Broadstripe (formerly Millennium, formerly Summit, formerly Seacom), the “little” cable company with a big image problem, has finally added a bunch more hi-def channels. They’re all versions of brands you know and love—TNT, TBS, A&E, History Channel, National Geographic, Lifetime Movie Network, and (for a little extra) Showtime.

So far, so good. We get TNT’s NBA playoffs (including, alas, the Lucking Fakers) and TBS’s baseball games (no longer exclusively starring the Braves) in their full-res, widescreen glory. The same goes for some movies, recent off-network reruns (Lawn Order: Assorted Flavors), and “reality” faves such as Ax Men (northwest Oregon never looked so beautifully foreboding).

But, and this is something Broadstripe can do nothing about, sometimes these channels aren’t showing HD material. (This is usually when they’re simulcasting the same shows as their famous parent channels.) That would only be a minor annoyance, except these channels then ruin this material by altering it into that fake-widescreen stretch-O-vision. Sometimes, even movies that were originally made in widescreen will get cropped and then stretched into unviewability. And you can’t “squeeze” it back into its proper proportions; you can only search out these shows on the channels’ regular standard-def incarnations.

The worst offender: Lifetime Movie Network, whose shelves of moldering ’80s-’90s made-for-TV victimization-and-revenge tales are almost all stretched out like digital Silly Putty comics.