A week after announcing that it was rebranding itself as "the first TV network for the social media generation," HLN has finally released some details about the new shows the network is developing to meet that goal. Spoiler: They sound exactly as bad as you might suspect.
First there is I Can Haz NewsToons (working title, as are all the titles on the development slate), which promises to "scour the internet to present the most original e-cards, caricatures and doodles, and for the first time bring people’s favorite political and social cartoonists from the world of print to TV." Ok, sure. Then there's Keywords, a new game show "of search and tag trivia for internet addicts" that will basically test players' skills at guessing a search term from keyword clues.
For those seeking more highbrow entertainment, perhaps you'd be interested in One.Click.Away -- yes, that's actually the correct punctuation, because internet, or something -- which tells "the untold stories behind the online classifieds" in a show created by the former president of the National Scrabble Association. Or perhaps you'd prefer Videocracy, which combines Tosh.0 and Best Week Ever and "counts down the most talked about entertainment ripped from social media." You create the content, they show it on television -- it's the online dream!
Albie Hecht, HLN's executive vice president and general manager, said in a statement the network's development slate was created "with a key goal in mind: debunk the myth that the world of social media is only about videos of cats riding skateboards." Impressively, with that one statement, Hecht has managed to simultaneously seem out of touch with both his target audience and his own shows, considering Videocracy sounds like exactly the type of show that'd happily discuss the latest hot skateboarding cat.
Clearly, the oft-promised death of television can’t come soon enough. But if you're the kind of millennial who spends more time looking at your second screen than your TV, HLN has you covered there too. The network is also developing an app called #What'sYourFomo that will help you "collect your list of FOMOs." ("FOMO" is "Fear Of Missing Out," in case you didn't know — just like HLN didn't know that punctuation ruins hashtags.) So there's that.
