Now I don't watch Court TV, because, namely, it's Court TV, and I can't think of much that is less interesting than watching legal proceedings. That said, I'd rather have it around than yet another channel that is adulterated by the blight that is "reality TV". Here comes "truTV"....

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

ToSeeked

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Their new slogan is especially ironic/sickening; "It's not reality, it's actuality!"

Um, no. It's TV. It's footage carefully chosen to attract viewers and edited for content.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

This really bugs me. As someone who's always enjoyed the occasional true crime investigation show, this seems like an enormous step downward--but one no doubt driven by the market.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

Is their content really going to change that much? I think they have been moving this way for a while now, it started off with more actual courtroom shows, lately they air COPS reruns and forensic shows more than court room type shows.

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-Sabrina

But then they are coming out with a channel called "Discover Investigations" (or something like that) for all of the forensics shows...

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Call me crazy, but wouldn't actual courtroom footage, unedited, be much closer to "actuality"?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

if OJ would just off a few more people, then maybe Court TV wouldn't have to change..

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"blacker than the blackest black... times infinity."- Nathan Explosion
The.. Best.. Thread..Ever...

Maybe you missed the 'endless' (6 months) Phil Spector trial they covered earlier this year, resulting in a hung jury and a late 2008 retrial.

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I don't actually watch Court TV. But even that is still real life, or at least a closer approximation of it than a reality show.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

In "actuality", the channel did actually broadcast municipal level court proceedings from around the nation. That was some time ago, though. Back when the channel(like a many others) followed their name and programming intention.

While it was no LAW & ORDER, it's lack of artifice(hummy cctv and all) and complete grounding in reality made it fairly riveting. Kind of like when you have to go to court for some petty traffic ticket and the poor slob in front of you is being put through a reenactment of Ben Franklin before the Privy Council.

It was hard to watch the show and not be overcome with a sense of "There but for the grace of God...."

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random youtube observation #83:
Nana Mouskouri without glasses is like peanut butter without jelly, like yin without yang, spic without span...

What's the point of "reality" tv? A) Anytime you introduce a film-crew, people don't act the same as they "really" would. 2) I thought the point of watching non-educatonal/news television was to escape reality. Why would I want to watch "reality" to escape reality?

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

Schadenfreude?

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"That's Not Blight. It's New Jersey" - The Wall Street Journal

gesundheit!

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.

To make money. They don't have to pay writers, professional actors etc. No fancy special effects. It's cheap television for bankrupt minds.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

But again, you've got to figure that showing trials is pretty cheap, too, and for a lot of the same reasons. And you don't need fancy locales, either; you don't pay for sets at all except insomuch as your taxes fund them.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Yes, that's true, but the cheapness of the show is only part of it; they also have to be showing something that enough people will want to watch. TV, after all, is a business. The more people watch their channel in a given time slot, the more money they can charge to have commercials run during those hours. That's also why you see more of the cheapest of the cheap ads late at night and early in the morning--selling things I won't write about, due to the younger viewers on this site.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a yo-yo.-Enoch Root, The Confusion
When I was a kid, if someone brandished a shrink gun he'd get a little bit of respect!-Myron Reducto, Harvey Birdman

Looks like they've dropped the "psychic detective" shows...

...which is a good thing.

Moved to OTB. Not space or astronomy media.

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Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein