When watching the “Office” becomes a privilege
I consider access to quality television a basic human right. Unfortunately, as the balloon boy story has shown, prime time television in North America is slowly becoming all about sensationalism and fanfare. The situation around prime time TV content in Russia is not much better: from 7 to 10 PM, Russian air time is filled with reality shows, talk shows, game shows and the «feel-good» movies. I know this because I watch a couple of Russian television channels online practically every week: mostly news, but also features and entertainment programming. And, like everywhere else, I am not liking the primitiveness of the content that gets spewed at me in Russian prime time.
But, a year ago, one of the top TV networks in Russia - Channel One (Pervii Kanal) embarked on an interesting «experiment». The network administrators decided to play it safe and experiment with their content late at night when the so-called «average» viewer is long asleep. So, every day after midnight, a programming block dubbed Gorodskie Pizhoni went on air. Gorodskie Pizhoni can be translated as City Cool Kids or City Slackers, implying that the channel is not for everyone, but for people who do not consider themselves «mainstream».
My guess is that the target audience for Gorodskie Pizhoni were the well-educated, socially conscientious people, 20-35 years old, who quit on television a long time ago, and do not even own a television set anymore. All they ever want to watch, they get online, and watch on their free time – that stuff being mostly American-made TV series and movies. The administrators of Pervii took note, and showed the same stuff on television, riding their viewers of the necessity to download their favourites online.
Gorodskie Pizhoni showed TV series, like the «Office», «Extras», «Lie To Me», «House», etc, and movies like «The Full Monty», «The Cat In The Hat», Pixar cartoons, and so on.
The channel became somewhat of a cultural phenomenon for people 'hungry' for qulity content. And so, a lot of online and radio chatter followed. From blogs and radio shows, what I was hearing is that people in Russia would show up to work late and sleepy, having watched Pizhoni until the wee hours. But, despite the success, the project lasted one summer, and was terminated in the fall of last year. It returned this summer, and so far as I am aware its ratings are nothing but growing… In fact, there is a growing petition to make Pizhoni a year-round channel.
So, while we here in North America do not usually think of watching the «Office» as much of a privilege, people in Russia still do. For now at least…