Really wishing I had something nice to say about Current TV.
Over the past week, and before that spottily throughout the summer, I've been following the online progress of Al Gore's new cable TV-slash-internet venture, Current TV. Having always thought, and spent large amounts of time arguing, that Gore is grossly underrated both as a liberal-political thinker and as the type of (futuristic, conservative, values-conscious) Democrat we need to produce more of, I feel sort of identity-political about this.
So seeing the early results of the endeavour has come ridiculously close to ruining my weekend (well, that and tracking down FORTRAN 90 compilers online. But somehow, it seems kind of synergenic: Fortan, Atari...) It's a fucking disaster. And not of the noble attempt variety; the cluelessness of the whole operation is just way beyond comprehension. It's simply amazing the industry professionals involved could have produced something this lame, particularly out of a concept that is entirely imaginative and workable.
The point of Current is that it's supposedly built around viewer-produced content, sort of citizen-journalist stuff. And the concept is great. There are different modules, which they call "pods" -- Current Parent, Current Soul, Current International etc etc. -- that people can make themselves and upload to the site. Then the ones playing get "shuffled" on TV (and on the website's corresponding live feed), making the whole thing like a pop-culture-news version of MTV with mini documentaries instead of music videos. Shuffles are addictive in principle; you never know what's going to come up next. And interaction between watching and voting for clips on the website and seeing them on the network is`new and could, I think, work quite well.
So what's the problem? Well, to start with, they don't seem to actually have any material, this despite the fact that they've been begging for content online for a year now (and some of the pods they do have featured online are quite good). They've apparently got about 4 hours of content currently in rotation (judging by the site's live feed; it's never been explictly explained whether this is the actual TV feed but it looks like it) and it's roughly the same content that's been playing since they launched on Monday. By my calculations, they've been adding two pods a day into the lineup since Monday. That's simply ridiculous, especially after the hype surrounding their going live. They could easily make four or five in-house pods (like the Current Flashback one that's just built out of old news footage) each day just to put up something fresh. And aren't they supposed to have people out in the field sending them stuff?
What industry professionals think this way? It's mind-boggling cluelessness. Who is going to watch the same four hours of material for six straight days? And the irony is that they don't even need a lot of material for this to work. Just adding six and removing two pods every day into the lineup would be enough. If they can't even bring that off, it doesn't encourage much confidence. What the hell is David Neuman (the long-time industry insider director of programming) thinking?
Then there's their blog, which simply never updates (or updates with discussions of total inanities -- like the wonders of super-imposed network logos) and never talks about what's going on with the pod development or about the new pods going into rotation and hasn't given us clue the first about when the Online Studio is actually going to become functional, which is supposed to the be the heart and soul of the network. Worse, the Current blogger never responds to any of the criticism launched at the network, which is pretty pathetic for a network swearing to want to start a revolution in inclusivity. Current blogger Robin Sloan did go and post a thank you response to some friendly criticism from Steve Safran at Lost Remote, but there was no official response to those or other suggestions on the Current blog. The result of which is that they seem totally, woefully, almost surreally out of touch.
Many people have said the on-air hosts are lame, which I'm sure is perfectly true. But lameness -- if it's winsome, earnest, well-meaning, responsive lameness -- isn't going to be this network's problem. Total vacant unresponsive cluelessness, on the other hand, will be. And so far, that's what we've got.
What kind of network launches with four hours of material?
I make no bones about this: I'm bitter. The biggest problem for liberal politics is that its leaders invariably turn into their own stereotypes, however silly those stereotypes might originally have been. It's like in our media-saturated culture, pols and their staffs just ingest this stuff until it overwhelms them. Dean was never very "angry" or "unbalanced" during the summer of 2003, but when he screamed after Iowa (because his campaign was too stupid to have written him a concession speech), he proved his critics right in that assertion. Clinton, after riding out the Whitewater smears, went and got blow jobs from an intern, then engaged in a scandalous pardon of a rich friend, proving his critics right about his lack of ethics. Kerry, who'd spent his whole career supporting and crafting common sensical legislation to help average Americans and even tangling with the very non-elite myths of Vietnam POWs just wouldn't stop windsurfing in the end, proving his critics right about his grotesque out-of-touchness. And Al Gore, my favourite Democrat since forever whose campaign and post-campaign positioning I have stridently defended, is about to prove himself irredemably pathetic, not in the endearing, tenacious way a lot of us on the center-left have admired, either, but exactly in the way his critics have always contended.
