NYP – This week’s A Network You Should Know covers “The History Channel”. We all remember this channel from the best part of 9th grade social studies. To this day Hitler’s Reichstag speech lulls me into a cozy desk nap. Unfortunately, their “all Hitler, all the time” programming strategy failed them when they ran out of images of Hitler in 2002. Actually, they exhausted them in 2001 and just used footage from The Great Dictator (1940) for a year.
“The History Channel” reinvented itself in 2008 as “History!” (I may have added the exclamation point myself.) This move makes sense, because dropping “the” and “channel” worked so well for that arm of the Atlantic Ocean. You know, the one that separates Britain from Northern France, you know, “English”? Even before the name change, “History(!)” revamped its image by eliminating the cavalcade of documentaries for which it was previously known. Filling the void since then has been a boatload of original programming. Shows like Ice Road Truckers, Swamp People, Pawn Stars, and Modern Marvelsare a nice Hitler substitute.
Ice Road Truckers is a show about a group of people who drive across Canada when it’s cold. Like a good cocktail, the only way to improve on the thrill-fest that is cross-country trucking is to add chunks of ice. Like a fine wine, the best of the gentleman truckers are slow-aged with a smoky aftertaste. And like a fine chemical fertilizer, Ice Road Truckers is now being exported to India.
Swamp People is not exported to India, but it does air in Australia, where people laugh and shout, “that’s not a knife!” at the television screen while watching. And they’re correct because it’s a gun. The gun in question is usually murdering the bayou bandit otherwise known as an American Alligator, deep in the Atchafalaya River Basin swamp in Louisiana. It doesn’t matter which Cajun hunter is doing the shooting because they’re the best.
Every local on this show assures the camera that they are, in fact, the best alligator hunter several times during an episode. It’s too bad that hunting is entirely subjective and there’s no easy way to match up the entire hunting season of one competitor with another. Sure, we can consider prowess against prowess but if only there was some way to, say, count up whoever killed the most alligators? It’s best left a mystery forever.
This fellow’s name is Chumlee.
Pawn Stars is not a spin-off of American Chopper like I thought. (But when is that happening? “I just know they’re going make a movie!” Said no one. But I pray the rumors are true and it’s going to be a prequel.) Anyway, Pawn Stars is about the three dudes who are paying everybody cash4gold and how they grow and learn to trust themselves again after a horrible accident with their high-diving horse. Okay, I may have fused the premise of this show with Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken (1998). What do you care? You haven’t seen either.
Modern Marvels is a show about marvels and, in a perfect world, the marvel will at some point be marbles. And it will be so popular that it deserves a spinoff series. And that spinoff show will be entitled—you guess it—“Marbulous!” Wait, what were you thinking?
Marvelous.
The most recent two marvels they featured were “blue fin tuna” and “deep-fried”. It makes sense because when I think of “modern” I think of a biological creature, and I seriously marvel at how they’re using “deep-fried” as a standalone noun. Also, I think they used the same stock footage of hieroglyphic depictions of Egyptians cooking fish in both episodes.
The original programming described above, takes up about fifteen percent of the channel formerly known as “The History Channel”. The rest of “History’s” timeslots are used to air historically and scientifically specious apocalyptic predictions about Ancient Aliens who command dinosaurs to eat the Earth. Or possibly, this has already taken place because the Aliens can move through time. Regardless, it’s presented as a documentary wherein Hitler may or may not be behind the whole thing. It’s nice to see people staying true to their roots.
