Have you noticed how A&E is no longer all about frilly dresses, powdered wigs and hoity toity accents? That’s called channel drift - the gradual shift in identity that signals a channel’s concentration on a new demographic (or, more frequently, grasping onto a fleeting viewer trend).

(Not to be confused with channel creep, where your once favourite channels creep up the “dial” - with PBS suddenly finding itself at channel 64. We’re back to the 1970s, where you had to dial high into the UHF band to find some of the less popular television channels. “No, you have to tweak the knob, or else you can’t lock in the horizontal hold. The station’s antenna isn’t that tall. Is it raining between here and Massena?”)

TV Squad has a lengthy, but funny, discussion of what has happened to that first generation of cable channels - A&E, Bravo, TMC, AMC and the like. Here’s one comment:

“…It is worse in Canada. In one week our Western channel (Lonestar) had The Matrix movies, Demolition Man, and Tango and Cash as its evening movies…

CollegeHumor has weighed in with its own interpretations of cable network logos - with predictable results.