Goodbye, Zwobot

VIVA Zwei was something. A German music channel with actual personality—VJs who went by names like Zwobot, Zelluloid, Kamikaze, and Soja—replaced five years ago by VIVA PLUS, which was marketed as "the CNN of music television." I hated it immediately on principle, and the principle turned out to be correct.

It was a joke from the first broadcast. Giant grey scroll bars eating half the screen while breaking-news tickers announced that The Sims were throwing a massive house party, or that Mary J. Blige was suffering from PMS. VJs who spent entire segments just giggling at nothing. There’s a kind of retrospective kitsch to it now—but only as a memory. Actually watching it was insufferable.

Then came the MTV acquisition, and VIVA PLUS mutated into something worse: a wasteland of SMS voting shows, ringtone commercials, and telephone quiz programs. It became a machine for extracting small payments from teenagers who had nothing else on.

So Comedy Central replacing it on January 15th didn’t feel like a loss. Whether it would actually be any good was a different question—the preview didn’t inspire confidence—but at least the schedule listed something called "Einmarsch in vier Wänden mit Tine Hitler," running daily from 19:33 to 19:45. That odd specificity at least suggested someone somewhere was paying attention.

For anyone still looking for real music on television: the Austrian channel gotv did the job, or MTV after midnight, when they occasionally remembered what they were supposed to be.