Stimulating Television

Lately I've developed a mild addiction to Man vs Wild. I don't feel compelled to seek it out, but if I'm scrolling and it is on, I am unable to not watch it. I think a new season has just started so the show is more visible, though just from watching the episodes, you'd never know if it was the newest or the oldest in the series. I'm not actually sure how they plan to keep running new episodes, actually, since it seems like every one follows a predictable pattern, and it's hard to tell the difference between the survival skills he displays whether in the Amazon, Panamanian, Chinese, or any other random jungle locale.
The thing that I noticed not long ago as I was watching one of them is that it isn't actually a how-to show. Sure it is somewhat informative, but for a show who's premise is teaching the viewer how to survive, it contains precious few moments of teaching. The real point of the show is to entertain, of course, to show Bear Grylls doing nasty things like eating snakes or rubbing mud in his ears, or wild things like jumping off a 50ft cliff or swimming under an ice sheet. I'm not saying they're not in there, but to actually ingest usable survival skills while watching the show, you have to be attuned to them and to already have a little knowledge of wilderness techniques to begin with. This from a show who's whole reason for being is presumably to teach.
What I'm getting at here is that there are shamefully few shows on TV that a viewer can learn anything from. There is a whole goddamn network called "The Learning Channel," but they fill up their hours with crap reality shows about midgets and irresponsibly pregnant women. Every so often there is something medical that might pass off as informative, but even then it's more by accident. Why is it that there are so few places to learn things on TV? Why does it all have to be for simple entertainment? Ideally, the informative shows would also be somewhat entertaining, but you never see any of these "entertaining" shows provide anything informative.
The only place where you see consistently informative programming (I means shows that are conceived and executed with a consistent focus on teaching) is cooking shows. Why nowhere else? Cooking shows aren't ratings gold or anything, but they've been around and heavily watching for a long time, prominently enough to sprout a whole network devoted to them. Their informative nature doesn't prevent them from succeeding as a business model. So why nothing else?
I feel like the History Channel used to be better and providing useful programming, but over the years has turned into the same kind of crap you see everywhere else: dedicated not to really captivate a viewer and give him a reason to watch TV, but more to simply hold his attention while he happens to be watching TV anyway. Someone is surely pulling the strings here. Some focus groups must tell network people that it's better for ratings this way. That's bullshit laziness.
The market for substantive TV is there. I know I'm not alone.