Network Decay / Major Shifts That Fit

The channel has been pushing or narrowing the limits on what they can show without leaving their genre entirely and/or are being too over-reliant on a Cash-Cow Franchise or two, but at least what they are doing still fits the original mission somewhat.

Nickelodeon Examples

• Nickelodeon has been narrowing its preferred demographic year after year. The programming lineup was originally built around kids ages 4-15 (aka the "tween" demographic), but between 1996 and 2007 it broadened its scope to include older teens and families in general by adding in live-action shows. Trying to emulate the success of Disney Channel, Nick spent the late 2000s transitioning into a channel for "tween" girls, and between 2009 and 2012, their lineup began to focus more on live-action series that at the time had a musical gimmick that could be exploited for more profit... along with several hours of SpongeBob reruns daily. By the early 2010s, the channel focused more on the 2-11 demographic by pushing Nick Jr. shows and cartoons.
  • Victorious was cancelled despite good ratings. Most speculation points to the executives not making enough of a profit on the musical side of the show and that it was skewing too old. iCarly kept skewing older the longer it went on, and Nick was content to let the show end when the cast and creators felt it should. To replace them in the lineup, Nick decided to create two Spin-Off shows. Sam & Cat includes Jennette McCurdy and Ariana Grande continuing in the title roles, and Gibby from iCarly had a pilot but wasn't picked up. All of these characters skew to the tween demographic and are regularly made trending topics on Twitter.
  • True Jackson, VP, The Troop and a potential sequel to Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide set in high school were buried for not appealing to the tween market (derisively referred to at the time as the "Tiger Beat crowd"). In True Jackson's case, another aspect was Nick not wanting more than one live-action show with a black lead on the channel at a time and cancelled it to air How to Rock instead (which itself was cancelled after six months).
  • Interestingly, you can see how Nick was trying so intensely to narrow down the age of people watching the network when you look at the failure of shows like Invader Zim. And by "failure", we really mean "it was being watched primarily by teens and college kids, not the 6-11-year-olds that Viacom wanted." Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra would've gone the same way as Zim if it weren't for the fact that they are just as popular with the target age as it was with the teens, college kids, and adults. Even then, the network seemed to resent the attention both series got from older viewers, as new episodes came out at a snail's pace and reruns were rarely shown, not to mention the Screwed by the Network incident of Korra where it was unceremoniously kicked off of TV in the second half of its final season and could only be watched on the Nickelodeon website.
  • For several months in 2013, during reruns of shows like SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly OddParents!, Nickelodeon aired Nick Studio 10, a live show about four teenagers doing random stuff like dressing as pieces of bread and singing about farting in a jar in the style of The Lonely Island, something the target audience wouldn't get. While the show's scope and scale was rather impressive, it was their method of promoting that received the most controversy... because Nick would interrupt reruns of shows at random points important or the funniest parts of the show) to air a random clip of something or a NS10 skit. This overpromotion turned off many viewers who found the show stupid and unappealing, and NS10 would be shown the door by June.
  • After scandalously severing ties with Dan Schneider's production company, the network began focusing more on its animated product, even planning a large-scale revival of classic Nicktoon characters, including rumors of a multiverse. However, the revival ended almost as soon as it began after Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie aired to pitiful ratings against Trolls Holiday despite glowing reviews — the only other completed revivals, Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling and Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus were sold off to Netflix (as opposed to airing on the main network); and a resulting executive shake-up (which saw Brian Robbins take over as Nick's head honcho) led to de-emphasize the cable platform in favor of digital contents (considering that kids are more likely to spend time with mobile devices than watching TV, this wasn't totally unexpected), as well as re-exploring the network's live-action properties.
  • As of January 2021, Nickelodeon now broadcasts select NFL games ^note With modifications to the broadcast and on-screen graphics to fit the Nickelodeon theme. airing on CBS, of all things, to increase simulcast ratings. This is similar to the practice FOX Family used following ratings issues after its rebrand, and what ESPN did with producing an alternate broadcast for Monday Night Football on ESPN2 that features Peyton and Eli Manning chatting over the game.
