Law and Order channel

A few months ago our apartment signed up for cable TV (because it led to a drop on our monthly telecommunications bill). This is the first time I have had access to cable in quite a number of years.

Now that I have had a few months to peruse cable's offerings I am amazed that in my years away from cable the offerings have gotten no better. One can still have a ridiculous number of channels and find many hours of the day when there is nothing to interest a particular viewer (or set of viewers). How is this possible? How has the situation not improved over the past 10 years? Have we now been pumping out hour upon hour of quality content for the better part of the last 60 years? Given this immense back catalog of cheap content shouldn't there always be something tolerable to watch?

Law and Order and its various spin-offs seem to be a brand that alone could be used to rectify such a problem. Why not just have a channel that is dedicated to continuously playing Law and Order re-runs. According to my quick calculations there are currently about 953 episodes of the various shows (with more added weekly) so that means that it would take about 5 weeks to go through the entire oeuvre. Of course, as more episodes are added this period would lengthen.

The benefit of such an approach would be that for a relatively broad swath of the viewing public (as indicated by the longevity and popularity of these series) there would always be something to watch.

I guess the real answer to my own question is streaming content. More surprising than the fact that there isn't a channel dedicated to Law and Order is that there are still even channels at all. Who wants to watch things on somebody else's schedule when the technology exists to allow them to watch the same content on their own schedule? Anyway, as our cable provider doesn't provide on demand streaming content I will have to be content to just watch less television content than I might if they actually provided access to content I wanted to see.

(Sorry, this was a little less structured then originally intended.)