CSI: Second Life After Life

Today, USA Today dropped this article reflecting on the success of big brand media companies eating up smaller web upstarts. How's the formula worked out so far? You decide.

News Corp + Myspace = Facebook the most popular thing ever

NBC + iVillage = a 4th hour added to the Today show

Conde Nast + reddit.com = you Digg everything, not reddit.

Clearly something's being lost in the translation from old media to new. Take for example CBS, whose acquisitions of web upstarts over the past year make for some of the largest activity in the industry. After sinking money into Second Life contributors Electric Sheep, CBS apparently found itself with a new, unwieldy media platform on its hand that does not fit conservative models of content distribution.

CBS' response? Obviously to cram their new, shiny round peg into whatever raggedy-ass square hole they can find. And as we all know, there ain't no square hole more raggedy than the CSI franchise.

Starting this fall, CBS will try to branch into the virtual space with CSI: New York plot lines that take Gary Sinise's character into Second Life in pursuit of a virtual killer. Yup, you read right. CSI is actually taking the plot of Virtuosity, starring Denzel and Russel Crowe and trying to make it culturally relevant to people who drink so much Amp they trade currency in kidney stones.

TVOTI's prediction? D.O.A.

Current TV Injures Shoulder Patting Itself on Back After Announcing Launch of Hip Music Content Video Blog

Current TV has been around for about 2 1/2 years struggling to be the hip center of the new media movement. Al Gore founded the network to give voice to the growing phenomenon of User Generated Content in early 2005.

A lot has happened in the realm of UGC in the past 30 months, however, and very little of it to do with Current TV. Now, I was one of the early fans of the network but the channel was borderline unwatchable. Not so much because of the content submitted by viewers, but by the offensively sterile personalities recruited by the network to represent hip, smart and engaged youth.

Can you imagine anything worse than getting hip and savvy news from this?

Gotham Chopra, contributor Current TV. Also, co-creator of K Lounge, the Kama Sutra themed bar in Manhattan that was kind of bumping that one time I went at like 5:30 on a Wednesday.

Or this?

Conor Knighton, Current TV Contributor

Or this?

Max and Jason, Contributors to Current TV. Seriously. SERIOUSLY.

The corn-ball personalities they chose as their faces and the minimal success of Current TV begs the question - is San Francisco too gay to be cool?

Apparently, yes:



But in case you're still on the fence, now's the time to find out. News came out today that Current TV is launching a Music-Video blog to air frequently on the network. The segment will apparently fill the void left by channels like MTV, VH1 and BET abandoning their ostensible objectives of music programming. By focusing on "up-and-coming" acts like Dizzy Rascal (who I'm pretty sure has been kind of huge both in the UK and the US for almost 5 years now), Current TV will ipso facto become the go-to destination for mainstream music news.

There's only one problem. The address for Current TV:

118 King Street
San Francisco, CA 94107p
(415) 995-8200
f (415) 995-8201

Yup, that's the Bay Area and nothing cool having to do with white people has come out of San Francisco since Judd scored Pam the Asian on the Real World.

Even worse, Current TV prides itself on its lame locale and unashamedly provides visitors to its site a link to a Google Map showing you from exactly where that stench of smug mediocrity you find in Trader Joes grocery stores and poetry slams originates.

Current TV can encourage you to FTP them cell phone videos of My Morning Jacket live at Lollapalooza until its XML is blue in the face. That won't change what has always been the case. San Francisco's just too lame to be cool.

Vh1: Friend, Foe, Frenemy?

I am firmly convinced that had I not had Vh1 freely fed into my apartment as an undergrad my G.P.A. would have been 0.6 points higher and I wouldn't currently be sitting in a windowless bedroom that smells like paint updating an internet TV blog for an audience of two (you know who you are, my sole RSS feeder). I had unfettered access, though, to that crack of cable, airing endless marathons of count down lists that legitimately had me wondering, "who DOES have the #4 hardest rock body?!" I would sit on that 9 foot couch, a Chipotle burrito sitting on my chest, and actively know what it was like to have television eat my brain.

Three years later Vh1 has taken its calculus of narcotizing crap and out of it actually spun a viable media platform: Celeb-reality. Shows like Flavor of Love, The Surreal Life, and I Love New York have given the network some of the highest ratings in the land of cable and, as Bill Carter in today's New York Times points out, pioneered the path for a bizarre new programming maxim:

Take a pop cultural idol from the past 20 years or so — idol being defined so broadly as to include almost anyone who ever struck the public consciousness even a glancing blow — and place him or her in some reality television context.