• Nicktoons dumped older Nicktoons such as The Angry Beavers, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Rugrats, Hey Arnold!, and Invader Zim in favor of showing reruns of the exact same shows playing on Nickelodeon just a few channels away. It began getting rid of even recent Nicktoons and replacing them with standardized superhero adaptations and bizarre infomercial programming consisting of a cartoon for the NFL and a Skechers kid's shoe line. It also started adding live-action programming, such as the "Nicktoons Comedy Breakfast" block (featuring reruns of Drake & Josh, The Troop, and Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide). Doug, meanwhile, was pulled because its production company, Jumbo Pictures, was acquired by Disney. (It would move to ABC's kids block for a few years as the retooled Brand Spanking New! Doug, later Disney's Doug.)
  • As of November 2015, the channel has basically become NickToo, airing programs the main channel won't devote their time to...including the above-mentioned live-action shows. The channel has also followed the main channel's footsteps in terms of airing several reruns of SpongeBob SquarePants daily.^note It's worth noting that, unlike with the main channel, SpongeBob is mainly restricted to watershed hours on Nicktoons, when the show's target audience would be asleep. The channel compensates by having nearly the entire watershed period dedicated to the show.
• Nick GAS (Games and Sports): This channel was for Nick's game and sports-themed shows along with original segments dealing with kids and their games and sports — Viacom's answer to GSN. Like the former Game Show Network, GAS slowly lost programs until by the end it was airing reruns of a few old Nick games, having lost all of the original segments and programming. It was finally replaced with the teen-oriented "The N" which was formerly part of Noggin (see below), a switch which left millions of college kids without reruns of Legends of the Hidden Temple to sarcastically comment about.
  • The N quickly decayed with a mass-canning of much of their teen/young adult-oriented programming such as South of Nowhere and Instant Star, and began devoting an increasing amount of airtime to old Nickelodeon shows, other Disney Channel-esque tween fare, and reruns of UPN stalwart One on One because it can be run for pennies per airing.
• Noggin was originally a collaboration with Sesame Workshop and focused on education for older kids and teens. The original tween/teen shows were eventually relegated to an overnight block called "The N" (standing for Noggin), with the rest of the schedule now being occupied by preschool shows. In 2009, Noggin was temporarily retired (its channel space was replaced by the Nick Jr. Channel), but Noggin was revived in 2015 as a streaming app. The streaming app saw its own decay, since it started out hosting many of the original Noggin channel's shows (like Oobi, Jack's Big Music Show, and The Upside Down Show), but in 2020, these shows were removed in favor of new ones.
• Nick at Nite started out in 1985 as the after-dark portion of Nickelodeon where they showed decades-old TV shows like The Munsters, I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show in the late-night hours where there was no need for non-parental programming due to the lack of kid and teen audiences. As time went on difference between the current year and when the rerunning shows launched started to narrow, with Taxi, Happy Days (and its later spin-offs) Roseanne, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Then the motto changed to "The Place for Modern TV Hits" and it started airing shows barely/not quite out of first run, like Scrubs, Everybody Hates Chris, and even Glenn Martin, DDS, an original show. It also began airing more movies, original content, and more family-focused programs and reran The George Lopez Show to absurd extremes. Currently, it's airing Friends reruns not seen since the mid-2000's when the UK's Channel Four pretty much was "The Friends Channel" to extremes. Somewhere in-between Friends and George Lopez, they aired The Nanny reruns to extremes. More recently, it's added Mom to its list of reruns and has dropped The Nanny reruns. And on top of this, the last several SpongeBob reruns each day are being aired under the block as well.
