Discovery+ - Literally nothing involving educational programming.

[MediocreMilt]

>Dr. Pimple Popper

Signing up for Discovery+ rn.

Can't resist my all-consuming fetish. Pray for me.

 

[ShortBusDriver]

There is a limit to how much you can milk the "Ancient aliens help the Nazis build flying saucers, or did they?" plot.

I'll even give the first two episodes of that a thumbs up because it wasn't a tinfoil hat circle jerk. They had opposing views that largely discredited most of the nonsense. But after that it was pure crazy.

What happened to both Discovery and History is the Obama administration cut off the funding. Prior to that the US government gave out millions of dollars a year for the production of educational programming which is how most of this stuff was funded. With that money gone they had to shift to cheap reality TV focused nonsense.

Even the Mythbusters got pretty shitty treatment their last few seasons when it was rarely advertised when new episodes were airing but there were endless commercials pushing that Street Outlaws nonsense.

Most of Discovery's 'golden age' shows including Mythbusters ended up on the Science Channel while History would air on History International and Military History Channel.

Science Channel and Military History Channel aren't commonly offered in cable packages and History International became that trash Vice channel.

With all of the recent acquisitions there doesn't seem to be anything unique about any of these channels anymore. History shows movies half the time on the weekend of dubious historic value, and random Discovery channel shows appear on A&E.

 

[MysticMisty]

What happened to both Discovery and History is the Obama administration cut off the funding. Prior to that the US government gave out millions of dollars a year for the production of educational programming which is how most of this stuff was funded.

Not really, the shit changes started way back during the Bush era. If they were playing misleading "a landslide will cause a thousand-foot wave to destroy the east coast of the US" programs in 2004, four years before Obama was even elected, the cracks were already there. Come to think of it I don't think there were many documentaries or anything really educational by the time 2008 even rolled around anyways, so I'd say the cuts were in response to already cut programming, and not the opposite.

 

[whatever I feel like]

>Dr. Pimple Popper

Signing up for Discovery+ rn.

Can't resist my all-consuming fetish. Pray for me.

She used to give away her wares for free on Youtube. Fucking Discovery taking away my second person pimple popping satisfaction.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

The cracks started to show around 2004 I want to say. That was when I saw my dad had put on a dubious program that he and my mom were watching. It quickly went from about how a landslide caused a locally massive tsunami in an Alaskan bay in the 50's to how a volcanic eruption will cause one of the Canary Islands to split in half and collapse, and send a massive wave across the Atlantic that will destroy the east coast. Complete with shitty CGI cities being destroyed by a thousand+ foot wave and a scientist saying that people on the east coast should run for high ground if they hear about an eruption in the Canary Islands. This is more or less physically impossible, but the program still aired without disclaimers.

The absolute last straw was a "documentary" about opening ta new "tomb" discovered in the Valley of the Kings. This was around 2006 or so, and the "documentary" some months or a year later, well after the opened it up and found that it was basically just a storage cache. In particular the program was about opening a sealed coffin that turned out to be empty. All of this was major news back when it happened, so I thought the program would be about how they go about opening the tomb/artifacts/coffin and how they preserve it as it's prepared to open. Nope, it was 59 minutes of going "is there a new mummy in the coffin?!?!?!?!" and the last minute going "oh yeah it was finally opened on this date and only had supplies in it". I found it incredibly deceptive since the ads made it sound like there'd actually be something substantial in the program, and never tuned into Discovery again.

I'm sure I've seen that, but it looks like we can blame the BBC for hyping it in 2000:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322598/

Megatsunami - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In a BBC television documentary broadcast in 2000, experts said that they thought that a landslide on a volcanic ocean island is the most likely future cause of a megatsunami.[40] The size and power of a wave generated by such means could produce devastating effects, travelling across oceans and inundating up to 25 kilometres (16 mi) inland from the coast. This research was later found to be flawed.[41] The documentary was produced before the experts' scientific paper was published and before responses were given by other geologists. There have been megatsunamis in the past,[42] and future megatsunamis are possible but current geological consensus is that these are only local. A megatsunami in the Canary Islands would diminish to a normal tsunami by the time it reached the continents.[43] Also, the current consensus for La Palma is that the region conjectured to collapse is too small and too geologically stable to do so in the next 10,000 years, although there is evidence for past megatsunamis local to the Canary Isles thousands of years ago. Similar remarks apply to the suggestion of a megatsunami in Hawaii.[44]

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tsunami/once-nf.html

NOVA did a doc about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. That companion page lists the allegedly faulty info about the Canary Islands.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Long ago, Shark Week on Discovery Channel was documentaries about sharks. But with reality TV, it's just shark-related "reality TV". Than again, the whole channel and all other "educational TV" went that way, in a very Fahrenheit 451 and Idiocracy way.

 

[Dysnomia]

the streaming service bubble can pop anytime now

I'm eagerly waiting. What was once a good alternative to cable has bloated into a hideous monster begging for a merciful death.

Discovery has sucked for ages. It's not much different from TLC. Discovery Times channel was great but that went off the air 15 years ago.

It's all trash reality TV because that's what got them viewers.

Paying for it at all should be ad free.

Didn't Hulu start airing ads even for paid subscribers?

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Didn't Hulu start airing ads even for paid subscribers?

I don't subscribe to them so I wouldn't know but if so then I'm glad I haven't.

 

[MysticMisty]

I'm sure I've seen that, but it looks like we can blame the BBC for hyping it in 2000:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322598/

Megatsunami - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tsunami/once-nf.html

NOVA did a doc about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. That companion page lists the allegedly faulty info about the Canary Islands.

If that's the case the cracks are even older than I thought, if they possibly were airing this four years earlier than I knew about. It's a far cry from the documentary about sending a robotic probe with a camera into the depths of the great pyramid I remember watching with my family in the mid 90's. Nothing dubious, or misleading, just straight forward "we sent a camera up into tiny tunnels in the pyramid and this is what we found". If I knew what it was called I would actually watch it again.

History Channel wasn't immune to this either. Up until they stopped showing them, my dad was really into the WWII docs and other regular history programs. One day also in the mid 00's he was watching an episode of one of these regular shows. I forget what it was called, but this particular episode was about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa (aka Krakatau). It straight up lied about the progression of the eruption, and I called it out on that (having read about the eruption in books). My dad got mad and refused to believe his precious History Channel would lie, though.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Not really, the shit changes started way back during the Bush era. If they were playing misleading "a landslide will cause a thousand-foot wave to destroy the east coast of the US" programs in 2004, four years before Obama was even elected, the cracks were already there. Come to think of it I don't think there were many documentaries or anything really educational by the time 2008 even rolled around anyways, so I'd say the cuts were in response to already cut programming, and not the opposite.

For me, History Channel was the mad notes back in the late 1990's and early 2000's but in the second half of the 2000's it took a weird turn.

From around 2003-2007, it was "The Hitler Channel" with its excessive coverage of WWII but you still got quite a few good specials. 2007 is when we first started seeing the cracks with Ice Road Truckers and Ax Men but you still had decent shows like Gangland (one of the last good History Channel shows IMO) and one-season wonders like Clash of the Gods.

Around the early Obama years, that's when History fully jumped the shark with Ancient Aliens, ghosts and conspiracies fully becoming the norm, and the first wave of reality show BS cementing itself.

Now it's all reality show BS and Ancient Aliens marathons on Fridays.

As much as we complained about "The Hitler Channel" days in the mid-late 2000's, at least WWII was actual history.

You always did have paranormal and supernatural elements on History Channel even back in the 90's and early 2000's but it was different.

You had stuff like History's Mysteries, Decoding the Past, and the original Haunted History as early as the late 90's when the channel was in its infancy but it was more about the history behind these old legends as opposed to "Aliens built the Great Pyramids" being presented as possible fact. Even specials like Vampire Secrets focused more on the history of the vampire genre and the history and folklore that influenced it.

 

[MysticMisty]

Around the early Obama years, that's when History fully jumped the shark with Ancient Aliens, ghosts and conspiracies fully becoming the norm, and the first wave of reality show BS cementing itself.

That's because they wanted to catch up to Discovery, which was well ahead of them on that front. Ice Road Truckers was just a lame imitation of Deadliest Catch (which itself I was never interested in watching), but obviously some people were interested in a History version of what Discovery was already doing. But really, if they weren't interest in getting the facts of a famous volcanic eruption right in one of their regular programs, in a presumed attempt to make it more "interesting" (it didn't, the truth is way more interesting), they were destined to die in some way or another.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I checked out Curiosity stream

They had a series of documentaries called the Story of Europe. It's hosted by Christopher Clark and it started off well enough, but I kept noticing the word diversity pop up from time to time.

The last episode he goes Full Remain and explains how Brexit is bad and how Populist Nationalists like Trump and Putin are a threat to western world.

And it's like you just got done explaining why the French revolted against a nobility class who were vastly out of touch with society.