Julia Allison to Air on Most Obscure Channel Possible
Relentless egoblogger Julia Allison took a break from hurling ladyparts labels at bloggers to inform us of breaking news: Her videoblog, TMIweekly, has been picked up by NBC's New York Nonstop. How appropriate!
Appropriate, because New York Nonstop is as close as one can get to the Internet in obscurity, and yet still claim to be on television, making it an appropriate home for the contentless musings of Allison, an inappropriately well-known dating columnist Time Out New York, and her two friends, Silicon Valley heiress Meghan Asha Parikh and vapid handbag designer Mary Rambin. (Or perhaps just Rambin: Rumors are spreading that Parikh may have quit, though Allison denies this.)
Episodes of TMIweekly, a videoblog, have featured the three talking about uninteresting aspects of their lives. (Imagine Twitter, but videotaped.) It's part of a pseudo-business called NonSociety. Allison recently informed me that NonSociety had taken in $60,000 in revenues in all of 2008. Using the advanced business metric known as earnings before expenses, that would give NonSociety's three foundresses a living slightly above minimum wage. Parikh's family fortune must surely throw off more interest than that in a month.
The 24-hour news channel broadcasts in Manhattan, sort of, on digital channel 4.2, and Time Warner Cable carries it on channel 161. So if you avoid triple-digit cable channels and haven't upgraded to a digital converter — since the government has pushed back the deadline for the digital transition, you probably haven't — you can remain blissfully Allison-free. New York NonStop claims a theoretical reach of 5.7 million, though, so it's possible someone, somewhere, in the New York area might accidentally be exposed to her work.
Whatever NBC is paying Allison for this 24x7 filler, it's surely too much. As NBC officials themselves seem to realize! Meredith McGinn, senior manager of special products for NBC4, explained to the New York Daily News:
You'll get your meat — your news, weather and headlines — every 15 minutes. In between those 15 minutes, you may have a two-minute segment, a two-minute pod, a five-minute pod. So the shows we're looking at are in little bits, not your traditional half-hour newscasts.
So the news is the meat, which makes TMIweekly, what, exactly? Shredded lettuce? Mayo? Anything, surely, except relish.
Rather than force you to watch TMIweekly, we will show you Gawker videographer Richard Blakeley's much funnier parody, "NomSociety":
Welcome To NomSociety from Richard Blakeley on Vimeo.