• In October 2012, Nick Jr. premiered a block of mother-oriented shows at 10pm called NickMom, complete with advertising. Granted, most of the Nick Jr. target audience is in bed by then... but Nick Jr. didn't have east coast/west coast feeds, so what aired at 10pm in the east started at 7pm on the West Coast and 4pm/5pm^note dependent on Daylight Saving Time in Hawaii. To say that parents in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Honolulu who were looking for Franklin and Dora were unhappy when they instead got stand-up comediennes talking about how painful their vaginas were after childbirth and episodes of The Brady Bunch with Carol snarking up the reruns Pop Up Video-style is a serious understatement (most of the #nickmom tag for social media started out filled with outright hate for the new programming). The associated blog site for the network even drew controversy when it made fun of children with food disabilities and people affected by Hurricane Sandy, as well as using actual photos of children without permission.
  
  Ratings for the NickMom block plummeted, with competitors Disney Junior and Sprout finding more success with continuing to air preschool programs in primetime. By mid-2013, the block's premier programs were either canceled or retooled to be a little more appropriate, and reruns of acquired sitcoms and movies (such as The New Adventures of Old Christine, Yes, Dear, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, See Dad Run and Rugrats, which used to air on the Nick Jr. block around the mid-1990s, and eventually made to regular Nick Jr. programming for a short stint in summer 2014) were added, making it a little more tolerable to watch. Nick Jr. also very quietly added a West Coast feed in early 2013 the first moment they could. Eventually, though, NickMom died anyway—the block ended with little fanfare on the night of September 28, 2015.
  • Beginning in 2015, the channel began to air non-preschool programming at random hours of the day. The reason? Viacom thought that the shows in question (Winx Club, Mia and Me, Kuu Kuu Harajuku, Regal Academy and Mysticons) would be out of place on Nicktoons as most of the series that got treated like this were aimed at girls and not their ideal demographic of boys. This even extended to programming not fitting this criteria like Rugrats ^note  which did air on the Nick Jr. block in the '90s as a special program for the summer. This also happened to The Muppet Show and The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss around the same time. ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks, Harvey Beaks, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, LEGO City Adventures, LEGO Jurassic World: Legend of Isla Nublar, and, surprisingly enough, The Loud House and Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In some of these cases, they were only simulcasts done to boost premiere ratings.
    • Another example of a non-preschool show airing on Nick Jr was when the Latin American feed aired SpongeBob SquarePants in the summer of 2021, which didn't last long.

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Other "Major Shifts That Fit" examples:

• Discovery HD Theater was rebranded as the auto-focused Velocity . It still fits because they show a bunch of car-related programming, like Chasing Classic Cars, Wheeler Dealers, and World Rally Championship coverage, and is a good rebranding now that networks that are just pure demonstrations of HD programming on a constant loop are no longer needed.
  • Velocity has begun to show signs of slippage outside prime-time hours (especially between roughly 3 a.m. and noon Eastern Time), where other Discovery shows that have nothing to do with cars air, such as "Undercover Double Life," "Man vs. Wild," and "World's Strangest UFO Stories."
  • Further keeping its concept in check, Discovery, through its Motor Trend joint venture with Source Interlink, announced the rebranding of the network to Motor Trend Network in fall 2018.
  • Its Canadian equivalent began as a straight simulcast of the SD version, and then got replaced by "Discovery HD Theatre" (a Canadian equivalent to the aforementioned HD Theater), and was re-branded as just "Discovery HD" in 2009 (despite the name, it? still a separate channel from the main network, who would re-launch its actual HD feed in June 2011). It became mostly an overflow channel for HD reruns of shows from the main network and other U.S. Discovery Channel shows that couldn't fit on the main network. The Canadian version went down its own road and re-branded as Discovery World in 2010, which was pretty much the same sheep in different clothing, but with a supposed "international" focus. On February 12, 2015, the network finally caught up with its U.S. equivalent and became Discovery Velocity. A few non-automotive shows (i.e. Dual Survival) still slipped through the cracks.
