More cuts at BET. Yesterday news broke that Tia Mowry and
Pooch Hall were leaving The Game. Today
Terrence and Rocsi are exiting from BET’s 106 & Park. What in the Clear Channel layoffs is this
BET? Seriously, there is nothing left to
watch on the network (not that I watch anyway).
From what I read on Twitter, nobody watches Lets Stay Together and
nobody plans to either.
I can honestly say that I’m not saddened by the news of
Terrence and Rocsi leaving 106 & Park.
I stopped watching 106 & Park in 2007, my sophomore year in
college. I could tell that the show was
going in a younger direction and it was going to be corny. The Freestyle Friday round used to be raw;
contestants used to actually “freestyle.” (Remember Poster Boy and Jin…they are
nowhere now but back then you thought they were the hottest thing out. But I
digress.) Over the years 106 & Park
started to target teenagers and focus on everything else besides music. Rocsi and Terrence fit for that purpose for a
while but overall somehow the vision of the show got lost. Of course, we can blame this on the exit of
AJ and Free but it is really at the fault of BET. Several of us in the black community that
grew up with BET can see the change. We
went from Teen Summit, Rap City, Cita’s World, Video Soul, Planet Groove, to
106 & Park. And when 106 & Park
got too “commercial” BET gave us a knock off of Rap City Tha Basement called Da
Deal. Typical BET, that was later
cancelled too. Only thing left was to
create two sitcoms and now that’s ruined.
My question is, what else can BET do? We’ve seriously seen them try
everything. They have tried game shows
(remember Joe Clair and Toccara's show Take The Cake), sitcoms, docu-series, award shows, and they
always abandon music shows. The movies
that they play repeatedly are not cutting it; we turn to TV One for all of
that. At this point every other music
station is doing better than them. VH1 has us tuned into all of their reality shows.
MTV stays young and fresh with their shows dedicated to just Hip- Hop and
channels dedicated to Hip-Hop music. Oh
yeah, and let’s not forget that actually have MTV News on the regular. And TV One, always brings back the best movies
and TV shows from back and the day for our viewing pleasure.
It’s clear that BET needs help. Somehow the network is worth
millions but their programming sucks.
Their ideas suck. Their marketing
sucks. Their decision making sucks. Where do they go from here? (Follow me
@eyediditmyway)
