Nelonen


Nelonen is a Finnish commercial TV channel. It started out as Helsinki's local television channel PTV in 1990 on the HTV cable network, and changed its name first to PTV4. On June 1, 1997 the channel expanded to become national and changed its name to Nelonen. Nelonen, in Finnish, means the glyph of the number four. The channel is mostly owned by Sanoma Corporation, which owns the Helsingin Sanomat and Ilta-Sanomat newspapers. Its largest owner was Aatos Erkko. Much of its programming is Australian, American, British, and European shows, with Finnish captions. Its main market is the 25-44 demographic.

Programming

Finnish series and shows

Nelonen was launched quickly and in an unprepared state. It has been criticized for importing "trash shows", especially during its first years. Mostly the subject of criticism have been related to its weekly imported "4D documentaries" concentrating on entertainment value and on highly emotive issues instead of artistic or other deeper values. The channel's entertainment output also consists of many other programmes which may be considered to be poor quality - imported game shows or Finnish versions of them and reality TV shows dominate the scheduling. On the other hand, Nelonen's scheduling also contains several award-winning drama series.

Controversy

During the fall of 2007, a day after the Jokela school shooting, Nelonen decided not to air a scheduled episode of the TV series Dexter. The TV series depicts a fictional serial killer Dexter Morgan and it was said to be inappropriate after such dramatic and nationwide turn of events. The episode was instead shown a week later.