• MAVTV in the United States started out its history in 2004 as what could kindly be described as a clone "No Budget SpikeTV", meant to be an even more coarse and crude than the latter with blatant programs meant only to appeal to men such as Manumentaries (profiles of only 'manly men') and Bikini All-Stars, which was filled with fanservice, but without any of that messing acting or any written plots, and just a half-hour of women in the thinnest of bikinis being leered over uncomfortably by men. It got carriage mainly by being very cheap to pick up by cable providers but really didn't get viewership for much more than its motorsports programming, where all of its issues could be ignored for great coverage of races. Soon though (especially after a second season of the equally clonish "Jackass but for women" Rad Girls bombed), it was pretty well on the road to ruin as providers began to drop it and the entire 'lad culture' that allowed MAVTV to get on the air in the first place was on a quick decline. By 2010, its primetime was made up of low-cost Canadian content dramas that usually portend a network's doom, as they might not pay any money to air them, but the advertisers are always horrid on them.
  • However, that motorsports coverage? It was provided mainly by Lucas Oil, a lubricant company that was really interested in spreading their name around and increasing their name value. The motorsports coverage was the only time the network had a pulse, and as the network's schedule declined, so did its value. Lucas Oil saw this and knowing that controlling a network with only their programming, despite the hassle of running a network, would be a lot better than renting time on the channel and seeing their audience melt away because of Bikini All-Stars. The company bought MAVTV at a bargain in 2011, and quickly made several deals for films and TV shows with studios in order to de-ghettoize the network from being only "for men". Bikini All-Stars and Manumentaries were gone, and for a few years, Lucas Oil built up their motorsports inventory for the network while getting rid of the "man network" riffraff. By 2015, the films and TV shows were gone, and MAVTV took advantage of a bunch of motorsports programming being homeless from the Speed Channel-to-FS 1 transition in order to make MAVTV a pure 'all-motorsports all the time' network that nobody would be ashamed to keep on at any time of the day.
• Cuatro TV in Spain once prided themselves in that they were "the only pure TV channel in Spain", offering "just TV series and made-for-TV shows, no movies, no reality shows, no celebrity gossip shows." Eventually all of those genres found their way into the schedule. Welp. Since their name is so generic (it just means "Four", similar to Das Vierte in Germany), they got away with a major shift without invalidating their name.
• The Playboy Channel probably goes here, in that it's still showing naked people. Originally, the channel showed video Playmate layouts and short, tasteful softcore movies that sometimes actually had well-written, endearing stories. Much like the original's Magazine Decay, the channel's kept the sex and lost the class, and now shows (randomly renamed) hardcore movies and a near-endless barrage of "reality" shows, including more than one that could be described as "Big Brother where they show the sex".
• The homogenization of BET (Black Entertainment Television) following its sale to Viacom (which didn't correspond to an increase in production values) led to its decline. They canned their news programs and started to be more restrictive as to what and who they played on their music blocks. Back in The '90s, it was easy for you to be seen on BET if you were black and MTV refused to play you. Nowadays, groups like Public Enemy, to say nothing of Alternative Hip Hop or black rock acts, wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being played if they had gotten started today. They used to play old-school vids from The '80s and The '90s on 106 & Park's "Old School Jam of the Day", but this was later replaced with the "Flashback of the Day", showing vids that are only a couple of years old. VJs (Free and AJ) even lampshaded this, and their vocal criticism of BET's direction is believed to be part of the reason why they were let go. Naturally, the rise of the internet supplanted television as a major source for music, which led to the axing of all regularly-airing music programming and the eventual cancellation of 106 & Park in 2014.
  • By 2010, BET was airing reruns of many black sitcoms from the past decade to follow the mini-marathon format most cable networks utilize. BET would also return to producing scripted series, with The Game (2006), after its cancellation from The CW, being its best-known example. In 2017, BET was named one of Viacom's "flagship brands" to put their resources behind. Yet, since then, other shows produced by BET were almost always short-runners and were usually cancelled after one season. It doesn't help that after overexposing the same pool of '90s-2000s sitcoms for years, BET would devote the lion's share of its daytime lineup to Tyler Perry sitcoms.
