Five US off to inauspicious start

So Five US, the channel just for me but with the rubbish advertising campaign, launched last night. So far, it’s not crowded with all the delights that were promised us: Shark, Vanished, et al are nowhere to be seen in the EPG. Of course, since TVTV doesn’t yet have Five US in its EPG, that might be the reason.

What is on, so far, are episodes of Joey, Happy Days and the various CSIs. I’m not impressed on the latter score. Five US decided to launch the whole channel with CSI, which would have been fine if they’d actually started with the first episode. But they didn’t. They began with episode two, which was the second half of a two-part story: in fact, it was the second-part of the original pilot episode.

So, to sum up, Five has launched a whole channel dedicated to fans of US programming; yet they’re not really showing anything new, only repeats, and the repeats aren’t in the right order or are missing episodes.

I recorded Conviction though, so maybe that’ll be worth the entrance fee alone.

UPDATE: They also repeated one scene in CSI so it played on either side of the final advert break. Classy.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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