MARATHONS | ‘Unsolved’ will do in a pinch

I’m working nights these days and thus have been distracted by some daytime television.

Spike TV has been repurposing old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries since October, and I have to say I was initially not impressed. To their credit, Spike fixed whatever was causing that weird sideways letterbox problem in the first episodes I saw last fall. I guess I’ve made a sort of peace with it, because I can’t bring myself to change the channel today. (Worse, this crap is on all day every day this week. Sigh.)

Sarah Bunting hit the nail on the head in her review of the show’s makeover. The shiny graphics and fancy computer technology bring the whole thing down, like dollar store merchandise at Macy’s. As I noted in protest a year and a half ago, my dead TV grandfather Robert Stack was what sealed the deal. Farina didn’t cut it for me as a replacement for the late Lennie Briscoe (another of my TV grandpas), and he’s sure as hell no Bob Stack.

In a related story, I have got to find a day job.

The new CourtTV…

…will be called truTV. The rebranded network, which is shifting from the courts to the streets with more reality-based programming, will launch January 1, 2008. The network will continue to carry trial coverage during the day, according to this story, before transitioning to the Star Jones talk show at 3 p.m./ET and a slate of programs targeted to “Real Engagers.”

Some questions:

• Does this mean the Star Jones talk show won’t necessarily focus on legal topics? If so, did Star know about this when she took the deal?
• Doesn’t this dilute the brand? While I admire the refreshing honesty at the heart of this change, if cable networks changed names every time they changed programming strategies, we’ve never know what to call anything.
• How hard could it really have been to program legal-themed syndicated shows for the non-courtroom hours. There are a plethora of them. It seems like small claims court shows would’ve been a perfect fit for primetime; there are plenty of gone but not forgotten legal dramas from the recent past as well (Ally McBeal and The Practice come to mind). Would it have made a difference if CourtTV had scored even one of the Law & Order shows?

My impression is that these changes only serve to lessen the CourtTV brand by making the network’s name and its new programming nearly indistinguishable from a plethora of channels that already exist: National Geographic, the various Discovery Channels, and Fox Reality, to name a few.

CourtTV is the first major player to jump niches since TNN became Spike TV a few years ago, leaving behind its country roots. And sure, truTV plans to keep the courtroom coverage…for now. But it may not be long before trials disappear from the cable channel; after all, a tru [sic] Real Engager knows that the real-life drama of the courtroom is no match for a good reality show.