• The History Channel originally centered on series and specials that dealt with historical events, primarily those that happened in American history. As time went on, however, only a handful of shows devoted to its original purpose appeared on the schedule, which is now predominately occupied by reality shows (such as Pawn Stars, American Pickers, Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers and the U.S. version of Top Gear) that revel in occupations such as logging, truck driving, and car racing, as well as pseudoscientific affairs about UFO sightings.
  • H2 was similarly founded as History International, and was founded to center on world history; when it rebranded as H2, it more or less offered reruns of the same shows seen on its parent network.
• To watch the Travel Channel, you'd think the only reason to travel would be to play poker, to find ghosts, or most importantly, to try the unusual, sometimes disgusting local foods. See Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, Food Paradise, and Man v. Food for examples. In fairness, many people do travel with trying the local food in mind; eating the interesting foreign food is usually a highlight of foreign travel. No doubt a program of the most haunted restaurants with the best/strangest cuisine would be the ultimate fusion for both. Eventually they were bought by Food Network's parent company in 2010.^note The Travel Channel, and its movie-based predecessor, is also mentioned on Total Abandonment. Scripps sold its cable network division to Discovery in 2018 (returning the network to that company's control for a second time), and Discovery decided to veer into a paranormal/conspiracy direction for the network. In October 2018, a branding executive changed the network's name to "Trvl", presumably for trademarking reasons à la Sci-Fi Channel becoming Syfy.
• Food Network began with cooking shows and has branched out into contests and reality shows...but every single one of these still has to do heavily with food and fits the network and every new personality has a background in the culinary arts. This can more or less be traced back to the surprise popularity of Iron Chef, which managed to catch that ever-popular 18-35 crowd. It's not even that much of a loss, since the channel still airs cooking shows during the daytime (when the target demographic for cooking shows—stay-at-home parents—are, well, at home), as well as the establishment of the Cooking Channel (which is owned by the same parent company and airs a lot of old Food Network reruns).
• Lifetime Television used to be the health/medical channel, or at least on Sundays. A third-party company bought the entire Sunday schedule to air shows they produced about such things as open-heart surgery, not just for educating the public but intended for medical professionals. There was plenty of stuff for women (nutrition, childbirth, etc.), but then the deal expired and the shows were simply dropped. As Lifetime became "television for women", it would also become kind of a joke in the industry that all its shows seemed to revolve around women becoming independent, not because it's cool but for the reverse. This decay has been on so long that most people forget it wasn't always the home of execrable made-for-TV movies that prey on the fears of middle-aged suburban housewives.
• The Latin American version of Discovery Kids was launched in 1996 and initially consisted of either edutainment shows (like Ghost Writer), ecology shows that didn't quite fit on Discovery Channel or science shows mainly geared to early teens and adolescents (i.e., Popular Mechanics for Kids)...however, the number of older fans was dwindling and unable to support the channel. Then, in the early 2000s, somebody noticed a market gap with preschooler shows being limited to the mornings and it underwent an extreme shift towards the toddler and kindergarten demographics, becoming the first all-preschoolers channel in the region. By the start of The New '10s, with the launch of competitor channels Nick Jr., CBeebies, and Disney Junior, the channel began to add non-preschool programming once again, starting with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Transformers: Rescue Bots, two shows from what used to be the original Discovery Kids channel.
  • In the case of My Little Pony and Rescue Bots, the former show's target demographic is ages 5-12, and the latter show's target demographic is ages 7 and up. Both shows have a sizable amount of older fans, yet they're airing on a preschool-oriented network. While an attempt to air WordGirl was quashed by Moral Guardians who thought the series was "too violent", this did not stop the channel. While 75% of their programming is still geared towards preschoolers (including up to four daily hours of Peppa Pig), they have also premiered series such as Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, a children's version of MasterChef and Peanuts shorts titled Snoopy and Friends, as well as airing not exactly preschooler-friendly animated movies such as some of DreamWorks Animation's output.
