I'm paying HOW much for TV, again?

Sitcoms Online reports that TV Land is about to include that good, old staple known as "Paid Programming" to its schedule. It'll start as a 5:00 to 7:00 AM thing and then expand to the 6:00 to 9:00 block at the end of December. No one should register surprise at this development. Maybe it's not all bad, though. After all, I hate infomercials, but I can think of about a dozen I'd rather watch than some of the "real" program acquisitions and originals TV Land added in recent years.

Of course, one thing that bites for the die-hards still sticking around to watch this declining channel is that this early-morning slot was where TV Land had been sticking many of its "real" (as opposed to reality) shows lately. This is just one more reason to give up on what used to be a great source of classic television.

In other cable network news, Verizon FIOS irritated me a week or two ago by adding Chiller, a horror channel from the NBC Universal company, but putting it on a new subscription package I don't get while placing it on the "dial" between channels I DO get.

I was quite bummed...until I looked at the Chiller schedule, which is loaded with--well, I'm sure the shows have their adherents, so I'll just describe the offerings as "uninspired." There are a few goodies, like "Kolchak" and "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour," and I'm impressed that the network is not yet afraid to show movies from the 1930s and 1940s. But there are too many repeats of too many shows that weren't all that interesting when they aired in the last decade or so, let alone now.

Still, Chiller's willingness to explore the pre-1980 shelves of the Universal library distinguishes it in today's cable landscape, especially compared to sister network Sleuth. Now, here is a waste of FIOS bandwidth. Each month or so, I'll open up my onscreen program guide, go to Sleuth, and see if they added anything worthwhile. I'm no longer disappointed, but each month I find the same handful of shows and an increasing number of (mostly) uninteresting edited movies filling the schedule.

Yet this is the one I get. I never want to see FIOS strip me of channels, but sometimes I almost wish they'd put Sleuth on some obscure programming package so I wouldn't bother with the charade of checking to see if it stopped sucking. Hey, swap me Chiller for Sleuth, and I won't complain, even if I know Chiller will be unwatchable in a year or two as well.