Thoughtnami™

DISCLAIMER: The following is part two of a multipart alternate history series about the history of  Doctor Who  if it was an American-made production rather than a British production. It's purely speculative and a work of fiction, although some real-world elements were included and presented for realistic situations and scenarios. Neither this series nor its author are connected to nor reflect the views and opinions of BBC Studios (the owner of the  Doctor Who  franchise) or any entity or persons mentioned and does not mean to infringe on the copyrights and trademarks of those parties. - JH “There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are. This is not one of them, this is an opportunity. Whatever happens here will create its own timeline, its own reality, a temporal tipping point. The future revolves around you, here, now, so do good!” - The Doctor After CBS canceled Doctor Who in 1971 , Universal signed a deal with ABC to pick...

I was watching Weird Al Yankovic’s 1989 cult classic UHF and thinking about how a guy like George Newman, played by Yankovic, radically transformed a low-tier independent UHF channel and made it must-see-TV. For a while, creating a network was a dream of mine. But television changed, and not for the better. And it all began with the death of independent television. I grew up in the 1980s. The younger half of Generation X, the MTV Generation, the Pepsi Generation, or as demographic analysts call us, nonexistent. Apparently, there are Boomers and Millennials and there were no humans born between them from 1965 to 1984 (by the way, that’s Harvard’s recent definition of the makeup of my generation), but I digress. The 1980s was the first TV decade fully in color on the local level in the United States. Cable was still largely in its infancy, but local television still held its own. If you were a kid with a decent antenna or a cable box in your house, television was pretty dang awesome. Ca...

The vacant shell of a building of a network that barely exists. I no longer have Cartoon Network.  For the first time since May 1995, I no longer have access to Cartoon Network. I don't think I'll ever get it back, and quite frankly, I don't think I need it, and they're really not giving any reason to want to resubscribe to the channel any time soon. And for the first time since I heard about the channel's creation back in 1991, I'm fine not having it. I never thought I'd be in a position where I no longer feel the need to watch Cartoon Network let alone support the channel because, for all intents and purposes, Cartoon Network is dead, and Adult Swim killed it. Not David Zaslav because, let's be honest, he's not thinking of what happens to Cartoon Network. Despite what so many people think, I doubt his final thoughts before he goes to bed is "How can I screw over Cartoon Network viewers and fans in the morning?" Way too many animation fans...

DISCLAIMER: The following is part one of a multipart alternate history series about the history of Doctor Who if it was an American-made production rather than a British production. It's purely speculative and a work of fiction, although some real-world elements were included and presented for realistic situations and scenarios. Neither this series nor its author are connected to nor reflect the views and opinions of BBC Studios (the owner of the Doctor Who franchise) or any entity or persons mentioned and does not mean to infringe on the copyrights and trademarks of those parties. - JH “There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are. This is not one of them, this is an opportunity. Whatever happens here will create its own timeline, its own reality, a temporal tipping point. The future revolves around you, here, now, so do good!” - The Doctor Prologue: The Nail For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. Fo...

I have a modest proposal to celebrate the television medium historically on the federal level. Do you know how there's an annual list of films inducted into the National Film Registry (2022's list is quite eclectic)? The group responsible for that is the National Film Preservation Board (the NFPB). Formed in 1988, the Library of Congress-based agency has selected films that are deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Similarly, a National Recording Preservation Board (the NRPB) at the LoC does the same for sound recordings such as speeches and music in National Recording Registry.   It is important to preserve our media history, and the NFPB and NRPB do that on the federal level. That said, there should be a similar federal-level board that preserves culturally, historically or aesthetically significant American-made television programs.  Not television news archives since there are many, many, many organizations dedicated to that, most nota...

Starting today, I'm putting up a few of my older articles I wrote for my Post account.  For those who wonder what Post was, think Twitter, but for journalists and writers who talked a lot about anything. Considering I liked to do that, this was a draw for me. Sadly, Post didn't last and ended earlier in 2024. I'm not going to repost everything I made there (a few were a little too personal), just a small selection of Post articles that still resonate and seem like a good read. Enjoy - jh.  I was thinking about how cable television was once used as a tool against public television by Congress only to become irrelevant in educational programming by the turn of the century.  It all began where a lot of weird modern media trends began - the 1990s.  Back in the 1990s, politicians threatened to cut public broadcasting funding and pushed broadcast networks to provide three hours of weekly E/I programming because they said that cable provided similar programming without taxp...