VICE (2013)

There are a whole lot of “Holy s--t!” moments, but it’s very real and astoundingly raw--without once giving you the idea these are show-off correspondents with a makeup artist and clean clothes.

In a world that has exploded with instantaneously accessible information, television news is hard-pressed to figure out how to keep up. It takes a show like Vice to make other news magazine shows seem like they belong in a TV antiques shop.

Despite showing some very gruesome imagery--a real decapitated head, for example--and having a swaggy, “we’re so hip we send our reporters into dangerous places looking like they just rolled out of bed” self-aggrandizement, Vice is fundamentally earnest.

Vice tries to go where other news, documentary and magazine shows do not. That’s okay, though it does at times overstate its pioneering prowess.

What Vice offers is not deep or thorough, but it is not without value. The news comes in pieces now; to get the full picture, you have to assemble it yourself.

It's graphic--disturbingly and, some would say, unnecessarily, so.... But it's also intelligent and enlightening.

Vice seems to be in search of some sweet spot between “60 Minutes” and “Jackass,” and there’s enough here to suggest that such a spot may exist. The concept could work, especially if Smith and his correspondents were more inclined to point the cameras away from themselves.

This isn’t look-at-me journalism with a fitted Gap t-shirt. It’s more of a holy-hell-can-you-believe-this approach that fights perfectly on a cable channel trying to do something different.

Hosted by Vice founder Shane Smith--hardly a natural on camera--the magazine nevertheless resonates precisely because it zeroes in on unsettling tales of violence and cruelty abroad, at a moment when TV news frequently seems preoccupied with trifles at home.