• In Mexico, the children's channel ZAZ was launched in 1991 as a children's showcase station, even airing shows from Nickelodeon when that channel was still unknown in the region. In 1996, the channel expanded into all of Latin America, and was refocused into a "non-violent" channel with shows like Arthur, Muppet Babies (1984), Fraggle Rock, etc. staying with that format for over a decade. Somewhere in 2003 they started to focus on showcasing family movies but would move away from that direction and start airing an Argentinian teen soap opera called Rebelde Way in 2008. The following year, ZAZ would began airing anime series like Eyeshield 21, Kiba, Deltora Quest, Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple and Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds. Predictably, this change in programming was welcomed with all the love in the world by anime fans, coming off what happened to the local version of Animax. Rebelde Way was later dropped from the channel, and they were even premiering the Toku Madan Senki Ryukendo and informative sections about everything related to anime, manga, J-pop, etc. ZAZ also made commercials mocking its old "non-violent" profile, stating that they were more cool, less childish. However, this was short-lived, as due to a lack of profitability, ZAZ stopped airing new episodes of all its anime series in 2011 and later canned the rest of their programming. Eventually, many pay TV providers dropped the channel, including those operated by its owner, MVS, and ceased broadcasting with a whimper at the stroke of midnight on August 1, 2012.
• HGTV (Home and Garden Television) has a fairly broad umbrella of topics ^note (though it hasn't really aired a show involving a garden or gardening outside of the three-second 'hey we landscaped the house, it counts!' segment of their shows since the early 2000s, making part of its full name seem like an unneeded appendix). It still features seasonal specials about over-the-top Christmas and Halloween decoration, but for the most part it's dropped most of its quirkier programming. They've also discontinued most of their gardening, DIY, and specialist design shows ("Spice Up My Kitchen," "Mission:Organization") in favor of more general shows which focus on a designer rather than a specific space. The station devotes increasingly large blocks of time to House Hunters clones, shows which follow a format where potential homebuyers see three or four homes and then buy one, but even those shows still deal with the "H" in HGTV.
• Hungary's Filmmúzeum, as the name suggests, specialized in airing older, classic TV shows and movies. Its sister-channel, Zone Romantica, focused meanwhile on American soaps. In July 2012, these were respectively re-branded as Film Mánia and Film Café. Film Mánia now primarily shows movies from the '90s and 2000s, but the classic stuff hasn't been completely discarded either — they simply aren't prime-time material anymore. Film Café, while it still airs its former soaps, expanded its showcase with European series and various other romantic and comedy shows and movies aimed at women. Note that before 2nd July 2012, Zone Romantica in Poland shared the same feed with Hungary. Then on that date (when Hungarian version of Zone Romantica was rebranded as Film Café) the Polish version was separated and given the new feed.
• DoQ, a network broadcast in Hungary and its neighboring countries, started out in 2007 as a documentary station whose showcase consisted predominantly of "serious" docu and reality shows, as well as Docusoaps, biographical programs about the lives of famous people past and present, and various ancient report shows and talk shows. In 2012, it slowly became something of a "poor man's Discovery Channel", airing older Dirty Jobs and Miami Ink seasons, survival shows, and a number of other series dedicated to Guinness World Records, superhumans, unsolved mysteries, YouTube videos, Fort Boyard and just general weird stuff, apparently giving up its serious tone, but still showing primarily documentary-esque programming. In later years, DoQ expanded its programming with features borrowed from the History Channel, and in 2015, it started categorizing it content for each day of the week, with the more entertaining shows being pushed to Fridays, and Sundays being reserved for programs about religious mysteries. Instead of focusing on only recent productions, documentaries dating back to as far as the 90s are also given plenty of screentime, though part of the programming was made up by infomercials. Ratings dropped despite the changes, and the network was canceled in March 2019.
