TV Review: U off

TVNZ U, the youf music channel, went off the air yesterday (Saturday 31 August) at 7pm taking with it any confidence that the Freeview platform would live up to its hype, and taking with it any commitment the state broadcaster has towards supporting it.

The last moments of U – after two and a half years of fruitlessly competing with c4 – was subdued and orderly in the antiseptically tradition of TVNZ. The clean cut kids were gathered around like a Christian youth camp a wee bit sad that one of their camp counsellors was leaving. The corporation gave them an anti-climactical send-off in the way it had given them an anti-climactical existence.

The cynic’s conclusion will be that the channel was merely TVNZ’s contribution to the initial marketing budget of the Freeview digital system. The executive’s conclusion would have been that TVNZ could not hope to enter this space against TV3’s entrenched c4 offshoot and against Juice and hope to win over enough audience to the watered down squareness that is TVNZ to be viable. In this line of thinking it was always to have been a temporary sop. A sop like TVNZ 6 and 7 were; and an expendable one. The critics’ conclusion would have to acknowledge this compromised position. U was a dead channel walking as much as its TVNZ predecessor on the same button had been earmarked for a prompt execution at the earliest convenience of the management.

Maybe this inevitability is why the crew didn’t seem overly distraught at the last hour. Maybe they would be reabsorbed back into the borg, back into the Death Star without fuss. After all it takes surprisingly few people to run a channel these days.

Compare those scenes with the final moments of independent stations like Max TV and Alt TV if you want emotion. They were actually sad and the occasion wrought because the channels were staffed by mainly unpaid enthusiasts operating with creative freedom. Max from what I remember was a spectacular, and Alt was a depressing farewell – victim (and perhaps creation) as it was of the last global financial boom and bust. Both had more diversity of programming and local content than TVNZ U, which had swathes of US and UK shows of dubious quality.

The U show imports were playing to a narrow demographic well catered for already. The prospect of marginally classier reality TV, British as opposed to American trash and smut, never was enough to appeal in a saturated market. The additional commentary between the program, like Rose Matefao’s typically verbose and vacuous inanities for the Made In Chelsea poshling saga, detracted greatly from the already intractable.

Apart from her and the guy who is the Telecom geek in the ads, U hasn’t been much of an open door for talent. It was as if the TVNZ employees would send their kids down to the U studio – in the main foyer – as a sort of baby-sitting where they would follow Matefao’s lead and just rant out hard about random shit until someone played a music video.

Over and inbetween all this was the relentless pop ups and scrolling reams of social media that was to define the channel. They elevated the passing thoughts of the teenage mind into an echo-chamber worthy of broadcast. But it was never worth broadcasting. Although to be
fair, so little of talk-back radio (which largely features the elderly) is worth listening to either. Maybe it’s just slightly more annoying hearing crap from a kid than the same crap from an adult. And the value placed on all the tiny text the viewer was supposed to read (presumably only on a large screen TV) and the intrusion of the feedback rarely seemed to produce anything of benefit. Too often we are left overwhelmed by the volume and underwhelmed by the content.

U pushed the limits of social media interaction and maybe that will be its legacy. The lesson here might well be that less is more. Certainly that is how we are expected to accept the reduction in Freeview channels.