The Show I Didn’t Get

Friday night, home alone, dehydrated past the point of coherence. My Sims were starving—visibly, with those little need bars emptying in real time—and I was watching them do it while drinking a Beck’s and flipping through whatever television had to offer. This is how I landed on VIVA, Germany’s answer to MTV and roughly as satisfying, and a new show called vasta.tv.

The concept: take a blog, transfer it to television, install a very pretty host named Nadine Vasta at the center of the whole thing, and call it social media. The phrase "social media" was almost certainly said forty times in the pitch meeting. I’m not speculating. I know how those rooms work.

Honestly? Not a completely worthless idea. A blog’s spontaneity and confessional texture transposed into television could be something real, if someone actually committed to it. The problem with vasta.tv is that commitment—or the absence of it. What the show was actually doing was the cautious, toothless version: boring guests, aimless wandering through Berlin, constant reminders that there’s a companion blog you can also visit (we know, we’re watching the show), and not nearly enough willingness to be genuinely embarrassing. That’s where this format lives or dies. You have to go all the way into the Peinlichkeit—the cringe, the exposure—or it’s nothing. Half-measures don’t read on television.

The host is, to be clear, extremely easy to watch. This is not nothing. But I can’t live on easy to watch alone.

I sat on my green couch and thought: this journal has been doing something like this for years. The pop-culture tangents, the Friday-night derangement, the opinions nobody asked for. Why doesn’t it have a time slot? The obvious answer is that I would be genuinely terrible on television. This is probably correct. The Sims died of neglect while I was still working through my feelings about it.