First is the complaint about the lack of history on the history channel these days.  Granted Modern Marvels is indeed sometimes historical, but generally not so much, as most often it focuses on the today of the situation.  But the show where they moving big things, most often buildings really just does not belong at all in a historical context.

It use to be on back in the not so long ago time period of when I was purposefully living without a television set (or least with no real access to any real sustainable decent connect) when I would visit somewhere I would immediately flip to see what was on the history channel.  Usually this would result in my being drawn into to epic history of real substance,  a good historically set movie or at the very least something that aired originally in a different format that had been adapted to something for the network.   Today, my situation finds me with a television system that readily gets the network and it is only out of extreme boredom that I even bother to check what the listings are on the History network.

Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men, MonsterQuest & especially Life After People are shows that have been on in prime time no less in the last year.  None of those shows really has anything to do at all with history in way.  Most of them are some kind of adaptation of reality shows that the History Channel clearly feels it needs to do in order to be competitive, but in so doing, it has diluted and in my opinion alienated the very folks that made the network viable to begin.   Life After People actually takes the idea of history to the absurd and looks to the future, sometimes millions of years, at what will happen if people suddenly died off in some sort of cataclysm disaster.

I have wondered more then a few times just exactly what happened?  It started occurring well before the current economic downturn, but maybe the cost of making decent historical documentary or dramas was just to expensive.  It is clearly a lot cheaper to catch a few people working on some task over and over in repetition and edit until only the highlights of things going wrong, such as a crane dropping a log or catching on fire – and then follow this up with anxiety on the part of the people involved to top it off nicely.

I have also thought that maybe they have exhausted all the things historical that would be a worth to a audience and given that they only have the dregs left they need to explore other options until some new slant on all of history comes along that they can explore.   Who are we kidding though, there are a million years of history and few million events that could be explored in the relatively short time period of recorded history.

And recently, after seeing the very nice job Ken Burns did with the a huge mini-series on PBS about the National Parks.  I have to dismiss both of those.  He took something that had not been addressed before, at least to my knowledge, and worked from its beginning right up to the modern day in a series that resulted in maybe ten hours of viewing time.  It was beautiful, enriching, and HISTORICAL.  Further, if you break up into one hour slots, including the few extras that were not aired, but on the web and you have an entire season.

No, I really think they have split out into about five networks, like Military History, History International, and so on.  As they have done this have watered things down and stretched to thin.  So know, occasionally there is still some good history on the History Channel, but it so far and few in between making the effort to find is hardly worth it.

So to anyone on the history channel that may be listening, please change things back to a historical perspective.  And hey, if you want to have a reality show about axe-men logging, that is fine.  Just require that they use only what tools were available to loggers in say, the mid-1800’s and give it a nice competitive flair from that perspective.  Take it a step further and go after my own personal preference – reality show that focuses on training school for medieval warriors, or knights if you will.  Have a serious a competitions from the competitors along the way and culminate in a grand tournament that includes actual jousting!

** – Image from the History Channel