Teaser: VICE MAG and MTV team up to deliver a series devoted to the most bizarre, dangerous and shocking stories around the world.
NYC-The Vice Guide to Everything blends Johnny Knoxville antics with semi-serious investigative reporting that is raw, bold, amusing and gross. This trailblazing, riotous journalistic series on MTV is the brainchild of Shane Smith, the inveterate, slightly cheeky founder of Vice Magazine. His partners in crime are Ryan Duffy, a tattooed, meek 20-something year old and Thomas Morton, the soft-spoken yet articulate (and somewhat anti-social) editor of ViceMag.com. Together they connect other hipsters with what is going on in their world, from their perspective, in their own words.
In this eight-part series (starting 06 December on MTV) the Vice hipsters-cum-correspondents travel to various sultry locations and exotic geo-political flash points and appropriate local norms and cultural values and then go about videotaping themselves and their subjects. Besides indulging in the hijinks they’re best known for, the presenters make a respectable attempt at understanding relevant topics in international relations, social structures and a host of other issues related to globalization, culture and politics.
They simultaneously joke around with the indigenous (in the same facetious manner that Steve-O jokes with his counterparts in MTV’s Wildboyz) while assimilating many of their customs (for instance, in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, Shane and his videographer dress in local garb and take the highly-addictive amphetamine-like Qut while cruising around the region engaging in interesting, sometimes retarded conversation with tribal radicals). In another episode, which is nothing short of amazing, Duffy goes to Detroit to document the proprietor of a 24-hour strip-club. Nothing unusual here, only in this case, the club is run out of the home of Jay Thunderbolt, who happens to be the freakiest, most paranoid pistol-toting white-trash pimp of them all (who is also half-paralyzed in the face due to a gun-shot wound inflicted by a rival gangster back in the day).
Striking a nice balance between courage, humor and a modicum of seriousness, Messrs Smith, Duffy and Morton canvas the globe covering all things weird, outrageous, taboo, and newsworthy (or not). The boys have
