Gore’s Current Actually Works, Some Think

After three weeks, Al Gore’s Current TV unexpectedly lives up to its billing as a “slick, commercial cable network that gives its audience a voice in the programming,” writes Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times. The network, aimed at viewers aged 18-34, features a series of short subject features, from 15 seconds to five minutes long. Some, labeled VC2 (viewer contributed content squared) are both created by viewers and selected to be aired by viewers who looked at them online, voting for their favorites.

While only a few of these are truly “distinguished,” Stanley writes, they look nothing like the “glossy, overpackaged and bottom-feeding fare found on MTV or VH1, which are both owned by Viacom.”

For all its “rough spots and blog pretensions,” Current is for-profit public-access television, at least partially successful at an attempt to add diversity to a TV world “ever more controlled by a few media conglomerates.”

Not everyone agrees that Current is a good thing, of course. A post in eTalkingHead calls the format, “a rapid-fire stream of five to nine minute segments coming at you bullet train-like and punctuated by phrenetic graphical segways [sic],” while the Richmond Times-Dispatch calls it “repetitive,” and “earnest.”