65 | TV Review
Discerning telly watchers – nanas included – should tune into Viceland.
Viceland. As its branding implies, “It’s a TV channel”. Print, digital and now broadcasting company Vice is attempting to woo Millennials back to watching that outmoded construct, a television channel. With a food show called F---, That’s Delicious, a documentary series called Balls
Deep and a truckload of shows about cannabis, Viceland is out to show that this is not your nana’s watch list.
Except I’m a nana and Viceland is becoming my browsing channel of choice when I can’t take any more low comedy on Fox News. The culture at Fox is proof that there has never been a better time for a show like Viceland’s Hate Thy Neighbour.
Comedian Jamali Maddix travels the world, talking to racists and bigots of all stripes. There’s no shortage of them. He’s like a younger, browner Louis Theroux, making unthreatening contact with neo-Nazis in America, far-right militants in Ukraine and a young anti-immigrant English Defence League member in the UK who wants to thump him. Maddix is okay with that. “I’d want to punch me in the head,” he muses.
Hate Thy Neighbour is frightening, subversive and humane. “Are you a little bit Nazi?” Maddix asks one of the Ukrainian militants. He is. “How much?” wonders Maddix. “Twenty-five per cent,” says the militant. They both burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Balls Deep presenter Thomas Morton travels an increasingly atomised world, test-driving different ways of life on our behalf. He reports from the rugged, hairy gay subculture celebrated at Bear Week in Provincetown, Massachusetts. “So much man in there,” he observes, taking in a pool party.
“May I appreciate your body with my hands?” enquires his partner at a body-appreciation workshop. Despite urgent viewer-discretion-advised warnings before most shows, it’s a relief to find Viceland still employs pixelation when the occasion demands.
There are, of course, endless food shows. Bong Appétit featured no-nonsense 91-year-old “Nonna Marijuana”. Her daughter uses cannabis to control seizures so she’s become an expert in cooking up cannabis-infused butter for pasta and napoleons with weed pastry cream.
F---, That’s Delicious stars rapper and former chef Action Bronson, who defies the middle-class zeitgeist by eating voluminously and offering his unique analysis: “Oh, man, that f---ing quail is next level” and, “We’re not going around eating bullshit.” He eats raw whale blubber. Not all of his crew are as adventurous. “That shit tasted very awkward, son,” observes Bronson’s producer, the Alchemist, after an encounter with French cheese. “It reminds me of hockey equipment.” Bronson made an Al Brown-heavy episode in New Zealand while he was here to perform: “Ah, Lion Red. I’m eating on the hood of a car, I’m making bagels, I’m hearing waves …”
The channel won’t be everyone’s cup of weedinfused tea but it does a good job of getting right an essential equation that has mostly gone by the board on mainstream television. It credits its audience with the requisite intelligence and doesn’t take itself too seriously. Vice World of Sports’ The Eternal Derby, about the apocalyptic scenes that ensue in Serbia when rival soccer teams Red Star and Partizan go to war on the field, in the stands and on the streets, proved to be epic television with enough historical and cultural background to give some context to otherwise inexplicably mindless mayhem.
What makes Viceland seem a little radical is that it is, in some ways, so old-fashioned. Entertain, educate and inform? Check. It makes you realise what an odd, ossified version of reality is offered these days on mainstream information shows. With their grinning, stiffly coiffed glamour, unnatural banter and arcane presenter hand gestures, they’ve become so ritualised as to resemble a sort of electronic Kabuki theatre.
At its best, Viceland does what television was invented to do. It takes you out into the world to have a good look around with a curious set of eyes and an open mind.
It’s a relief to find Viceland still employs pixelation when the occasion demands.