The combination of television and instruction couldn't be a more natural fit. When you need to learn how to do something, nothing beats being guided by an expert on the topic, and TV allows that expert to come right to you in your very own living room. It's like reading a textbook, but so much better, since you can hear and see the process from beginning to end. All of this is why the How-To genre of TV programming has been around since nearly the dawn of the medium.
One of the most popular subgenres of How-To programming is the cooking show. Ever since Julia Child taught America how to cook French food in the 1960s, television chefs have bringing their tasty instruction to aspiring cooks, and now entire channels are devoted to teaching viewers how to cook better.
And then there's the home improvement How-To show. On these shows, handymen and women teach viewers how to build, repair, maintain, renovate and otherwise improve their surroundings, and, again, the subgenre is so popular that it claims entire channels for its own.
Just about anything you want to learn about - music, sports, business, finance, gardening, auto repair, technology, fashion, design, whatever - has its instructional programming out there somewhere, and modern video technology brings it to your doorstep.