Carter's article raises the obvious criticisms levelled against shows like Flavor of Love, which opponents claim reify black stereotypes of minstrels and hoochies. Most interesting, however, is the paradoxical role Vh1 seeks to establish for itself as the gatekeepers of "Acceptable TV," an upcoming show starring Jack Black that "dovetails neatly with the general skepticism that VH1 executives have about the value of the Internet vs. traditional television."

Here we have Vh1, the network that brought us Mini-Me peeing on a Brady Brother, as the final arbiter of taste between what passes for measly user generated content and broadcast worthy entertainment. Maybe that passes for irony, but I'm not exactly sure of the term's definition. If only I'd spent more time in the library as an undergrad than on my couch inhaling burritos taking note of the top 40 most awesomely dirrrty songs of '04.

Potato Chip Company Makes Ad For What Looks Like Prescription Allergy Medication Featuring Music of UK Indie Band to Effect of Promoting Sun Flowers

It's the question that's on the tip of everyone's fingers in potato chip chat rooms all across the internets, who sings that song in the Lays commercial and why do they sound like an early Wilco cover band?

Probably because they're British and their name is The Candyskins. Are they any good? I don't know, you tell me. My musical standards tend to be more Zach Braff than Ziggy Stardust. Less Ruffles and more Lays.

Meta Tarses

I'm home for the holidays in the Midwest and my dad's refusing to give me any wine because I've already taken 2 Sudafed pills for a cold he's probably responsible for by voting Republican then refusing to turn on the heat because of high oil prices. In my alcohol-less stupor I've been relegated to watching My Boys on the plasma wrapped in an afghan on a leather chair that awkwardly matches my skin tone.

As my thighs started to congeal to my track pants under the intense heat generated by my immobility I noticed an awkward screenshot of the Match.com homepage during a scene of My Boys that had really nothing to do with the episode's overarching narrative. Some google-ing later I found that I was probably the last TV blogger this side of Taipei to know about the groundbreaking deal struck between Match.com and TBS for full sponsorship of the freshman series. Needless to say, an angry phone call to the TV on the INTERN back in New York ensued, which is when I heard that according to the New York Times:

“It’s a fully integrated campaign that feels less like a sponsorship or advertisement and more like a part of the program,” he added.

In threading Match.com through the episodes of “My Boys,” Mr. Safka said, “it has to feel seamless and natural,” otherwise it could annoy or even alienate viewers.

Now, I don't know if a random screenshot constitutes either seamless or natural, but the new media side of me kind of smiles at the notion of TV advertising taking risks on original programming on basic cable channels. You go, TBS. You go, Match.com. And you know what? You fucking go too, Dr. Phil.

On a related note, the fucking NYT also had to be the one to break to me that My Boys executive producer Jamie Tarses was the inspiration for Jordan McDeere, the Amanda Peet character on Studio 60 and the Sunset Strip. Born in 1964, she was the youngest creative exec at ABC in the mid '90s, and I as I sit on this mocha colored couch watching faux Chicago sitcoms sweating through my Sudafed-induced haze and City Sports track pants, I realize, branded entertainment isn't the worst thing in the world and I could use people like Jamie Tarses as role-models in my life because I'm in the Midwest, watching TBS, with a cold because of the Republicans.

Hustler's R.O.M.E.

No, that graffiti on that poster isn't an ad for the new Jim Jones record. It's just HBO keeping it rilllllll.

The comment battles of course rage on like Antony and Cassius in the Forum. That is if Cassius was an incestual HBO message board with far too many homoerotic puns involving "phalynx" on a self-moderated "I would do him" list.

DJ WebSploitation

Maybe it's because an American History undergrad degree essentially translates to four years of studying social trends, but I'm pretty sure the 6 month arc seen by DJ Webstar's Chicken Noodle Soup provides a very specific answer to a question someone much smarter than me has asked. And it probably had the terms "contemporary," "blackness," "mimicry," and "class" in there somewhere.

Below find the beautiful trilogy that as a whole describes a social phenomenon. A trend in its past, present and future stages. Or in other words: organic, commercial and corporate. Add "Black," "Harlem" and "YouTube" into the mix and I'm pretty sure you got a strong sociology thesis on your hands.

Crass Roots



I came across this vid like 4 months ago when trying to see how exactly to pull the Chicken Noodle Soup dance off at an apartment warming party. Bedroom solo renditions of dances have become the unofficial heralding of the birth of a new trend.

106th and Propagate



In August (about 3 months after the original song hit the streets) BET's 106th and Park presents a conveniently "authentic" performance of the dance for a mass audience by young, Black Harlemites bringing their culture to devouring eyes...cable.

Dance, Dance, 10 cents per minute

And finally, we have Cingular's latest Ad campaign . I wonder what a 4 year undergrad marketing major would have to say.