Gore's Current TV shoots for the hip

Video killed the radio star. Al Gore apparently is trying to kill television.

Once upon a time, MTV brought the short heartbeat of pop tunes to a visual medium. It was a true format innovation, whose effects linger in everything from 15-second commercials to "American Idol" to concerns about an attention-impaired society.

Last Monday, Current TV hit the air, announcing itself in similar groundbreaking terms. The former vice president's brainchild, it has been relentlessly billed as "A new concept in television where viewers create the TV content that they watch."

That "new concept" part would be news to the hundreds of public-access channels across the country. But then, Current TV is what cable-access television would be like with more money, a less adventurous spirit and a fanatical focus on one niche audience.

The audience Current TV wants to reach is 18- to 34-year-olds. As we all know, it's a demographic woefully underserved — by only Fox, The WB, UPN, Comedy Central, VH-1 and, oh yes, MTV, not to mention the dozens of cable slivers devoted to interests like computers, extreme sports, car-pimping and indie films.

To reach these viewers, Current TV has come up with a structure that borrows from the Internet. Instead of old-fashioned half-hour or hour-long shows, it has so-called "pods" — stories and segments ranging from 15 seconds to five minutes long.

Each pod is branded under the Current logo and then labeled by type of programming. There's Current Information, Current Escape, Current News, etc. These broad categories are then subdivided into specific topics, called Current Parent, Current Flicks, Current Travel, Current Tech and so on. For example, a piece under "Current Video" featured people who parachute off bridges.

To quote from the 18-to-34 crowd, whatever. Slapping a label on every bit of content — particularly content that changes every few seconds or minutes — thwarts the free-flowing, let's-put-on-a-show experience allegedly at the heart of Current TV. It ends up feeling even more packaged than a late-night infomercial.

And that's too bad, because some of the content is interesting.

A short documentary called "Iran Underground" from New York filmmaker Yasmin Vossoughian took us into the world of secret house parties in Iran, where young adults actually drink, dance and take Ecstasy. Vossoughian got her subjects to really open up, and it was one of the most intimate, personable pieces I've seen on nonwar Middle-Eastern life.

It also wasn't long enough. Current TV's short-attention-span theater may give it a surface Web cachet, but it underestimates viewers. Whatever the restless, channel-surfing nature of Generation Y (and Z), they're fully capable of sustaining interest in a well-done half-hour or hour as demonstrated by "Laguna Beach," "The Surreal Life," "Gilmore Girls" and "The Daily Show."

Then again, those constitute entertainment — and as Chairman Gore and partner/CEO Joel Hyatt have made clear, Current TV isn't entertainment. It's "nonfiction information."

I'm tempted at this point to posit a connection between Gore's political persona and the soul of Current TV. The notion that substance and amusement are mutually exclusive could only spring from the mind of a man who expected to excite voters with the prospect of a dull, earnest period of fine-tuning the national bureaucracy.

Yet spirit aside, Current TV so far is surprisingly free of politics. Frankly, it could use a more radical injection of opinion — or maybe just a dose of the gross-out shorts on IFC.

Instead, it resembles an incubator for a future list of Hollywood's top 100. The segments are introduced by overly enthusiastic and carefully groomed people who could pass for fledgling news anchors in another universe, minus a tendency to say things like "That video was siiiiick!" after a piece concludes. Oh, how hard Current TV tries.

If Current's creators got one thing right in targeting the 18-to-34 crowd, it's the relentless "I-I-I" approach to reporting.

Like the Web log mania presently in vogue on the Internet, no story is worthwhile unless it can be sifted through the presenter's personal history. An hour of Current TV contains more talking-to-the-camera asides than an entire night of Fox sitcoms.

The actual content is generated mostly by the San Francisco-based staff or by established filmmakers. That's not how it was supposed to be; initially, Current said it would hire 200 video journalists, give them low-cost equipment and turn them loose.

This didn't work out, reportedly because Gore felt picking 200 people was too elitist. Instead, the network now is soliciting work directly from viewers and stipulating a three-month exclusivity agreement for their work. Contributions even can be uploaded to the Web site at www.current.tv (yes, it's so cool, it's in the dot-tv domain).

Curiously, however, you can't get Current TV's broadcast "pods" simultaneously video-streamed on the Web site. For an endeavor hell-bent on parading its meld of computers and television, this seems like an egregious oversight. (You can watch selected videos.)

On the other hand, no one sits behind a desk as the Voice of Authority. There's a remarkable consistency of tone, for a new network. And it's hard not to resist the promise of grass-roots programming, even though somebody's got to filter the contributors.

Current TV seems to have sold its message to advertisers. It's partnered with Google for news content, and commercials last week included Sony, Converse, Feria, the B.C. band Hot Hot Heat and that fixture of low-cost spots, DeVry University Online.

But here's the deal: For all the veneer of hipness, Current TV just doesn't bring anything new to the table. It's as if it were created in an imaginary universe devoid of competition — say, government.

On a more personal level, the magpie in me enjoyed the constant shifting of pods. But the "I" part just wanted to curl up with "The O.C."

Kay McFadden: kmcfadden@seattletimes.com.