One by-product of the new, free, off air broadcast service are the amazing added benefits of the DIGITAL, STANDARD DEF CRAP STATIONS! There is the home shopping ghetto of the most horrifying garbage capitalism can offer it's most vulnerable credit card holders. There is random Korean, Chinese and Indian stations with their amazing and often incomprehensible cultural offerings. I love the Indian station SURSAGAR, which will run the most jaw dropping Indian films; truly Bollywood is the master of the medium. There are also the expected multiple Christian stations, in many languages. Interestingly there are now Muslim stations, that have copied the Christian Broadcasting format with endless talk shows, over produced singing and self imposed gravitas of scary badly mic'd apocalyptic preachers. I saw one that showed a live feed of the Haj at Mecca (which frankly, was very boring TV)
What I am most entranced by is the time tunnel into my own youth reflected by the "entertainment channels". It is a bounty of old school TV stations that do nothing but strip mine the American Television landscape of the 70's and 80's. It reminds me of growing up in the 1970's, when local stations, deprived of a network ran the back catalog of American TV series and movies to stay afloat. In Seattle we had channels 11 and 13 which were almost carbon copies of these new second their digital stations. It is like watching TV in my High School years again. There are several old movie stations locally that run a really awful cycle of 1980's sludge that is truly amusing. I avoid the Magnum PI reruns and Murder She Wrote, in favor of the movie stations. The absolute best among the worst is GRIT-TV, a Sinclair Broadcasting also-ran that is demographically tied to 25 year old to 75 year old shut-in males who are angry, have mullets, and presumably (by the advertising) diabetes and the will to sue someone for their misfortunes. The steady diet of B-Grade (and frankly some awesome) action films, war movies, westerns and general action star worship is fun to watch. The things most noted: The incredible lack of talent that the 1980s and 90's action stars had versus their predecessors. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Steve McQueen you name it, were light years ahead of Jen Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Stallone and Steven Seagal. The 1980's are painful to watch but the cheese is still alluring. The sad part is that this experience of craptasijc excess will again be a relatively short evolutionary period of media. These stations will last a few years and become slicker as they become less expensive to create. They will stop showing the old movies because the people who can relate to them will die off. It is like all things in my life, immediately available to be turned into a metaphor about driving my el Camino: Its fun for now but the euphoria isn't endless, and the trip will soon be over and all that will be left is a huge, bulbous flatualent mess in the driveway that begs to be relevant again.
