyway and then be repeated endlessly. The thing about lots of TV channels is that it doesn't mean there is more content; the good content is simply diluted or repeated across all the channels. The most difficult thing is finding the 1% of good TV. There are some good programmes out there, but I usually miss them because they are lost, unnoticed amongst the dross.

I've liked this french reality tv program of french teens who compete with their cooking skills; it was interesting because I love cooking and food, and those kiddos were good.

Not when an Xbox or wii attached to it.

I know the program you mean, though I don't watch it myself. The French are very passionate about anything to do with food or food production. My preference is for science documentaries and those are few and far between.

Thanks to Netflix and subtitles I am currently watching the French TV series Les Revenants about dead people in a French town who come back to life without being either conventional zombies or ghosts. To you this may be an example of boring French TV. Or it may be an example of good French TV diluted across the channels by bad stuff (which Netflix doesn't bother picking up). To me it's an example of a change in the TV watching paradigm which I think will ultimately be for the better.

The conventional way to watch TV is to flip through channels looking for something good. The abundance of crap makes channel surfing an annoying search for a needle in a haystack. Duck Dynasty? Yuck! But a DVR and/or streamed content (Netflix, Hulu etc.) acts like a powerful magnet to instantly extract that needle so you don't even have to be aware of the hay. I think DVR and streaming will ultimately end channel surfing so that people just get the specific content they want. That is how I currently watch my little slice of TV and it is increasingly common.

Interesting you mention that series. I saw previews of it; but it is on the canal+ subscription channel here at the moment so I can't watch it yet. It probably won't be long before it is on the free to view channels and I'll definitely watch the first episode to see if I like it.

Like you say, channel hopping has become a terrible way of finding something to watch. It isn't easy using the internet either as there are way too many pages of TV guides to wade through, the same is true with a paper based TV magazine but that is easier to thumb through than loading endless pages on the net.

The local Arab tvs are crowded with Turkish dubbed into Arabic rom-coms - boring.

and Music shows and Music games/contests with flashy colors and staged applauding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD702vjOGq4- if I want to listen to music I use a radio or mp3 player; thank you.

In the US, we get C-Span, where you could sometimes watch the proceedings of the American Congress and the British Parliament. "Prime Minster's Questions" could be interesting.

I also watch quite a bit of sports.

I also enjoy COPS, even though, sometimes, they get too rough with the defendants who are arrested for non-violent crimes.

Then you have the science and history documentaries; you have to know when bias is present, though.

I also enjoy watching old sitcoms like Gilligan's Island, or old doctor shows.

Don't you have access to the BBC? They sometimes have interesting documentaries about science, but usually history. BBC1/2 are usually included in the free channels here, even though many people don't speak English. Do the French have something similar to the BBC? I wish the Dutch gov broadcaster did more with history.
I remember we had a French-German channel named ARTE for a while. They had some interesting stuff, but my French wasn't really good enough to follow it easily.
And dubbing should be banned. Watching James Bond in German is just so awful it becomes hilarious. The worst is when they dub someone on the news whose language you understand. You can't really hear the original because the dub voice is louder.

Here in France, freeview channel 13 is the proceedings of the French parliament. It is dull as ditch water; I never watch it. Similarly channel 21 is dedicated to sports and I never watch that channel either.

I do like Sci-fi series but I'm tired of the endless reruns of Stargate SG1. Dr Who is great, looking forward to the new series soon. For some reason I've never been able to figure out, none of the Star Trek series or spin-off series are ever shown on French TV. I'm baffled by that. Back in the UK there were always runs and reruns of Star Trek, original and new series, Deep space 9, Voyager but never here in France.

Canada isn't much better. The CBC is a dead horse, both radio and TV. The only time I listen to the former is on Saturday afternoons for the Radio Two opera broadcasts and I download some Radio One podcasts. CBC TV is only going to get worse since it lost the broadcast rights for "Hockey Night in Canada".

The commercial networks have mostly American imports and, unfortunately, those same networks own many of the channels we have on cable. So, guess what's on them a lot? That's right: re-runs of what was available on the commercial channels.

We do get PBS, of course, but it's like watching many same sort of bland reality TV and edutainment shows available elsewhere but with periodic pledge breaks. It's a far cry from what it was even 25 years ago.

I'd subscribe to channels such as HBO Canada, but my cable bill is expensive enough as it is. Fortunately, there are movie channels like Encore Avenue and Turner Classic Movies. If it wasn't for those, I'd have cancelled my cable service long ago.

Well...at least you like hockey! LOL

Hockey is a relatively popular sport here in the US--probably 4th most popular, after football, baseball, and basketball.

Tim Hortons, as you know, was started by a hockey player.

Yeah....I know what you mean about the pledge drives; otherwise, PBS is a really great channel.