AZNTV, we hardly knew ye...

Due to billing issues with Comcast resulting from a takeover and generally mediocre service, I finally switched over to IPTV through my local phone company/ISP this week. The pair of guys running the wire and setting it up kept commenting to me with trying-to-be-polite variations on "Boy, you have a lot of shit in your house." I still can't tell whether they were jokingly envious, or trying to tell me they had trouble with the installation because of it (in one room and one room only, you do have to navigate a labyrinth of boxes and furniture to get to the old cable outlet).

Ironically, a day or two before the installation, I saw the news that AZN Television is no more when I attempted to check their scheduling (while investigating into this further, I also learned Lydia Shum from "Living with Lydia"--if you've never seen it, imagine a Singaporean sitcom striving to be the penultimate concoction of '80s plot devices, with sort of a Asiatic quasi-Roseanne titular lead--passed away in February). I felt genuinely sad, not only because had pretty much become my favorite TV channel of all time, but I had lost it in 2007. Without warning, it was suddenly replaced by EWTN, and since then I sort of always hoped I'd get it back sometime.

I didn't care for some of their original programming, and I think at times they tried to be overly hip and ending up just wiggerizing things with DJ Hapa. I also probably represented the least desirable target demographic; the young white guy generally looking for martial arts flicks and anime. But since AZN aired shows based on their cultural pedigree, not grouped by content, they presented a weird eclectic mix of programming--what other single channel could show Story of Chinese Gods (trippiest animation evah!!), a bunch of uncensored anime, that flick with Pat Morita and the kid from My Bodyguard as an American P.O.W., that movie where Jane March gets fucked a lot...uh...that movie where Jane March gets fucked a lot that's not Color of Night, Tae Guk Gi, Love Bakery, a film about the exploits of a Japanese guy obsessive about vehicular sex, a movie about a Chinese bathhouse with a retarded guy who aspires to be Pavarotti, rappers overdubbing Kung-Fu flicks, all kinds of weird indie films, PSAs on Japanese tourism, a technology show in which Randall Park assaults vendors at technological business fairs with unrelenting sarcasm, Filipino Jehovah's Witnesses spreading the gospel in the morning...well, you get the drift.

Ultimately, I got the feeling that AZN came to be because the International Channel executives realized the Asian programming was what most people in non-niche markets were watching. Certainly anime and Chinese/Japanese subtitled actions flicks have more universal appeal than Romanian newscasts. In case you never saw it, typical programming on International Channel would literally change countries about every half-hour or hour. The weekday daytime schedule was almost exclusively nonstop newcasts from different locales. Thus I assume a lot of people had some degree of interest in it, even if the programming in their mother tongue was a tiny slice of the pie. I think in going all-Asian, the sustainability was overestimated. AZN also had short and long-term oversaturation problems. Almost everything was shown twice in the same 24-hour period, and original series with only a few episodes were overkilled. The channel was also torn between two demographics--I remember a lot of Korean-Americans complaining that the Korean dramas shown were a year or two old, they'd already seen them, and thus the channel was devoting a lot of time to programming that was of no interest to them. On the other hand, for someone like me, these shows were totally new. I thought the anime programming was fairly decent. Unfortunately, almost everything was from Central Park Media, so some of the movies had previously been on Sci-Fi and IFC. International Channel definitely aired better anime series, but the only drawback was they never showed anything longer than half-an-hour (except for an April film fest where they showed some OVAs, but still, nothing over an hour--no movies). So AZN had mediocre-to-good programming, just not popular or fresh. And for such a specialized channel, that's probably what you need to pay the bills.

Still, the channel came a long way from the old International Channel days, which I also remember with some fondness. Well, not the real early days. Those are horrible, tragic memories of Dragonball Z in raw Japanese and Turkish films with full frontal male nudity which I'm still trying to wrench from my subconscious. I remember being so ridiculously happy a channel was showing The Adventures of the Little Prince again. In Spanish. Without subtitles. I don't speak Spanish. Yet, I videotaped all the episodes I could, if just for the ending theme and commercial bumpers.

I'll have to get used to things, because now I actually do have 100+ channels. I used to, for some odd reason, get the Chicago PBS station WTTW in addition to the nearest state one, and I did enjoy some of its original programming. I still get two PBS stations, but now the second is just a small one from a university a couple hours away, and their only original content consists of old-school telethon fundraisers, sans-celebrities. Unfortunately it seems as if Bravo, A&E, Sci-Fi, Cartoon Network, and Food Network have gone totally downhill in my abscence (keep in mind I haven't had upper channel tiers for about 2 years). TBS seems to have branched out from showing America's Funniest Home Videos, A Christmas Story, The Beastmaster, and any Golan-Globus/Cannon film (add emphasis if said film has Chuck Norris in it). The only thing I'm really missing entirely I guess I somewhat wish I had is The Independent Film Channel, although I doubt they have David Cronenberg film fests anymore.

I'm pessimistic about the state of television. But I get VH1 Classic, so there's still that sliver of hope...