Sitcoms Online ran the best explanation of this that I saw here and here: Antenna is removing "Leave It to Beaver," "Dragnet," and "Adam-12" from its lineup, but fear not, fans of those shows, because they are merely migrating to Me-TV. If you love those shows and aren't sick of them, I guess this is a good thing, and if you're a fan who has Me-TV but NOT Antenna, it's certainly a good thing. But for the rest of us, this is kind of--excuse me for using a little industry jargon again here--lame.
When the rerun-oriented digital subchannel trend started a few years ago, I looked forward to a wide variety of programming. Wait, that's not entirely true. I hoped for a wide variety but feared we would actually get the same old stuff eventually. Now, there are still great old shows on both Me and Antenna, but this kind of swap is the thing I worried when the two "competitors" made their library deal with Universal a few years ago: Exchanging the same series instead of digging deeper and showing rarer programs.
Oh, Me-TV and Antenna accomplished something else with that deal: They effectively killed off RTV, which suffered a crippling amount of defections shortly after it lost rights to the Universal library. Personally, I could do without most of the Universal library at this point, or at least most of what we've seen lately. "Beaver" is on Netflix now, as is "Adam-12." I've seen the whole run of "Alfred Hitchcock." I love, love, love that Antenna still runs "Burns and Allen" and "The Jack Benny Program," but unless they unearth some new episodes, I don't see them as so special now that they have gone through multiple cycles of the ones they have. Let's try a little harder, folks, please, to put some different programs on the air.
I'd rather see Me-TV look elsewhere than at Antenna's leftovers. As for Antenna, here are the brand-new program acquisitions it will add to replace the 3 departing Universal shows:
...
That's right, nothing! Oh, it has shows filling the time slots. "Married With Children" and "The Nanny," both of which have had ample exposure elsewhere, but more importantly have already been on Antenna, are coming back.
Yippee.
I fear these two channels are stagnant and will remain so. I hold out more hope for Me-TV to at least sprinkle its schedule with rarities like "The Rebel," but Antenna in particular is stale, and I expect it to look more to the 80s and 90s than the 50s, 60s, and 70s for future programming additions.
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1 comment:
Well, I don't think they're gonna market it like that, though I would like to see those promos. I envision June addressing "The Beaver," followed by a quick cut to a lot of wild audience hooting and hollering from MWC.
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