They’re out there. They’re lurking in your TV lineup.

And they’re weird.

I’m talking not just about the Universal Monsters Channel, but other odd and occasionally cool channels in the 1,000-something range on your cable television lineup. Maybe 10,000-something.

Somewhere up there in the channel range you can’t easily just stumble across, and also on services like Roku, apparently, are channel offerings like the Universal Monsters Channel, which true to its name offers 24/7 showings of classic Universal horror films of the 1930s-1950s like “Bride of Frankenstein” and the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy as well as newer films from Universal.

But it’s not just Universal monsters that are hiding in there, waiting to be stumbled upon. There’s a channel that offers nothing but Universal mainstream movies, channels that are devoted to TV series like “Xena,” “Andromeda,” “The Virginian,” “Las Vegas” … there’s a lot and a lot of it is pretty obscure.

The oddest thing about these channels is how they’re set up. You can’t click a channel on at, say, 10 p.m. to watch “Frankenstein” or your favorite episode of “Xena.”

And you can’t set your DVR to record any of the movies or shows.

The FAST – which stands for Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television – channels don’t care about your schedule or your pathetic “time-shifting” goals. If you want to see “Revenge of the Creature” and it’s on at 2 in the morning, by god, you set your alarm and get up and watch it through bleary eyes.

The movies and shows are advertising supported but at least on my cable lineup they don’t seem to have many ads. So you might see a 30-second spot for a coffeemaker, for example, followed by 90 seconds of this:

Yes, a countdown until the movie or show resumes.

These channels are odd. They’re more like old-timey television, in the days before you could record and time-shift to watch a show later. Although you can’t count on anything starting on the hour or half hour, because the programming doesn’t have breaks full of commercials or previews. One movie ends and the next begins.

In other words, don’t count on starting your binge of any of these shows from the beginning on a FAST channel.

Variety reported a while back that nearly 2,000 of these FAST channels are available.

In March 2025, Deadline reported that Universal had launched 40 FAST channels dedicated to the SNL vault, “Little House on the Prairie,” “Murder She Wrote” and other programs. And yes, a lot of the programming is available elsewhere on streaming.

But only with FAST channels could you turn on your TV on a random Tuesday and still be seeing Frankenstein’s monster or Nellie Oleson a week later. (Yes, I had to look up the spelling.)

It’s all out there. In a chaotic but totally locked-in manner. And it’s probably hidden in the far reaches of your cable dial.