• The Argentinian Utilísima channel. It was originally the TV side of a media company dedicated exclusively to all things handmade. Cooking shows, handcrafts shows, sewing and knitting shows, you get the idea. Then in 2006, they were sold to the FOX Latin American group of channels, who basically let them stay the same, only with better production values. However, gradually it went to include more and more American lifestyle, cooking, and management reality shows, creating a mutant hybrid who looked like a blender of the old Utilísima, Casa Club (another cooking+handcraft+lifestyle channel), and the Latin feed of FOX Life. They were now basically aiming at a younger demographic with the same handcrafting tastes. Then, in the last days of 2013, it was announced that Utilisima and Fox Life would merge under the latter's name. The programming of the New Fox Life by now remains the same as the late Utilísima, only with some new shows.
  • On 1 July 2017, the channel was again rebranded as Nat Geo Kids. As its name implies, it's a children's version of its parent network, basically.
• The French channel AB Cartoons was, initially, devoted to classic cartoons and anime. In 1998, the channel decided to focus on just the anime, re-branding as Mangas (co-branded with a French anime magazine, D.Mangas).
• In late 2016, VH1 Classic was relaunched as MTV Classic, and originally focused on classic MTV programming. However, the new channel had even lower ratings than it did before, and in January 2017, MTV Classic retooled itself into yet another 24/7 music video station (specifically 80s, 90s, and early-to-mid 2000s music videos). Interestingly, this means MTV Classic has become what MTV used to be, as it's now devoted to showing nothing but music videos. MTV Classic's decline is actually a reverse of what happened to the main MTV network, right down to Classic airing the very same videos from when MTV was a music station. Predictably, the ratings have declined even further since switching to music videos and MTV Classic is currently one of the least-watched cable networks in America.
• Disney XD started out as a Spear Counterpart to the increasingly girl-geared Disney Channel. It aired cartoons, male-aimed live-action shows, and went for a Totally Radical vibe. Disney XD, however, became popular with girls due to airing cartoons that its sister channel usually didn't. That Disney Channel had been reduced to almost nothing but teen sitcoms and preschool programming as a result of its own decay was also a huge factor. By 2016, Disney XD had completely retooled itself; now going for a more geeky theme with a heavy focus on animation and gaming-related programs and events.
• Though it's not as bad as it was when it first made the jump in March 2004, GSN has still seen better days. At least the network is technically devoted to showing game shows again. Many of the classics it was known for showing have dropped off the lineup in recent years (and in many cases now air on GSN's direct competitor, the Fremantle-owned Buzzr subchannel), though the network has begun re-adding more of its classics to the schedule as of late, possibly in response to the success of the aforementioned Buzzr.
  • Speaking of Buzzr, programming that doesn't fit their mission has been making its way into their schedule. During its first month on air, reruns of Monster Garage and its sister show Monster House ran during the late-night hours. After years of not doing this, reruns of The Great Christmas Light Fight were added in 2019.
• The Canadian FX Networks, after the launch of FXX Canada. Parent company Rogers didn't have enough Canadian content, let alone acquired programming, to sustain another network. As a result, despite FXX in the U.S being geared towards comedies, FXX Canada had to rely on repeats of Murdoch Mysteries to fulfill CanCon obligations. Not helping matters was that the Canadian comedies Rogers did own the rights to, Seed and Package Deal, were shortrunners that only lasted 26 episodes each. The biggest problem, however, is that FXX seems to run on a looping schedule adopted by other Canadian networks as of late. In FXX's case, a two or three-hour block of programming is aired ad nauseam until primetime, compete with same episodes being aired over and over and over again. After the CRTC's new broadcast rules took effect in Fall 2017, FXX did the same thing to fulfill CanCon requirements, while FX Canada had adopted the same schedule pattern.
