TV For You and Me

Producer-director Dave O’Brien has already gone through the development wringer with the Here cable network and MTV’s Logo channel. The gay 30-year-old’s indie documentary Hip Hop Homos and short film Straight Boys aired on Logo, as have his music videos for artists such as lesbian hip-hop duo God-Des and She. But it’s the Al Gore–backed Current TV that O’Brien says has taken the most interest in his LGBT-themed work. While Logo and Here program their fair share of coming-out profiles and documentary features within the mix of reality shows and serials, it’s Current that’s procuring stories from the LGBT population -- in other words, people like you. In fact, the Current is more akin to a local film festival than a TV network in its pursuit of the unique, less heard, and often underfunded narratives, and it has opened up a blank canvas for gay people to represent themselves if they simply pick up a camera and get to work.

The channel aired Fight for Marriage, O’Brien’s report on last year’s referendum on an amendment to ban civil unions and same-sex marriage in Wisconsin, which chronicled the weeks leading up to the November vote. Current also bought from O’Brien a segment about young people, both straight and gay, who are battling sexual addictions; another about the controversy at the University of Southern California’s campus newspaper, which had published antigay letters to the editor; and another about a group of die-hard “Rentheads” who give early reviews of Rent.

“These are the kind of authentic LGBT stories that “you wouldn’t see anywhere else, not even on Logo or Here,” O’Brien says. “On Current the ideas are coming from the viewers and are being told in their voices.”

The network, launched in 2005 with the aim of giving the 18- to 34-year-old set a hand in generating their own news, is a collection of short-form programs called “pods,” many under five minutes long. These pods run on a shuffle, like your iPod, in a loop that cycles every couple of hours. Topics for these programs fall under the purposely broad category of anything that interests young people: careers, relationships, fashion, sex, pop culture, and yes, even current events. And the shuffle means that programming isn’t organized by topic. One minute you could be watching something about Britney Spears; the next, the war in Uganda. Think of it as a think tank for the MySpace generation that makes news palatable for an audience that shuns news and politics on the air and often in print. According to “Teens Tune In to News on the Internet,” a Knight Foundation study published in 2006, 66% of U.S. high school students get news from Google and Yahoo! while just 34% get it from local TV or newspaper sites. What’s more, adults younger than 30 say they spend more than half of their Internet time with user-generated content, according to the 2007 “State of the Media Democracy” study conducted by Harrison Group for Deloitte. Has Current TV seen the future of television?