Vice

And Carr was right. Serious journalists had been in Pakistan, Angola, and North Korea for years, so what made Vice think that because it sent some tattooed kids wearing jeans to a war torn area that it was reporting serious news and not just promoting “what the fuck” tourism. With Vice’s new HBO series, also called Vice, that question looms large and is never really answered.

Hosted by Shane Smith, each episode of the Vice TV series is made up of two 10-15 minute reports into different scenes that the company thinks exemplifies the “absurdity of the modern condition.” In the first two episodes, the show investigates the dangerous Kashmir region of India and Pakistan, helps four women escape North Korea, talks to child soldiers the Taliban has recruited to carry bombs for them, and ridden in a bulletproof government convoy in the Philippines, where more politicians are assassinated than anywhere else.

As one would imagine, all four of those situations make for compelling stories and offer a glimpse at just how absurd some of life is. Whether all of these things are purely modern conditions, well, that’s a stretch, considering there’s been fighting in Kashmir for years and years, and North Korea certainly hasn’t been a picnic for a while now, but for those of us who are sitting at home, looking at iPhones in our totally safe homes, yes, these lives seem a little—absurd’s not the word here—insane, maybe? Incredibly different than ours? And that doesn’t make them bad, per se. Children strapped with bombs are bad and paying $10,000 to a pimp to get a North Korean girl out of Chinese sex slavery is bad, but these cultures aren’t “bad.” The way most people live in these cultures isn’t bad. It’s just different.

That’s probably not what most people watching the show will think, unfortunately, but that’s not Vice’s fault. They just present the stories, though the facts are a bit underpinned with some quick-cut artiness and a “gritty, authentic nature” to these kids strapped with homemade guns in third-world countries that audiences might, unfortunately, think is kind of awesome looking. That probably could have been framed better, and to Vice’s discredit, some of the reporting voice-overs are a little heavy handed. For instance, at one point, Smith, Canadian accent intact, wondrously muses about how, in “our 21^st century,” there are “children used as transportation devices for dynamite,” and while yes, that’s true, our 21^st century standards certainly aren’t the same as the rest of the world’s, whether we like it or not. Still, the idea is there: Why aren’t we doing more about this?

That question is where Vice, the show, really falters. Not unlike a lot of other news programs, Vice doesn’t really offer solutions or judgments about how to help these children or refugees or how to make the Kashmir border better. On other news shows, though—Vice partner station CNN, for example—they’d have a reporter stationed there and constantly reporting (or at least they would have before newsrooms were basically desiccated, but that’s another story.) They’d do more than one 12-minute story on just how fucked up something is before flying away, saying “whoa, man. Can’t believe we did that.” Whether or not CNN’s multiple stories would get viewers at home all riled up is still hard to say, but the coverage, ideally, would be different and the audience more receptive.

Then again, maybe Vice’s audience is full of difference-makers. 2012’s anti-Kony quest got a bunch of well-off young people moving, and now there’s a $5 million bounty on that scumbag’s head. If Vice’s show manages to get even a few politically inactive people riled up or a few uninformed people learned, well, then, it can’t be all bad.