I don't write much about TV anymore, but it's worth noting that the Discovery show Mythbusters ended its 14-year run last weekend. That's a pretty good run, and it was a pretty good show.
In more recent years, I stopped watching it because frankly I just didn't have enough time. It also started to feel a little repetitive. Last year they rebooted the show a bit, dropping the three secondary cast members. I actually liked the overall style of the "new" show, in terms of storytelling, graphics, photography and the like. It felt more focused and polished. It's kind of a bummer that they ended it just when it was getting interested again.
The show jokingly ended up being about blowing a lot of things up, but actually the science content was consistently solid. There wasn't a lot of anything over that decade and a half that really could match it in terms of interesting science content. Perhaps one of the best and unintended angles of the show was that they frequently tested the validity of stupid shit you read on the Internet. Since there's no shortage of that, the show's content was gold.
Probably the worst thing about the show's demise is that there really isn't anything on Discovery that is worthy of its name and original intent. With hundreds of channels of stupid on cable, at least there was Discovery, not making us quite as stupid. The end of Mythbusters is something of a reality on the state of TV. We can only hope that things like the Cosmos reboot are not one-off rarities.
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