The Reality of Things is Such...

I like the History Channel. I really enjoy learning more about what it may have been like during the Black Plague, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil Rights Movement--I say this in the present tense when the reality is that History Channel, along with TLC and Discovery Channel, are fast losing sight of their original objective and becoming networks of reality-based programming, and I am sorry History Channel, you can dress it up any way you choose by saying "History is made every day" before showing Pawn Stars, American Pickers, or Ice Road Truckers, but none of these things have to do with actual history; face it, these networks are becoming the MTV of the 2010s (when is the last time anyone actually saw a whole music video on MTV?). Speaking of MTV...The Real World? Really? Really? This is so far from real that any and all of the participants would get their asses kicked on a daily basis if they were in the real world. What makes things even worse is the fact that at any given time one can turn on his or her television and be inundated with reality-based show after reality-based show, and most of them are pretty horrendous. Every network seems to have its own Coonass mascot, and those that don't have asses of a different sort--the Jersy-ites--polluting the airwaves. Yesterday I saw advertisements for two new reality-based shows--Farm Kings, about corn farmers; and Hard Parts, about working in a car parts store. Working in a car parts store!--The ideas for these two are almost as stupid as...oh, I don't know. Doing a show about finding things with a metal detector, or parking cars, or being stupid, sixteen, and knocked up, or being a Kardashian (and it's either watch this crap or Sex and the City, which seems to be on every other channel). The thing is, the whole idea of reality-based programming has lost its luster, and we can surmise that it is easier to say, "Let's do a show about pig farmers" than to actually write a good tele-play. When all is said and done, this is but one more thing I will just have to bend over and accept, because it doesn't look like it's going to be changing any time soon.