  • To go into detail, FXX Canada's CanCon block is, as of writing, airing one episode each of Mr. D (despite the show having produced 80 episodes), Young Drunk Punk (which only lasted 13 episodes), and Da Vinci's City Hall (13 episodes also). This two-hour block repeats over three times and is aired for seven hours from 5am to 12pm eastern. It can be argued that no one watches TV in the morning these days, but even still...
  • Another huge issue with FXX Canada is that, despite the channel's existence preventing a situation where new premieres from FX and FXX in the U.S could air at the same time, the American channel's original programming roster is slowly becoming nonexistent. FXX had no new programming to air during the Winter when It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia went on hiatus until Season 13 released. You're the Worst ended in 2018. Luckily, FXX Canada acquired Future Man to air in Sunny's place, and Sunny would eventually get a thirteenth and fourteenth season with a fifteenth on the way.
• Frisbee, an Italian cartoon channel, was originally created to air old Fox Kids shows that its brother channel K2 wasn't rerunning anymore (like older Power Rangers seasons or X-Men: The Animated Series). Then in 2013, it became a channel aimed at girls, and in 2015 it was further shifted to a preschooler channel. Reruns of K2 shows are still alive anyway, but only in the night timeframe between 1am and 7am.
• Disney Cinemagic was a channel that showed Disney movies and television shows that adapted them such as Lilo & Stitch: The Series, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Timon & Pumbaa and House of Mouse. Towards the end of the channel's run, shows that weren't based on pre-existing films, but were no longer run on the other Disney channels, like Bonkers, Dave the Barbarian, Kim Possible and Recess were added to the roster. It got to the point where shows that were still airing at the time like Phineas and Ferb and Bunnytown were also added to the lineup.
• While Fox News has always been known for reporting from a conservative point of view, up until the late 2000s it was still regarded as a credible news source, with the network claiming that any perceived right-wing bias came from primetime "editorial" programs like The O Reilly Factor and Hannity, while the rest of its programming was presented as "straight news".^note Despite this, liberal critics pointed to plenty of instances of right-leaning opinions being presented as fact in Fox's purported news blocks. But during the presidencies of Barack Obama and especially Donald Trump, Fox's schedule gradually became overtaken by programs explicitly designated by the network as opinion shows (including Tucker Carlson Tonight, The Ingraham Angle, and the morning show Fox And Friends) at the expense of the news shows, which have often been either pushed into dump hours or cancelled altogether. It has gotten to the point where some veteran Fox journalists, most notably Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace, left the network over both the shift and the increasingly extreme opinion hosts. Part of the reason for the shift is explained by a rise of competition during the late 2010s: fledgling networks such as Newsmax and One America News (OAN) have siphoned away major portions of Fox's viewership through offering fringe perspectives on the political climate; the increased focus in showcasing similar content is Fox's response in order to stave off their losses in ratings.
• At one point in time, anime channel Animax aired Elmo's World, a live-action show. It didn't last that long, likely because of the program not fitting the theme of an animation-centric network.
• The former South Korean feed of Disney Junior sometimes aired shows that weren't targeted at preschoolers, such as Pretty Rhythm: Rainbow Live, Kiratto Pri☆Chan, Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama, Rilu Rilu Fairilu, Secret Jouju, Catch! Teenieping and Phineas and Ferb. It's justified, however, as many of these were Korean productions or co-productions meant to fulfill Korean content quotas.
• Much like the American feed, the Japanese feed of Cartoon Network has a Cartoonito block. Most of the shows on it are for preschoolers, with the exception of one show: Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz.
  • The Italian feed of Cartoonito sometimes airs shows that aren't for preschoolers, like The Penguins of Madagascar, The Tom and Jerry Show and the localized version of Idol x Warrior Miracle Tunes!.
• NHK ETele mostly focuses on Edutainment Shows, but some of their programs don't fit under that banner, such as SpongeBob SquarePants, Love Live! Superstar!! and Nichijou.
• The former Pluto TV channel After School Cartoons played The Big Comfy Couch in the mornings despite it not being animated.

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