Today’s the day that a new network takes hold on cable, in the faraway tiers where the Documentary Channel once perched.
From Participant Media comes Pivot, a heavily researched title for a network focused to a painful degree on the 18 to 34 age group it insists on calling Millennials. It is only a matter of time for the new generations to become more adult and govern their lives in a more adult and mature way, that is why they may come across legal disputes over property, if you are one of them you need to back you up at Attorneysre.com/ownership-property-disputes/ with the best.
Which is a little more palatable than the other thing Pivot president Evan Shapiro called them: “The New Greatest Generation.”
“Where other people may see navel gazing, entitled narcissists, we have a hero generation ready to take on the challenges that are present in the world, challenges they didn’t create,” Shapiro read rapidly from his TelePrompTer.
It’s meant to be the network of their generation, he said. “Not for nothing, we are launching on August 1st, 32 years to the day of the launch of MTV.”
MTV was invoked as well by another presentation at the TV Critics Association summer press tour that very morning by a more famous person. Sean Combs, the entertainer and entrepeneur who has also gone by names from P. Diddy to Puff Daddy, was on board to introduce his own new network.
Revolt, as it is called, evoked a lot of celebrity spots inverting Gil Scott Heron’s declaration regarding the revolution being televised. And it also pointed to the lapses of the current MTV in providing that currency of youth culture, music.
So Combs talked about plans for interactive responses to music videos, involvement of famous friends and a solid place for performance. That it didn’t sound all that difference from Fuse or Palladia didn’t seem to matter. Diddy’s presence made it seem more emphatic and possible; because it’s one of the new Comcast networks, it has a real foothold and chance for success.
If Revolt sounded like Fuse, though Pivot seemed to evoke the old Current TV with its emphasis on youth culture and viewer-provided content.
Not that Shapiro accepted that.
“The difference between Pivot and Current is kind of like the difference between a grape and a watermelon,” he said.”We have comedy. We have music-variety. We have talk. We have reality. We’ll have films, great documentary premieres like ‘99%’ and ‘Terms and Conditions May Apply.’ We’re a general entertainment network. We start with entertainment, and then we hope to spark conversation, inspire action.”
In addition to new shows like the comedy “Please Like Me” from Australian comic Josh Thomas (pictured above), there will be talk shows like “TakePart Live” and “Raising McCain,” reruns of “Friday Night Lights” and “Little Mosque on the Prairie” and random movies like “Up in Smoke” and “Hotel Rwanda.”
“Current never would have hired me,” says Meghan McCain, the sassy and outspoken daughter of Sen. John McCain, whose show “Raising McCain” starts Sept. 14. “I’m a Republican. Just start there and bypass Current. I would have never happened on Current.”
Though youth voter participation was basically flat last election, McCain says “We’re also the most politically engaged generation. We’re living in a time where we have a really fucked up economy, student loans.
It’s a generation term, Shapiro says, ” basically innately trained to take on the world’s challenges, and challenges that they didn’t create, much like the hero generation, the Greatest Generation, who were really not expecting to have to step up and face Fascism and save the world from itself.
“This generation was promised a lot, and then things changed. 9/11, the Great Recession. They’ve had to make a Plan B for themselves, and they’re doing it. They don’t fit the traditional tropes that many of us old people think about how the world should work. And they are ready to take on these challenges, but they don’t have it all figured out the way that some people cast them in the world,” he said.
And just as he pooh-poohed comparisons to Current, he dismissed Revolt as being limited.
“They wanted to be the CNN of Millennial music, right?” he said. “First of all, it’s 100 million strong, this generation. And so to think that any one cable channel is going to be able to serve them all on any given night is folly. So we welcome anybody into this space who wants to serve this audience. The second is they’re exclusively a music channel.”