Tedium - Changing The Channel 📺

A reflection on great advocacy work

The old network: Pivot TV, an offering of Participant Media, a well-known film production company started by early eBay president Jeffrey Skoll, who took an approach akin to First Look Media years before eBay founder Pierre Omidyar did. Participant’s mission is to create and fund content that reflects on social issues, a noble approach that has been fairly successful—Spotlight and Syriana are some of its best-known productions. Started in 2013, Pivot reflected the innovations of its owner, including an early embrace of streaming and a focus on encouraging social advocacy by its viewers.

The new network: None. The feed shut down in 2016.

The transition: At the end of a film, a message from Pivot to its viewers takes up the bottom half of the screen as credits air, with Pivot highlighting its work in advocacy—including its work to fight seal-clubbing and support mental illness initiatives. As the credits end, though, DirecTV cuts off the feed.

A low-key bumper implying a big change

The old network: Included as part of the Cartoon Network in most markets where it airs, Adult Swim first came to the Canadian market in 2012 with a similar approach to its American counterpart. However, it was not alone in the market, as Canada’s Teletoon network also had a late-night programming block that at one point featured Adult Swim shows.

The new network: It was really more of a promotion more than anything. In 2019, Adult Swim was given a full channel of its own, the first time the network was given a 24-hour block to work with anywhere around the world. (The network it was replacing was Action, which aired—you guessed it—action movies.) The Canadian Cartoon Network was expanded to match the need, while Teletoon at Night was given the heave-ho at the same time. Part of the reason for this is that Corus Entertainment, the owner of Teletoon, had fully licensed Adult Swim and the Cartoon Network from Warner Bros. for the Canadian market.

The transition: In true Adult Swim style, the programming change was announced using very basic text cards at the end of February, 2019, while Action announced the change with promos during its films. Teletoon at Night, meanwhile, was taken off the air unceremoniously around the same time. The refreshed Adult Swim started on April 1, 2019.

Pong never gets old

The old network: G4, which began its life in 2002 as a competitor to TechTV before acquiring it (a move I still have strong opinions about), slowly faded off the air between 2013 and 2014, depending on where you lived. It’s expected to be revived as a digital channel later this year, though I’m personally not sure who would want that.

The new network: In the U.S., G4 found itself in an awkward position when news surfaced that it was supposed to be replaced with an Esquire-branded channel, but the magazine took over the former Style network instead. G4’s signal, instead, shut off entirely.

The transition: Because of the decision not to move the Esquire Network over to G4’s signal, many cable providers took the network off the air at different times, with Comcast (which owned G4) and Charter pulling it off the air months before its actual shutdown when it became clear it was a repeat wasteland. (DirecTV killed it as far back as 2010 because of low ratings.) Despite this state of affairs, G4 ended its initial run with a simple game of Pong that slowly faded out on the screen.

So what got me thinking about all this? I guess the best way I can put it is that I have come to realize over time that television networks are often very malleable, just like websites are. Especially cable networks, which require big investments in programming to even get off the ground.

Many of the stories I’ve listed above reflect the results of brutal business decisions that aren’t properly discussed with viewers before they occur. They simply just happen. Viewers are forced to react.

The strange thing about this state of affairs is that occasionally, a network’s relevance only proves itself after the fact. All apologies to the folks at MSNBC, for example, but it turns out that America’s Talking was the template for modern news coverage, as is proven by the fact that the Fox News network, also created by Roger Ailes, is effectively 70 percent people expressing opinions on television, and MSNBC had to change its own model to reflect this fact. While America’s Talking featured other kinds of talking besides politics (and those things were often quite weird), it had an entire program devoted to government waste and gave folks who only grew more prominent over time in the TV news realm, like Steve Doocy, Chris Matthews, and Steve Kornacki, some of their first significant national airtime.

One could also argue that the revival of G4, as much as I’m not looking forward to it, also reflects this, as gaming and technology are significantly more dominant topics in the discourse than they were a decade ago. Clearly it came back because somebody missed it.

Sometimes channels change significantly without changing their name. MTV is a great example of this. Compare what it was in 1982 with what it is now.

Another great example of this from back in the day, which did later change its name more fully, is TNN—first known as The Nashville Network and dedicated to country music culture, then as The National Network and having no discernible identity. After a long period as Spike TV, it’s now known as the Paramount Network. What a ride.

A television network’s identity is also a moving target. And it’s fascinating to look at these moving targets in aggregate.

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