I hate Veronica!

Argh! I now officially hate Veronica, a tv network here in the Netherlands.

Veronica used to be a government sponsored network. Not unlike the BBC in the UK, except we have several of those, sharing the three public tv channels. They've always focused on a young crowd and eventually they decided that the public networks were keeping them back. To make a long story short: after a short-lived alliance with the RTL networks, they sided with the RTL's rival the SBS network and got their own tv channel. This was heaven on earth!

Well, maybe not exactly heaven on earth, but it was pretty nice all the same. Where before there really wasn't much on tv that I liked, now I had a monday night filled with science fiction series, daily Buffy reruns, good movies on a regular basis, new Angel episodes, etc. etc. Tv couldn't get much better for me.

But of course it wouldn't last... Sigh...

The SBS group had always been synonymous with audience disrespect. They'd stick 20 minutes of lame "news" shows (think reports on some tree that might collapse on someone's house) right in the middle of the last 40 minutes of a movie. Their pograms would never start at the time they announced. One day they'd start 10 minutes earlier and the other day that'd start 20 minutes late. If you wanted to make sure you didn't miss anything, you were forced to watch a good chunk of the cheap crappy shows that invariably were programmed right before the good shows.

SBS sucks and Veronica has been tainted. Badly. Shows get moved between timeslots on different days without the slightest warning. Series suddenly get programmed or pulled, more often than not right in the middle of seasons. Crappy shows get programmed in the slot between two episodes of some other show. The list goes on.

Up to today I could, with much effort, forgive them on account of the number of good shows they are broadcasting. But then they decided to stop broadcasting Angel until January, even though they're right in the bleeping middle of the last bleeping season. The exact same bleeping stunt they pulled with Buffy. And then they wonder why their ratings are so low. The bleepers. Argh!

Note: This post has been edited for expletives. Time to grow up... (Or at least give that impression ;-))