http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/arts/television/review-vice-news-tonight-on-hbo-is-new-but-no-game-changer.html 2016-10-11 20:49:08 Review: ‘Vice News Tonight,’ on HBO, Is New but No Game Changer This weeknight newscast bills itself as atypical. But its segments, while competent, offer the usual fare. === The “Tonight” in Vice, still targeting young audiences after 20 years in the content game, had announced that its “modern approach” to a nightly news show would mean no anchors, no desks, cool graphics and long-form pieces. More obvious in Monday’s 7:30 p.m. premiere was another difference between “Vice News Tonight” and the traditional network newscasts. They’re live to some extent, while the Vice show is recorded, delivered to HBO a few hours before airtime. At best, it’s Vice News this afternoon. On Monday the show managed to get in some election-related breaking news. A headline roundup included House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s telling Republican members of Congress that he would A head-scratcher of a piece with the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, heavy on shots of his scenic Texas ranch, included Mr. Beck and a Vice correspondent watching the presidential debate on Sunday. (When Mr. Trump uttered his already notorious line to Hillary Clinton, “you’d be in jail” if he ran the country, Mr. Beck said, “He just won.”) Otherwise, though, the show was mostly a canned, feature-heavy affair presenting news that was a day old or more. Over the years Vice’s online video and television content has offered an often shallow but slick and jazzy spin on traditional newsmagazine and lifestyle coverage, and the “Vice News Tonight” segments tried to be in that vein. But they suffered because of the show’s 25-minute length — segments ranged from one to five minutes, and lacked the atmosphere and style of Vice’s actual long-form work. Pieces about an Alabama prison riot, which featured a Skype interview with a prisoner in solitary confinement, and the Wells Fargo phony-account scandal, which uncovered a single incident of the practice back in 2005, were competent but far from earthshaking. A one-minute check-in on Hurricane Matthew focused on the storm’s effects in Haiti several days ago, and an animated segment achieved timeliness by reporting on efforts to rename Columbus Day. Subjects like banking scandals, presidential politics, a hurricane and a prison riot were at least slightly outside Vice’s usual focus on the interests of young male armchair warriors. But a final news segment was right in the comfort zone: a report on the merger of two giant brewing companies. (The deal was long in progress but, in a coup for “Vice News Tonight,” closed on Monday.) As hackneyed, shallow and formulaic as network newscasts can be, they still offer something in terms of immediacy and comprehensiveness that “Vice News Tonight,” as it’s currently constituted, can’t pretend to compete with. If you like the Vice sensibility, though, you might enjoy the show’s capsule version of it. Just don’t expect the news to be new.