Featuring series with proudly provocative names like Slutever and Fuck, That’s Delicious, Smith’s vision for Viceland is extraordinarily ambitious: luring advertisers’ coveted under-35s-a demographic awash in cord-cutters and cord-never-havers-back to traditional, linear TV.Īccording to a recent New York story frankly titled “A Company Built on a Bluff,” Viceland averaged just 103,000 prime-time viewers in the first quarter of 2018, making it the 83rd-most-watched cable channel in the country.
Launched just more than two years ago, Viceland is the cable television arm of Vice Media, the anarchic, millennial-targeted media company cofounder Shane Smith has propelled over the years into a multinational empire with investments from venture capital firms, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney. The announcement was widely interpreted as a promotion for the hosts less discussed was its impact on the platform Desus and Mero are leaving behind. Last week, Twitter-turned-podcast-turned-TV stars Desus and Mero revealed the duo would leave their namesake talk show on Viceland to hatch a weekly series on the more established Showtime. Could the same issue be facing the networks that air them? Much has been made of how individual series, whether The Good Fight or Halt and Catch Fire, struggle to break through in this enormously crowded era of entertainment. But there’s also the risk of doubling down on building a curated identity while omnibuses like Netflix are working to make the very idea of specificity obsolete. The start-up costs of a prestige brand include very literal costs of hiring movie stars, shooting scenic mountain vistas, and poaching HBO’s entire bench of recognizable character actors for a six-week series event. Paramount’s first months speak to the challenges of starting a prestige brand from scratch in the late stages of Peak TV-a battle the Paramount Network is joined in by other cable channels, like Viceland, and more unorthodox streaming services, like Amazon and Hulu. It takes much longer for a full lineup to cement into place-and in the meantime, in an awkward holdover from the Spike TV regime, the network has a cluster of reality hits like Lip Sync Battle and Bar Rescue it can continue to profit from.
As long as 2018 can feel, Paramount is still less than six months old. Paramount also has a promising development slate: Potential series include a legal episodic anthology from House and The Good Doctor’s David Shore a sketch comedy show targeted at Latino millennials set in a fictional neighborhood called Browntown and a missing-person thriller centered on a celebrity journalist. The success doesn’t come as a complete surprise: A modern Western in the Justified vein set in Montana and starring a white man in his 60s, Yellowstone-like the government-hostile Waco-is geared toward an older, more conservative, and more rural (or at least nature-romanticizing) viewership, which happens to overlap neatly with the demographics who still watch TV the old-fashioned way. None of these obstacles are insurmountable, and there are bright spots, too: The Kevin Costner–fronted Yellowstone premiered last week to an impressive 4.8 million viewers, including reruns and DVR viewings, in the three days following its release. (Viacom will shop the show to other networks, but Heathers will not air on Paramount.) American Woman, a comedy based on the childhood of Real Housewife Kyle Richards originally developed for TV Land, is more forgettable summer comedy than reliable brand-builder. After the Parkland shooting, the premiere of Heathers’ 10-episode season (already shot, edited, and released to critics in advance) was delayed due to a midseason episode centered on gun violence the show was scrapped entirely earlier this month. Waco was a ratings success, averaging over a million viewers an episode, but after mixed reviews, it never acquired the intangible patina of word-of-mouth buzz. More than five months later, the Paramount Network’s admittedly lofty dreams have yet to become reality. With Viacom’s considerable weight and a legacy name behind it, Paramount is attempting to muscle its way into TV’s more highbrow echelons. Waco was but the opening salvo in a barrage of projects perfectly suited to grab headlines: an adaptation of the pitch-black ’80s teen comedy Heathers Yellowstone, the first foray into television by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Taylor Sheridan a First Wives Club update by the cowriter of Girls Trip. The rebranded Spike TV, a property of Viacom’s entertainment megalith, announced itself in January with Waco, a high-profile, superbly cast miniseries drawn from real-life events. When the Paramount Network made its debut earlier this year, the fledgling channel appeared to be cribbing from a very familiar playbook.
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