Digital cable has spoiled me so much that I rarely venture outside a handful of mainstays like MTV Jams and the English Premier League on Fox Sports World. Soccer and disposable hip-hop have become my two favorite excuses for not doing homework, but there are times when Baby and Beckham just don’t cut it.

I wade through the mire of other programming choices like a slack-jawed yokel. “Ren & Stimpy” reruns on Nick Toons, an interview with David Mamet on IFC and “Swingers” starts on HBO2 in 15 minutes. Isn’t there anyone or anything out there that can offer me some guidance?

“Today’s men have a wide variety of entertainment interests,” TNN president Albie Hecht recently told The Boston Globe. Yeah, that sounds about right.

“[These include] movies, music, finance, cars, women, sports, comedy and health,” he continued. Uh-huh.

“They want it all, and they want it all in one place,” Hecht said. Slow down a second, brah. Hecht’s comments came after the announcement that as of June 16, his The National Network would take on the name Spike TV and aspire to be “the home base for men’s programming.”

For those of you uninitiated to trashy cable television, The National Network was formerly The Nashville Network, a channel primarily devoted to country music. Its redneck contingence apparently befuddled after it changed its moniker but kept its acronym, TNN went on to incorporate a wider array of redneck in its viewership, including the Coors-swilling Kid Rock-er (“WWE Raw”), the mother’s-basement-dwelling dweeb (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”) and the fanatic whose mass consumption of Mountain Dew has jaded his ability to follow normal sports (“Slam Ball”).

With TNN’s ratings sagging, Spike TV will rescue male-oriented programming with shows like “A Guy and His Stuff,” “Top 10 Things Every Guy Should Experience” and the animated series “Stripperella,” with the titular character being voiced by Pamela Anderson. Spike TV will arrive just in time to beat a similar effort from the antichrists at Dennis Publishing, Maxim Entertainment Network (take a second to piece together that acronym — clever!).

Thank God. Finally, a television network that acknowledges the viewing needs of middle-class heterosexual males aged 18-49. Advertisers must be chomping at the bit to get at this untapped demographic.

The foremost of the many problems facing Spike TV, however, is that by assuming such a broad spectatorship, it will end up not acknowledging and catering to its viewers’ needs, but dictating them. This is the same dialectic exploited by the pony-tails at Dennis Publishing and countless women’s glossies that would have us believe it is every man and woman’s dream to subsist on a half a grape a day, donning Jimmy Choo shoes, Burberry scarves and Axe Body Spray.

So if the idea of original television programming from the same scribes who pen articles like “Bring Out the Animal in Your Man” and “Find Her G-spot and Make Her Hot” makes you wary, don’t worry, because it won’t last long. Spike TV and its ilk will be the victims of their own blind ambition.

In the early days of network television when the only thing to watch was quite literally The Big Three (NBC, ABC, CBS), programmers sought to bring in as large an audience as they could simply because the relative lack of competition allowed for the existence of such a large audience. They had variety shows and likable sitcoms.

Today, the networks’ main aim is to get the viewer to stay loyal to it, if for no other reason than to keep him from straying too far into the land of digital cable, satellite TV and other niche programming. It is no longer 1958, however, and for a network to hope that it can harness roughly half of the country’s population is downright foolhardy.

Hell, I’d love to find one channel that shows everything I like, but it would be impossible for that channel to operate on the pretense of knowing this — I don’t even know what I like. The whole point to today’s proliferation of viewing options is that Americans are restless. We need to be surprised, and when a channel by which we’re usually surprised is showing crap, we need the option of being able to go to another channel and be surprised by something we never even knew we liked.

Just as long as someone is showing a little FA Cup action or that hot new joint from the Clipse every now and then.