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Shane Smith, in the thick of it for VICE (Vice/HBO)
When Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice Media, pitched a television show to MTV in 2010, it seemed unimaginable that the company that came out of Vice magazine could establish itself as a respected informational source about, well, anything (other than how to decorate your heroin stash). And yet the network bit, and The Vice Guide to Everything ran for eight episodes, balancing ridiculous segments against heavier fare.
With its latest television program, VICE, which premieres next Friday, the media company is once again trying its hand at American television. Not just television. HBO. And this time, it’s not trading on its nihilistic reputation. Instead, it’s asking audiences to trust in its international-relations acumen. It wants to be taken seriously. Or at least as seriously as it takes itself.
“This is the grown-up, smarter, more erudite version of Vice,” Eddy Moretti, Vice Media’s executive creative director (and one of the producers of VICE), told Off the Record. In addition to being more earnest than its predecessor, Mr. Moretti said, this show is intensely researched.
Like Vanguard but shorter and with more cursing, VICE features three correspondents whose job it is to “expose the absurdities of the modern condition”: Mr. Smith, Dos & Don’ts book editor Thomas Morton and a former intern named Ryan Duffy.
For the show’s first season, the trio treks deep into dangerous international terrain, with a special focus on the Middle East, India and the North Korea/Thailand/China region. (We hear that if HBO gives them a second season, they’ll cover domestic terrors as well.)
“News from the Edge” is the slogan that HBO has given VICE, which makes one wonder what counts as “news” these days. VICE goes to dangerous locales and puts its correspondents in inhospitable situations, but it is less current-affairs journalism than novelty of access.
Indeed, immersion and danger are the points of the show, facts that the hosts allude to throughout the segments. “The world is changing,” Mr. Smith intones in the credit sequence. “No one knows where it’s going. But we’ll be there.” It’s the ultimate humblebrag.
Bill Maher, the only non-Vice executive producer of the show—the other two are Mr. Smith and another Vice Media co-founder, Suroosh Alvi—is a natural fit to back the program, as his own off-color TV show is to politics what the Vice brand is to traditional reporting. Fareed Zakaria, who is a consultant on VICE, is a much stranger bedfellow. The fact that a CNN host would be involved in Shane Smith’s project suggests the media company is making a prime-time play for legitimacy with VICE.
Mr. Moretti stopped just short of calling VICE a “news” program—but that may be semantic. “I think it’s a documentary show,” said Mr. Moretti. “News, to me, is everything that happened in a day, from the weather to the president visiting Israel to, you know, a cat in a tree.”
It’s a potato/potahto situation: it’s not news in the timely sense, and yet meeting Taliban leaders is newsworthy. And in recent months, the media company has gotten used to finding itself in the news cycle.
With stunts like sending Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea (where “The Worm” became the first American to meet Kim Jong-un) and the accidental leaking of John McAfee’s whereabouts in Guatemala through a photographer’s metadata, Vice Media has become a newsmaker—if not a newsbreaker.
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Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un in North Korea (Vice/HBO)
Still, VICE is having some trouble finding where it fits on the spectrum. It seems as though the show wants to stay true to its roots, in some ways, but also wants to be taken seriously; a hard line to toe, especially when your program is composed of two rushed 15-minute segments about “showing some of the scariest, weirdest and most absurd customs and practices known to humanity,” as Mr. Smith has referred to it.
That tongue-in-cheek tone is difficult to maintain when dealing with VICE's surprisingly serious subject matter: child bombers of the Taliban; India and Pakistan’s fights with Kashmir; political unrest in the Philippines. Half of each episode is the correspondents telling the audience how “fucked” the people in a particular region are, with interstitial shots of shockingly explicit footage from bombings, shootings and massacres. It’s not exactly “fun TV.”
In fact, several sources questioned whether HBO has gotten what it bargained for with VICE. They suggested that HBO was hesitant to work with the company—president of HBO Entertainment Sue Naegle in particular—but agreed on the condition that the program would deliver a scoop about Mitt Romney’s polygamist family in Mexico during the election cycle. (That particular piece ended up online, but the show proceeded anyway.) Mr. Moretti denied the existence of such a condition.
Others said HBO was expecting more of the old Vice.
“[HBO] actually wanted a hate-Brooklyn, pissing on themselves [show],” said one source close to the situation, who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. “And then they got all this serious shit.”
“HBO was shocked by that,” our tipster continued. “But Vice likes to do really serious stuff now.” Still, the source floated the possibility that the network was actually impressed: “Maybe HBO was shocked in a good way.”
As Mr. Moretti tells it, there was no resistance from the premium channel.
“It was just kind of a meeting of the minds. It was a wonderful process,” he said. “A lot of people can experience a traumatic pitch process, but with HBO, we just felt like these people knew us, understood us. They have a passion for news and documentary.”
To be fair to Vice, it’s not your older brother’s Canadian grime-core magazine anymore. (Hell, it’s barely a magazine anymore.) Vice Media has become a huge digital content creator, especially with Vice.com, which hosts 60-plus video channels. According to a spokesperson, 80 to 90 percent of what Vice Media produces today is online video.
In 2011 alone, Vice Media made $110 million on these video series, from pre-roll ads to YouTube partnerships. The programs range from the silly to the somber.
The stern of Vice’s skateboards-and-boobs ship began to turn in 2007. That was when Mr. Moretti and Mr. Alvi premiered their documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, about an Iraqi heavy-metal band, Acrassicauda. The video struck all the right notes: it had the hardcore, DIY underground music scene that already fit with Vice’s original conception as a punk magazine, but it was also covering a reality about the war-torn country from a unique perspective. When the accolades began pouring in for the documentary, Vice transitioned—overnight, it seemed—from a hipster outfit to an international “news” presence. The HBO show appears to be the natural culmination of this Vice 2.0.
“The secret of Vice was to stick to the core template I created. Stupid in a smart way, smart in a stupid way. Never be serious,” said Gavin McInnes, a founder and former employee of Vice Media, who left the company in 2008 following a very public dispute after Viacom was brought in. (Viacom maintained a partnership with Vice’s online video content from 2007 to 2009, when it was VBS.TV.) “I think they are trying to do serious journalism now.”
In a 2007 interview with Wired, on the occasion of the launch of VBS.TV, Mr. Alvi said, “Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since Day One with the magazine, we never believed in that.”
In fact, when VBS.TV first launched that year, its motto was: “Rescuing you from television’s deathlike grip.”
Oh, the irony.
“I think it’s a maturation of our natural form of documentary storytelling,” Mr. Moretti said of the show. “A maturation of the Vice brand, in a way. It’s consistently more serious, and the stories are told with a lot of diligence.”
When asked if this evolution represented Vice’s bildungsroman, Mr. Moretti answered with a laugh: “Totally. Actually, it’s my personal bildungsroman.”
Like a lot of things about Vice, though, we couldn’t tell if the executive was being totally serious. Which might be a problem when it comes time to teach Americans about the Pakistani and Indian factions currently tearing apart the region of Kashmir.
In the meantime, we’ll take Vice’s new conscientious-citizens-of-the-world shtick with a grain of salt. Or, if they can spare it, a bump of blow.
Additional reporting by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke