The Slow Downfall of the History Channel - How History Works

Please find a better narrator. This voice is annoying as hell.

Pawn Stars is a history show. People sell items from the past. We get a history lesson in said item. That’s history, folks.

Oak Island was a decade of nothing. Alcapone vaults on steroids

The one thing you didn't touch upon was the diminishing quality of their history programs. They used to be decent documentaries, back in the channel's early days. But by the time they were about to transition away from history programing, they were devoid of value. The narration was basic. The same background footage would be used repeatedly throughout the episode. The shows were built around commercial breaks, so tried to place hooks to increase the odds of people coming back post commercial. After where the commercial was supposed to go, the "documentary" would then repeat what it had said right before the commercial break, wasting time, reducing the amount of info the documentary could document.

Basically, before they even made the change in what their programs were, the history channel symbol on a documentary was already a warning of low quality.

But what happened to the Fireplace Channel? Do they claim aliens create fireplaces? The suspense is killing me!

History channel then: stuff about nazis and hitler
History channel now: conspiracy theories

As a europoor, I 1000000% blame the amerifats for this one

Why aren't you calling it the Hitler channel LOL

Modern marvels wasnt the problem, pawn stars was.

Basecly is the american tv childish culture

It's all hot garbage now.

Drunk History makes history interesting

The reason i didnt like modern marvels at first was because in the guide it said that Dogfights was coming and then it was that show so i hated without watching , i gave it a shot one day and it wasnt bad i did learned some stuff but then i thought "why is this on the history Channel??", then Ice trucker came , gave it a few episodes and was meh and i stopped watching the channel overall little by little . (I was 10 around this time ) i wanted to learn not how much an old poster with an autograph costs.

Perhaps we ran out of history? 🤷‍♂️

Honestly, the good thing about the conspiracy shows did was bring up absurd topics to try and justify their claims, like for example, the tunnels under Berlin. I found out about a lot of things through the conspiracy shows…okay, hold on, that sounds bad…uhm…Ah! I found out a lot of things by researching the absurd topics that I had previously to known about!

I’m going to be honest: you sound like you’ve plagiarized half the script from Quinton Reviews.

Sagan’s prophecy in The Demon Haunted World met Idiocracy.

This is our current status in 2024.

In 10 years, people will say “blimey, 2024 wasn’t that bad… look at today’s rubbish!”

And so on…

8:03 who is this and what show

Dogfights chads, where we at?

Ah yes, the "History" Channel....I grew up on it but for many years now it has not been very good at HISTORY. Howver, now we have CURIOSITY STREAM. Been a sub for 5 yrs now, $20/yr, go chk it out.

maybe they also did this to dumb people down

I remember watching ww2 in color and trying hard not to fall asleep , eventually i fell asleep and had a dream about being a soldier and fighting in a battle.

Comically, Ancient Aliens is more historical than most of the History Channel's shows now, since they use real historical events to support their wackjob conclusions.

History channel, broadcast direct to you from the Outer Limits of the Twilight Zone...

Storage wars was the final straw for me.

It used to be all Hitler, all the time. And that was ok. At least it was history. Sometimes there’d be the occasional medieval documentary or WWI in color, but I specifically remember the day I realized it was changing. There was an 18 hour block of “Ice Road Truckers.” After that they began slowly eliminating all history from the History Channel.

History channel is like Facebook, it used to be the shit, now its just shit

At least american pickers was pretty cool

At the end of the day they're a business operating to make a profit. I think a lot of people assume that they're some PBS-esque nonprofit that abandoned its founding principle - to make entertain and make money.

Some Hollywood movies portray history better than the current History Channel (1917 and the new version of Midway come to mind).

I grew up watching old History Channel documentaries about WWII. There's a small theater aboard USS Laffey (DD-724), one of the local museum ships, and they still play the episode (I can't remember what the show was called, might've been Dogfights) about Laffey defending against swarms of kamikazes in 1945. This stuff was good, imagine how much better that kind of programming would be with today's CGI tech.

It's sad that people find lies more compelling than history. That men who killed Kennedy crap ran on A&E first. I was one of those who bought all the JFK conspiracy nonsense until I watched that series. That started me on a fact-finding campaign and where I started with a conspiracy going in I came out the end with a three-time-loser, a $19.00 mail-order rifle (with scope) and a guy with a death wish who didn't give a damn about the stress he put on the men whose job it was to protect him. Main takeaway, don't put a fatalist in the White House, but I digress.

I enjoyed the History Channel, A&E, even the Learning Channel when they arrived on the scene but the plume fell off the rose pretty fast. The History Channel still dabbles in history now and again and some of it is even okay to pretty good. And some of it ranges from garbage (their World War documentary) to hot stinking garbage (Sam Adams as an action hero). But then I don't really watch much of what cable has to offer anyway. Decent television programming wasn't the only casualty reality-TV left in its wake. It acted as a force multiplier alongside social media to make our culture and politics more coarse. Worse, it has helped distract people to the point where we are literally amusing ourselves to death as the book with that title written in the 1980s postulated.

Our education system has dumbed down America in a whole host of academic disciplines but none as thoroughly as history, civics, and economics. You don't have to be a conspiracy/tin-foil hat guy to connect those particular dots. Is it really any wonder why we can't even agree on the definition of male and female or what bathrooms should be used by whom? I'll just leave it there because anymore speculation on my part will result a "return error" by the omnipresent TY hall-monitors. Who knows, maybe it really is aliens from the planet Zoltar messing with our culture. Why? Tune in next week to the guy with crazy hairdo for that answer. The other guy with crazy Nostradamus hairdo will be along after him to explain how it was all predicted in some quatrain. Sleep well boys and girls but stay alert. It's a brave new world out there and it's getting braver by the hour.

Why the downfall of history channel answer aliens

(7:06) This is why it's up to Youtube channels like this one to fulfill the niche.

Boufon? Think he meant to say buffoon

I watch Epic History on YouTube… History Channel is trash.

Yup, history channel sucks, they are just a novelty channel, a channel for morons

Oversimplified beat them at their jobs- I mean, they were punished severely.

I miss Dogfights, Shootout, Battle/Patton 360, Men Who Built America, Rome: Rise And Fall Of An Empire, The Revolution, Civil War Combat, Engineering An Empire, The Warfighters, and Sniper. I hope that the History Channel can return to the shows of old and make some high-production HISTORY shows that actually have more than 3 brain cells in them.

Thanks again

How many times is this guy gonna say "Nazis?!"

Enough of the word 'history'

They have their share in the fake news machinery that took over

Just goes to show that people will swallow the most outrageous bullony as long as it's packaged right!

Ken Burns is pretty good though ngl