Why is TV so bad nowadays? Really?

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If one does not like what is on the television, he usually has the choice to not watch it and to enjoy doing things that he wants to do. Read a book. Take a walk. Pop in a DVD if you want to stay home and dislike what is on the air. Life is too short, so if you want to waste time, waste time on things you enjoy.

I miss the good old British comedies where they were actually funny and not so lame.

I saw a 1st gen Doctor Who on Retro TV the other night. I honestly can't believe the show was ever popular, but I suppose it didn't take a lot to impress people back in the late 1960s.

I saw a 1st gen Doctor Who on Retro TV the other night. I honestly can't believe the show was ever popular, but I suppose it didn't take a lot to impress people back in the late 1960s.

Plus, British TV back then left much to be desired in comparison to American TV. The Tom Baker Doctor Who I used to watch while in school left much to be desired in everything from script to special effects.

Try watching comedies from the 70s, like El Chavo and Viruta y Capulina. Those are hilarious. They did do movies, but it was just fun. The 'plot' was more about the characters being fun. I think for comedy, the characters must be simple, so you can be able to concentrate on the fun, not being complex like in a drama. They should also be more expressive in their gestures.

It depends what kind of TV is bad.

Network and syndicated TV is crap, 8 minutes of program, 7 minutes of commercials, 8 minutes again of program and 7 more minutes of commercials.
How can anyone enjoy TV anymore? Plus all the show must be politically correct, they can't show certain things, can't say or use certain words, can't mention certain topics. And when they show movies, everything is cut, censored and edited to fit in a certain time frame.

Regular cable is a little better but still crap, first because they have to much commercials, and even so they can go further with violence and language, like The Walking Dead that shows a lots of violence, blood and gore, they still can't show nudity (even a pair of breast, I mean WTF, it's just the human body) or use certain words like the F-bomb or the N-word or the C-bomb. So they are limits there.

Then we have premium cable, like HBO, Showtime, CineMax, there they can do whatever they want, shows like Games of Thrones or Banshee show it all, violence, nudity, sex, they are allowed to say anything they want, what allows the creators of these shows to be more creative and be edgier. And when they show movies, no censorship.

This is how I feel too.

When I look back and rewatch some of those old sitcoms from the 90s, they don't seem as good as they used to be. In facts FRIENDS was a much more painfully stupid show than I recall. The dramas though were actually pretty decent, CBS had some good ones back in its day (Dr. Quinn, Early Edition). Today's dramas lack the appeal to pull the audiences in and that ones that do get cancelled prematurely.

I suppose you're right. Family Guy didn't steal the formula, they just did their own animated version of it that was far, far worse.

What sucked about The Simpsons' decline is that nothing could have been done to stop it. There's not really anyone to blame. Phil Hartman's tragic death may have done more damage to the show than we will ever realize, because he played the best recurring characters (Troy McClure, Lionel Hutz and more) and was a frequent presence in the studio. Another problem was Homer; the writers just naturally kept upping the ante with him, making him dumber and more accident-prone with every season until it got to be more sad and cliched than funny. And after a while, the writers just ran out of interesting things to say or valid lessons to teach, and what was once a character-driven show complemented by humor and pop culture became exactly the opposite after Mike Scully took over from David Mirkin as showrunner. (The shockingly bad 'Simpson Tide' in Season 9 was a sign of things to come.)

Finally, the show seemed to wither and lose its punch when Matt Groening moved on to develop Futurama, a potentially great but fatally flawed series in its own right. All of these things happened around the same time in the late 1990s, reducing the series to numbing mediocrity in a few short years. It basically died there in my opinion. FOX were the only ones who refused to let it go, ignoring that 9 or 10 good seasons is twice as much as viewers or networks can reasonably expect from any series. They are really the ones to blame at this point. They didn't kill The Simpsons, but they did allow its death throes to continue for about 14 years on national television.

Not gonna read through 5 pages of comments so forgive me if I'm just repeating stuff, but honestly, this is the golden age of television. Don't get me wrong, there's a whole lot of crap out there still, but the "Jersey Shore" style reality-tv shows don't seem nearly as prevalent as they were a few years ago, and we have several series that rival movies. Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones...this is fantastic drama. One could make a serious case that the recent FX Fargo mini-series was even better than the classic film that inspired it. On the comedy front, yeah, Family Guy's gotten painful and The Simpsons ain't what it used to be. But Parks and Recreation is just fantastic, It's Always Sunny (which in a lot of ways is kind of this generation's Seinfeld) just had it's best season, 9 years in, there was a fascinating show called Wilfred for people who appreciate completely surreal type stuff, Netflix just had a great animated series called BoJack Horseman which started as a simple comedy and turned into a fascinatingly dark character study....I guess my point here is, it depends on what you want from a tv show, but if you're a lover of truly original cinematic stories, tv is actually ahead of the film industry at this point.

Breaking Bad is not on anymore, and when it was, it was the exception. Game of Thrones is overrated. Not as good as Lost, The Wire, and The Sopranos. Comedy is not as good either. For every Modern Family, Family Guy, and Veep, you get five of these terrible sitcoms that show up for three episodes and get cancelled, and even the good ones don't compare to shows like Seinfeld, Friends, and early Simpsons. Reality TV is obviously terrible, generally. Even the good reality shows like The Amazing Race and Survivor aren't as good as they used to be.

All in all, the standards for TV have gotten a lot lower. There are tons more terrible shows than there used to be, and even the good shows are watered down versions of shows that came before them.

There is actually some very fine horror on TV these days, such as American Horror Story, The Strain, and The Walking Dead. Though I admit there is also an over abundance of those Goddamn pretty boy vampire shows!

I like shows where characters help each other out such as The Monkees, Little House on The Prairie, The Brady Bunch and The Mod Squad. I've never seen anybody helping anybody out on reality TV. Big Brother is the worst. I watched one episode and decided that enough was enough.

I'm sorry, did you actually just throw Lost into the same discussion as The Wire and the Sopranos??

But, seriously, you have to bear in mind that there are WAAAAY more channels now than their used to be, and that as we've grown more diverse it's tougher to find common ground between everyone, so there's more pandering to the common bottom denominator for ratings. It's unfortunate, but an inevitable result of our population boom. Out of all those channels, yeah, we do have way more crap than there was 10, 20 years ago. But with bigger budgets and more artistically free sources like HBO and Netflix, we also get the gold. You really think anything even close to The Wire would have had a prayer of seeing the airwaves back in the 70's? Basically, there is some AMAZING television out there if you really want to find it, but there's also more crap to dig through. It's a give and take.

Most of television is just appealing to the mindless masses, I find as you get older the less television shows are watchtable (which is a very easy inlet into cynicism).

I find that the only thing really worth watching on television is sports, at least consistently, every now and then there is a good show worth watching, but beyond that, I noticed there are a lot of silly 'revenge' story lines which are essentially comic book narratives... Which saddens me because petty revenge stories are the stuff for 14 year old boys, it's depressing seeing adults being pandered to in the same manner. Part of me thinks we're getting stupider, but I think it's just a part of getting older and realizing that most people are quite simply dumb.