In a world of Netflix, good ol’ network television has fallen by the wayside. As a college student, my only connections to cable are the two shows I have set to “record all” on Philo (Seinfeld and Chopped), and when I binge watch talk show clips in my room for two hours. This means that I’m missing out on the many mediocre fall pilot premieres that have been hitting the airwaves— dramas starring B-list movie stars that make you worry about their career prospects, series about Stephen King novels you’ve never heard of, and even more sitcoms about indistinguishably dysfunctional families. Fall is abound with dystopian clichés and muddled down, laugh tracked, feel good comedies that will inevitably get canceled after one season. This got me thinking—what if there was a network that catered specifically to Brown students, combining the pervasiveness of these premises with the campus culture we know all too well? Tune your television antennae and steal that remote back from your roommate, because BrownTV is broadcasting now with this hot fall lineup:
Ratty Rush: Guy Fieri(‘s son Hunter Fieri) hosts this cooking competition where student chefs compete in dining hall challenges. Watch as contestants transform plain chicken breasts and battle it out for access to the panini press, hoping to get Hunter’s seal of approval, a take off on his father’s catchphrase “this is money”: “mhmm, this is so worth a credit.”
Brown Bears Admirers: On this reality dating show, contestants go on blind dates based on the anonymous submissions to the popular Facebook page. There is a very low success rate because most of the time it matches two best friends who sent in anonymous compliments for a laugh.
Saturday Night Live: Live from Brown University, it’s Saturday Night! What are students doing once the weekend rolls around? Dancing to hot beats at a club downtown? Finishing a CS project in the SciLi? Eating mozzarella sticks on the floor of Jo’s and wondering how they got there? Less sketch-based than its predecessor in that it’s shot completely documentary style, it follows real life students in their real life missions to turn up/in their assignments.
Friends-ish: Follow a group of freshman as they maneuver the first weeks of school. Watch as they eat breakfast in the same booth of the “Sharpe Refectory,” fall into recognizable tropes, develop catchphrases that incorporate critical theory language from their FYS and hook up with each other because they’re all “on a break” from their significant others back home. Don’t miss the finale, “The One Where We Realize We Don’t Have Much in Common Except That We All Use the Same Bathroom on Our Floor.”
The S/NC Zone: “It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call…the S/NC Zone.”
Images via Sarah Clapp, Sarah Clapp, via, Sarah Clapp, via, and via.
