I'm a media junkie. It's a common affliction, and I've got it bad. I can't get my fix with just channel-surfing. If I want to relax, I need to fully immerse myself.
If I'm not playing a video game, listening to music, reading a book and instant-messaging friends at the same time, I feel like I'm wasting my potential. I mean, you're only young once.
Although it sounds the opposite of a therapeutic isolation chamber, it's strangely soothing. Noises and images are assaulting me from all sides demanding my attention, and no matter which one I choose to focus on at any given moment, I will be delighted and amused. Maybe it's because I have a short attention span or maybe I've developed a Zen technique where the cacophony of transient pop-culture nonsense is a sensory hurricane in which I am the calm eye, floating like the lotus.
No, it's definitely the short attention span. This combined with the rate at which I consume the stuff means I'm always on the lookout for the next score, and sometimes I end up finding treasure in unexpected places — like The N, for example.
The N is a premium cable channel, which means it's a cable channel that nobody watches. It's the teen-oriented spin-off of Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, Nicktoons and NNN, the Nickelodeon News Network, with co-anchors The Angry Beavers and war coverage by field correspondent Rocko the Wallaby.
As you might expect, The N is mostly crap. They claim to offer programming that "cuts right to what matters in teen lives," but a closer look reveals it's mostly formulaic "Dawson's Creek"-esque dramas with episode synopses like: "Dorian thought finding his mom would provide answers, not raise more questions. Lil' Bow Wow guest stars."
I was surprised that The N's demographics include such a large number of orphans desperately searching for their estranged parents, but I was even more surprised by Lil' Bow Wow's commanding performance as a repentant mother seeking forgiveness from the son she abandoned in order to pursue her dream of getting a sex change.
The syndicated reruns would be pretty good, except they censor most episodes of "Daria" into incomprehensibility and air "My So-Called Life" at 5 a.m., if at all. At least they've got three hours of "Fresh Prince" every day. I'd be really thrilled at this chance to catch up with Alfonso Ribeiro, who I consider to be both America's greatest youth role model and the world's sexiest man, if I hadn't already been watching him in syndication on every major network for more than a decade.
Yeah, OK, you already knew The N was unwatchable in the same creepy sixth-sense way you know that jabbing yourself in the eye with a stick hurts before you even try it. But deep, deep in the syndicated garbage and vapid teen pseudo-drama is a precious gem. It's called "O'Grady," and it's from the same people who produced "Dr. Katz" on Comedy Central, "Home Movies" on Cartoon Network and "Science Court" on ABC.
Those people are Soup2Nuts. "O'Grady" follows their usual formula: several veterans from their shows (like H. Jon Benjamin, famous as the voice of the onanistic can of vegetables from "Wet Hot American Summer") and a variety of stand-up comedians voice some crudely drawn, computer-animated characters.
The fun part is that the shows are only roughly scripted before the cast records, leaving the comedians free to add their own personal touches as they try to crack each other up. Then they add some pretty cartoons over the top of it so you don't have to look directly at Patrice O'Neal, who has a fine comedic mind but the appearance of a giant fearsome man-ogre.
The setting for "O'Grady" is, predictably enough, high school, but there's no contrived drama. There is some extremely contrived humor, but that doesn't mean it's bad. In each episode, the kids have to deal with a completely random manifestation of a force known as The Weirdness — which plagues their town.
It tends to be something confusing yet ultimately pointless, just like I remember a lot of high school being. In one episode anybody who yawns is suddenly teleported a few yards away; in another, The Weirdness periodically causes everybody to become incontinent simultaneously for no apparent reason. It gives a certain flavor to the usual high school comedy format, and I really wish they'd tried it with "Saved by the Bell" instead of churning out that “College Years” crap.
I know, there's a problem here: you don't have The N, you don't know anybody willing to pay for it, and you've got better things to do then sit around waiting for it to come on. Luckily, the imminent collapse of all conventional forms of media transmission is your gain, because it means that you can just watch them online — legally, because The N so desperately wants to generate interest in their only original show watchable by the over-14 crowd. You can get almost every complete episode straight off their website instead of dealing with formalities like a cable subscription, commercials or having to haul your ass from one glowing screen to another.
The site, www.the-n.com/ntv/shows/ogrady/video, will get you there directly, avoiding exposure to any of the 57 "Degrassi" spin-offs that haunt the network. Try the episode "Big Jerk on Campus." Not only does it feature perennially excellent David Cross as a guest star, but also a character with an eerily hilarious resemblance to Conor Oberst. I promise you, it will not be the worst 24 minutes of your day.
Ben Freund secretly loves "Degrassi High," even if he'll never admit to it. Let him know he's not alone at [email protected].
