Bravo has gone through a massive metamorphosis in the past eleven years. But instead of going from a caterpillar to a butterfly, Bravo has gone from a butterfly to a caterpillar. This writer used to list Bravo as one of her favorite cable channels back in the mid-1990s; now I can’t stand it.
Brief Brvo History
Bravo used to be a network devoted to the arts hard to find international movies, arts news, dance, opera and unique animated “fillers” (programs that only took up a few minutes when a movie ran too short and they didn’t want to completely alienate a viewer by showing commercials). If you wanted to find something interesting, something to think about later, you found it on Bravo.
Even the choice of the name Bravo was suggestive of going to a live performance and cheering at the end. The thought was you would want to cheer in the same way with the programming on Bravo. At first, Bravo lived up to its name.
However, I must have been in the minority of viewers. Although starting out with lofty intentions, Bravo’s bottom line was money. In the entertainment business, just surviving is quite difficult and making a profit is unusual. Many cable channels have come and gone, or merged into another channel (such as The Comedy Channel and Ha! merging to become Comedy Central) or completely changed. Bravo chose to go the latter route. Unlike TNN which changed its name to Spike TV, Bravo chose to keep the same name, but completely change the programming.
Going Back to American TV
I moved to England from America in 2000 and did not return to America until 2005. Although I had a lot more on my mind than cable TV, one of the things I did look forward to upon my return to the States was getting to watch Bravo again.
But when it comes to television, you can’t go home again.
Bravo is now completely unrecognizable from when I last saw it in May or 2000. The only show that has survived the change has been Inside The Actor’s Studio, which was once the premier show on Bravo and now is regulated to unpredictable viewing times. You are basically forced to go to Bravo’s website in order to find out when the show will be on. Now, I don’t even bother with Inside The Actor’s Studio anymore.
The vast majority of Bravo’s programming is one cookie-cutter reality show after another. Their most famous is Project Runway, although they lost the series to Lifetime Television in 2009. Other reality shows like Top Chef and The Real Housewives of New Jersey have stayed.
Every now and then, they show a movie, but usually ones that had box office draw in America, such as Pulp Fiction (1994) instead of European or Australian hidden gems, such as France’s All the Mornings in the World (1991). I prefer those movies because I didn’t know anything about them and could watch them without any preconceptions. It was like getting a piece of choclate and not knowing what was inside of that piece until I took a bite.
Unfortunately, now I always know what to expect when I turn on Bravo.
