So the folks at Current TV are working within the system -- which, I guess, explains why everyone on the network is so damned good-looking. From the gratingly hip young hosts to the young female preacher in Texas in her bright-red lipstick and cowboy boots to the "Current Hottie" -- a pod that profiles a revolving lineup of supermodels -- every face we see on Current is beautiful. Even Jones, the human rights activist, has the face and body of a Polo model. After a few hours of this steady flow of pretty faces, it's easy to feel as if you're watching the extended version of that Coke commercial where young people drive around the country with their video cameras, proving that "kids today aren't just slackers, yo!" No, kids today make art and spin records and skateboard and play guitar, and best of all, they're all really adorable! Yes, we'd all like to teach the world to chill, if the world were this sexy.

Unfortunately, the Current hosts are too sexy for their cable network. And not only do they introduce each segment with inane, bubbly comments that make it sound far more fluffy and empty than it is, but they reappear after each segment to sum up their feelings about what happened. This is why we know that watching a pod about dating in Iran makes former Miss USA Shauntay Hinton realize "how lucky I am to be free to do what the hell I wanna do! Yeah!" and watching a segment on suicide in Japan "pretty much took the wind right out of my [host Johnny Bell's] sail." Bell adds, "Not much more to say, but it's tragic." As a result, tuning in to Current TV sometimes feels like going to see a moving documentary with a semiliterate preteen who insists on recasting the entire story in the shallowest of terms the second the credits start to roll.

Does all this fluffy packaging make sense? While it's certain that the network thought it was hiring an unusual, eclectic, diverse range of young people as hosts, this group is actually far less interesting than early MTV VJs. And if every pod features a bunch of pretty people, how does that encourage those grass-roots storytellers out there, many of whom don't have glowing skin and teeth as white as their kitchen sinks?

That said, compared with the same-old, same-old of most news shows, Current TV's content feels fresh, succinct and engrossing. Over the course of a few hours, I watched segments on home buying in Brooklyn, N.Y., jumpers (people who jump off cliffs and bridges with parachutes on their backs), modern kit houses, money trouble among newlyweds, college-age egg donors, the prevalence of suicide in Japan, the anxieties of expectant parents and the perils of dating in Iran, and my interest didn't wane. The segments were concise and dynamic, each one introduced me very directly to some new experience or perspective, and I could easily see how much time was left if I did get a little impatient with one particular pod.

In fact, I was pretty impressed by Current TV in spite of the jabber of the hosts ... and then, two hours into my viewing, the segments started to repeat themselves. In the course of four hours, I ran into the spot with Chopra twice, the egg donor spot twice and the Texas preacher spot three times. The next day (Tuesday), I turned on the TV to hear Chopra tell me, for the third time, that the universe is "actually a field of possibilities that is compelled to answer questions, that is compelled to make choices based on questions that you ask."

One hopes that when Al Gore asks how Current TV can retain viewers if it keeps repeating the same content over and over again, the universe will have an answer.

Recent Stories