Think this isn't bad for American liberalism? It is.
Update: Forever obsessive, I went to the site today and found a bunch of new, interesting-looking material in rotation. Good, good.
So seeing the early results of the endeavour has come ridiculously close to ruining my weekend (well, that and tracking down FORTRAN 90 compilers online. But somehow, it seems kind of synergenic: Fortan, Atari...) It's a fucking disaster. And not of the noble attempt variety; the cluelessness of the whole operation is just way beyond comprehension. It's simply amazing the industry professionals involved could have produced something this lame, particularly out of a concept that is entirely imaginative and workable.
The point of Current is that it's supposedly built around viewer-produced content, sort of citizen-journalist stuff. And the concept is great. There are different modules, which they call "pods" -- Current Parent, Current Soul, Current International etc etc. -- that people can make themselves and upload to the site. Then the ones playing get "shuffled" on TV (and on the website's corresponding live feed), making the whole thing like a pop-culture-news version of MTV with mini documentaries instead of music videos. Shuffles are addictive in principle; you never know what's going to come up next. And interaction between watching and voting for clips on the website and seeing them on the network is`new and could, I think, work quite well.
So what's the problem? Well, to start with, they don't seem to actually have any material, this despite the fact that they've been begging for content online for a year now (and some of the pods they do have featured online are quite good). They've apparently got about 4 hours of content currently in rotation (judging by the site's live feed; it's never been explictly explained whether this is the actual TV feed but it looks like it) and it's roughly the same content that's been playing since they launched on Monday. By my calculations, they've been adding two pods a day into the lineup since Monday. That's simply ridiculous, especially after the hype surrounding their going live. They could easily make four or five in-house pods (like the Current Flashback one that's just built out of old news footage) each day just to put up something fresh. And aren't they supposed to have people out in the field sending them stuff?
What industry professionals think this way? It's mind-boggling cluelessness. Who is going to watch the same four hours of material for six straight days? And the irony is that they don't even need a lot of material for this to work. Just adding six and removing two pods every day into the lineup would be enough. If they can't even bring that off, it doesn't encourage much confidence. What the hell is David Neuman (the long-time industry insider director of programming) thinking?
Then there's their blog, which simply never updates (or updates with discussions of total inanities -- like the wonders of super-imposed network logos) and never talks about what's going on with the pod development or about the new pods going into rotation and hasn't given us clue the first about when the Online Studio is actually going to become functional, which is supposed to the be the heart and soul of the network. Worse, the Current blogger never responds to any of the criticism launched at the network, which is pretty pathetic for a network swearing to want to start a revolution in inclusivity. Current blogger Robin Sloan did go and post a thank you response to some friendly criticism from Steve Safran at Lost Remote, but there was no official response to those or other suggestions on the Current blog. The result of which is that they seem totally, woefully, almost surreally out of touch.
Many people have said the on-air hosts are lame, which I'm sure is perfectly true. But lameness -- if it's winsome, earnest, well-meaning, responsive lameness -- isn't going to be this network's problem. Total vacant unresponsive cluelessness, on the other hand, will be. And so far, that's what we've got.
What kind of network launches with four hours of material?
I make no bones about this: I'm bitter. The biggest problem for liberal politics is that its leaders invariably turn into their own stereotypes, however silly those stereotypes might originally have been. It's like in our media-saturated culture, pols and their staffs just ingest this stuff until it overwhelms them. Dean was never very "angry" or "unbalanced" during the summer of 2003, but when he screamed after Iowa (because his campaign was too stupid to have written him a concession speech), he proved his critics right in that assertion. Clinton, after riding out the Whitewater smears, went and got blow jobs from an intern, then engaged in a scandalous pardon of a rich friend, proving his critics right about his lack of ethics. Kerry, who'd spent his whole career supporting and crafting common sensical legislation to help average Americans and even tangling with the very non-elite myths of Vietnam POWs just wouldn't stop windsurfing in the end, proving his critics right about his grotesque out-of-touchness. And Al Gore, my favourite Democrat since forever whose campaign and post-campaign positioning I have stridently defended, is about to prove himself irredemably pathetic, not in the endearing, tenacious way a lot of us on the center-left have admired, either, but exactly in the way his critics have always contended.
Think this isn't bad for American liberalism? It is.
Update: Forever obsessive, I went to the site today and found a bunch of new, interesting-looking material in rotation. Good, good.
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