Vice
Vice debuts tonight on HBO at 11 p.m. Eastern.
When Vice magazine first launched in 1994 as the Voice Of Montreal, it was funded in part by the province’s government and served—at least in theory—as a community service for the population that read it. Fast forward 10-odd years to the early 2000s and most people who knew about Vice magazine—and you had to be in the know to know about Vice—were into it for its cutting humor, sexualized photography, and commitment to stories about self-surgery, awkward sex, and child soldiers. In more recent years, though, Vice has shifted its focus away from shit pics and toward those harder stories of global atrocities and anomalies. Where its readership had once been shocked by Lesley Arfin’s Dear Diary column, now they could be appalled by what was going on in Pakistan or Angola.
Now, skeptics could say that Vice maybe made the move to slightly more “legit” content because it had become a parody of itself or because it had influenced too many people, leaving its pictorials and stories looking too similar to what was readily available in American Apparel ads, on Girls (which, until recently, Arfin wrote for), or on LiveLeak. Or maybe the serious stuff was just easier to sell, especially since Vice had birthed AdVice, its sales arm that had its the PBR-drinking youth of America in a headlock. For the sake of argument, though, let’s say Vice switched to more hard-hitting and worldly content because it was the more responsible thing to do or because that’s what its audiences really responded to as they grew older, smarter, and more mature.
Ultimately, that serious stuff is what got Vice noticed, too. The company’s documentaries on North Korean leaders or music in Mauritania are what landed its YouTube page a million subscribers, and what made the serious news media sit back and take notice. Still, when David Carr from The New York Times visited the Vice offices in the excellent documentary Page One, he wasn’t exactly impressed with their approach, essentially calling the company a bunch of Johnny-Come-Latelies to the global atrocity game.