#VICEonHBO
Friday April 5, 11 p.m.
VICE, the ballsy fringe media company out of Montréal that
has become a media behemoth, launches its first television series tonight. It’s a half hour international news magazine
focusing on under-the-radar stories that can’t be accessed by mainstream media. Bill Maher executive produces.
VICE founder Shane Smith leads a band of vagabond reporters
who thrive on the dangerous situations they encounter and manage to pull off
coups that would leave network news gasping.
It is riveting viewing at times, dangerous, ugly, and real. And best of all, it’s highly personal. 
VICE pulled off a coup recently, sending Dennis Rodman to
Pyonyang, North Korea to meet tiny dictator Kim Jong-Un. They hit it off. It was a basketball political manoeuvre of
the oddest sort and will be featured on the series soon.
Tonight, a world primer for comfy, smug North
Americans. The first episode features the
gun culture of the Philippines, and the children trained as suicide bombers
inside the Taliban. VICE gets up close
and personal with guns and the Taliban.
The political culture of the Philippines is deadly. 1200 assassinations have been carried out in
the last few years. It’s a dangerous
calling for anyone who might wish to challenge the corruption that permeates
every aspect of life there, and yet there are aspiring politicians who keep
trying.
These brave men are fully bulletproofed and cognisant that
they could be attacked around the next corner.
Guns are “banned” around election time but that’s inspired a booming
backyard gun making industry. VICE watches a third generation of gun
artisans cobble them powerful models from scrap metal. In some areas, 70% of the population owns a weapon.
The second story concerns the growing number of boys 6 and
up, recruited into the Taliban in Afghanistan and brainwashed into strapping
explosives to themselves and setting them off in enemy territory. These smiling, giggling, carousing children
are told the bombs only blow outwards so there is no chance that they will be
hurt.
VICE gets inside on the children’s training camp and meets a
friendly, grandfatherly leader who says his boys do it because they don’t know
any better and they are not afraid. Its
good business. 
Next stop a face-to face interview with of one of the
highest officials of the Taliban in his Kabul apartment. Smith is conducting the interview and is
visibly shaken. Who wouldn’t be?
The next episode features a stare-down in Kashmir, the place
where Pakistan and India’s mutual hatred simmers hottest. The dangerous war that’s been in place since
the Partition shows no signs of slowing down and both sides are threatening
nuclear annihilation. There’s a chilling story of three Noth Korean girls, so discouraged by life – and death – in their homeland that they risk their lives and their families’, by escaping. It’s a long, twisting road through China to Laos that must be navigated in secret in the dark. From Laos they will head to South Korea and hopefully safety.
VICE goes along out of North Korea and to South Korea where
a sad fate awaits the girls. Pastor Kim,
a local Catholic activist puts everything on the line to save refugees fleeing
Kim Jong-Un’s regime.
VICE is a chilling,
riveting and important documentary news series that will shed light on situations
we couldn’t imagine. As reporters, the
VICE folks are green. They can be repetitive,
use their hands and arms to do the talking, use poor grammar and usage but you
have to hand it to them, they are passionate and unimaginably brave. I’d
like to see mainstream American news reporters do what they’re doing. They don’t have the resources of the nets,
but they do have the juice.
I’m hooked.
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