In 1997, a subversive, transgressive, prescient show aired on MTV. From what I recall, it aired randomly. 3 thirty minute episode that aired on non successive weekends on either Saturdays or Sunday, at different times. This may be mis-remembering it, and it possibly aired once at a scheduled time on successive weekends, and it was even too weird for advertisers or MTV, so it was only re-aired a couple times, randomly.
There’s little information on it, and it doesn’t help that U2’s Zoo TV tour was happening around the same time, and it had *nothing* to do with this show. What I found does confirm… it aired in April of 1997 on 3 weekends in a row!
Zoo TV: The Television Series https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0307890/episodes/
The three episodes were: “Surveillance”, “The Body”, and “Alternative”
They actually had a 1997 website: www.zoo-web.com
https://web.archive.org/web/19980212155712/http://www.zoo-web.com/
Also, you could call for a program guide: 310-985-9333
I left a 1m15s voicemail.
There was an AV Club review on it, but that article was never logged, and deleted. So the only mention in media is below, at the end.
https://www.avclub.com/tv/reviews/zoo-tv-the-television-series-1997 <— resolves to the home page, and never indexed.
Here is 1997’s Zoo TV casually predicting Youtube:
ARTIFICIALLY INTELLIGENT CONTENT PERSONALIZATION AND DELIVERY:
(Finally, true freedom from too much choice)
BODY DYSMORPHIA, TOXIC GYM CULTURE, AND HEALTH ANXIETY (ok we could all predict this in 1997)
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DESIGNED DIGITAL ECOSYSTEMS WHERE DIGITAL BEINGS EVOLVE
CRISPR, EPIGENETICS, TAILORED GENE TREATMENTS
JOKING ABOUT THE HISTORY of HIP-HOP BEING FROM THE SUBURBS BECAUSE A MEATBALL FELL ON A RECORD AT A POOL PARTY: CULTURAL APPROPRIATION, MARGINALIZATION & SUBJUGATION, AS WELL AS POST-TRUTH GASLIGHTING, ETC.
The channel with all the episodes, and each 2 part clip below, 6 clips total, 3 episodes total, about 60 minutes total.
https://www.youtube.com/@dwanderer25
EPISODE 1 PART 1
EPISODE 1 PART 2
EPISODE 2 PART 1
EPISODE 2 PART 2
EPISODE 3 PART 1
EPISODE 3 PART 2
This is simply a pull quote mention from the producer, an editor at Details who produced Zoo TV, Roger Trilling. Emphasis mine.
David Kushner Culture Apr 17, 1997 3:08 PM
Time for Alt.Culture to Alter Name?
The principals behind the youth-culture guide book aren’t worried about button-down interference as their project debuts on Time Warner’s Web world. But they’ll come whining if they need to.
“We didn’t sell our souls,” says Nathaniel Wice, co-author of Alt.Culture, the youth-culture guide book that premiered Thursday as a refurbished Web site on Time Warner’s Pathfinder. “We’re just licensing them.”
Wice, 28, and his partner, Steven Daly, 36, have been dancing with The Man since their book was originally published early last year. As an “A-to-Z Guide to the ’90s – Underground, Online, and Over-the-Counter,” Alt.Culture is a pithy, cross-referenced encyclopedia of pop, covering everything from Alicia Silverstone to *69, which the book describes as “a relationship-altering phone feature, also a 1994 song by REM.” Though it was intended to reach the writers’ peers, the book wound up on the night tables of marketing execs and boomer hipsters. Fortune called it “a new dictionary [that] enables the aging (anyone over 30) to keep up.”
With their Pathfinder site, Wice and Daly, a Harvard graduate and a transplanted Scotsman, respectively, who met while working at Spin magazine several years ago, will ditch what they consider to be the old-school model of the ezine, for a more speedy and accessible database. Enter, say, Douglas Coupland and a blurb comes up with links on Generation X. “As we were writing the book,” Wice says, “we had the Web in mind the whole time.”
A concern for some is how the association with Time Warner (which, incidentally, was skewered in a couple passages of the book) affects Alt.Culture’s street cred. “That depends on what street you’re on,” says Roger Trilling, an editor at Details magazine who produced MTV’s Zoo-TV mini-series about the mass marketing of youth culture. Although Trilling enjoyed the original Alt.Culture book, he’s somewhat skeptical about its presence on Pathfinder. “If you want an alternative to corporate culture, this isn’t the place,” he says.
Though Time Warner’s new media editor, Dan Okrent, unabashedly hopes to “get a lot of business from a younger audience,” Wice and Daly aren’t dismayed. “We don’t take the alternative in Alt.Culture too seriously,” says Daly, who adds that the company will have “no involvement” in the content.
Of course, Time Warner has raised objections about so-called alternative content in the past, most notably in the case of gangsta rap on its Interscope record label. If such a situation should arise for Alt.Culture, the authors are prepared with a generationally appropriate response. “We’ll come whining to you when they come at us,” Wice says.
The Pathfinder site is actually version 2.0 of the Alt.Culture Web site and will be refreshed with five new entries per week. This brings about a whole different challenge, says contributor Richard Gehr: “the potential and hellish obligation to update everything.”