I suppose there's only so much footage from WW2 (and 1) that eventually you run out.
The History Channel's descent into numb-TV isn't unique. It happens all across the board and european channels are for some reason buying this stuff AND making their own with a slightly tweaked format.
My main issue with US TV-programmes is the tendency to speak to the viewer as if he/she is a child. Plus the inherent repetitiveness. Someone buys a storage unit and finds stuff and yells or speaks in a much too high volume to be natural. Then they do it again and again, interrupted by infantile comments from the "scavengers".
This is the basic US tv-format at the moment, with only the venue changeing.
I'm sure there would have been an interesting documentary on the storage unit raiders, but the format was changed into this piece of shit.
Danish TV does sort of the same. We had a three-episode (or so) serious documentary about "young mothers" called, "The young mothers", about teen moms and their brief awkward boyfriends that abandoned them days after birth. It was sort of a "wake-up call" to the Danish public.
The producer, however, saw a market and made a followup programme, and another. And then he went all-in and made it a reality-show that "recruits" new young mothers (who are pretty far apart in Denmark), and after a season or two sort of devolved into "stupid mothers" because the age of the mothers were closing in on 25. This caused a spin-off "Me and my Mother", where the (formerly) young mothers now go on the town with their own mothers in what can only be staged mini-bachelorette parties, boob-job sessions, binge-drinking, tatooing and other irresponsible behaviour.
I sometimes think, that "Classic Car Rescue", Pawn-stars, Duck Dynasty, Sons of Guns etc. etc. began as ideas for documentaries or "one-off" shows - devolving into reality-shows, making the hosts or whatever become stars in their own right (not really) and make spin-offs or take the program away from it's original (mildly interesting) premise and moving it into the bedroom, where whoever's wife bitch and moan over nothing because the director tells her to, in an attempt to create fake conflict and then make dramatic photography and editing trying to trick the uneducated (US?) audience into thinking this has anything to do with reality, removing anything that could educate or promote reflection or afterthought.
Something similar happened on MTV, that was about music video's and things like that. Now it's poor reality programming far removed from anything musical-related, and serves not even to entertain, but to fill the time between the commercials.
No wonder Netflix etc. are destroying network TV.
