It is 2.30pm on a Monday and I am watching a video of two people aggressively snogging. They are a man and a woman in a car, shrouded by nightfall; all is quiet save for the sound of mouth on mouth, each lip smack echoing into the void at a volume that could be classed as torture. There are closeups of skin and saliva. There is lipstick, somehow, on the steering wheel. Minutes go by and still, they are making out with a dangerous tenacity, undeterred by anything as prosaic as breathing. It is a disgusting little tableau. It is the visual equivalent of the word “moist”.
This is my introduction to Pedestrian Television, the new digital TV channel launched late last month by the Australian youth media juggernaut Pedestrian and its parent company, Nine. Excuse the truisms, but the death knell for free-to-air has been clanging for easily a decade, while streaming – including watching commercial stations on demand – continues to hold out. The arrival of Pedestrian Television on 9Now might feel opportune: can it capture a generation increasingly disillusioned with terrestrial TV? Can it translate its sprawling network of publications – among them the Australian editions of Vice and Refinery29 – into loyal viewers?
These questions immediately waft away when I click into the channel itself. Pedestrian is now known as an online youth publisher but it started in the indie sleaze era of the mid-00s as a series of free DVDs they called “Plastizines”, packed with original productions: short clips, sponcon and party reports.
It’s a different beast that’s streaming on 9Now in 2023, more curated than created by the outlet, but the term “television” might still be a misnomer: it does away with all of the strictures of its free-to-air counterparts to provide an experience much closer to an infinite scroll. Its programming grid feels like free association: a 24/7 melange of web series, internet skits, music clips and niche reality shows that flow into one another without pause. The overall effect is akin to letting YouTube videos run on autoplay. It is enough to lull even the most caffeinated viewer into a state of smooth-brain.
Pedestrian Television bills itself as the only channel “dedicated solely to 18-35 year old Australians”; a more accurate descriptor might be “dedicated solely to stoners”. Tuning in before bed, I watch a sketch where a man in a white T-shirt performs a jig in front of another man in a slime green morphsuit adorned with ping-pong balls. One of the men starts lecturing – mumbling and equivocating before bursting out with a sudden provocation: “It seems that everyone has become obsessed with werewolves recently!” There is a haunting miasma to the footage. It induces the same dread as a horror film or an improv show.
The platform tells me, hilariously, that what I am watching is Foreign Correspondent: Community and Creativity in Vietnam. Later I find out the clip is actually from Eternal Family, a streaming service dedicated to bizarre alt-comedy that teeters between cringe and canny. It is one of a few companies that Pedestrian has brokered a licensing deal with; the others include the queer Canadian network OutTV – home of the dating show For the Love of Dilfs, hosted by Stormy Daniels – and the Australian production studio Robot Army, best known for the animated series Beached Az about a slacker whale. All are purveyors of the arcane and the profane.
It’s a curation that feels delightfully stupid. Instead of the high gloss and astronomical stakes of commercial TV, Pedestrian’s channel shares more with the anarchic shows of yore. There’s a whiff of the ABC’s Recovery, the late-90s music series that frequently paired live guests such as Green Day and Silverchair with cutaways to “weird comedy sketches full of non-sequiturs” and “home videos of dogs dressed as space cowboys”. You might also detect the vertiginous thrill of ABC’s Rage and the lo-fi surrealism of early MTV in Pedestrian’s ethos too: once in a while, the channel interjects with one of its own slogans. “Say … hello to the home of cooked content,” a voice booms between programs.
It is chaos for chaos’s sake – but it is also pleasingly off-kilter. Over the course of a week I watch a Stella Donnelly music video sandwiched next to an internet sketch about a man walking slowly around a house that can only be described as “SNL on ketamine”. Wes Anderson’s 1996 caper Bottle Rocket makes an appearance; as does a decade-old episode of a gameshow called Release the Hounds, where contestants must survive a pack of baying dogs for their chance of prize money. Unfortunately, they are weak and outnumbered (and also British), so you can imagine how this goes.
Often the channel feels as though it’s beamed in from an alternate universe where clinical psychology has been outlawed. These are the ramblings, the conjectures of an unmedicated population: sometimes unintelligible, often beautiful. Letting the channel play indefinitely, it begins to resemble the TV you might see at a gay club or a karaoke dive – slippery, stochastic, sensory overload.
Whether it finds longtime viewers or is destined to become an afterparty oddity is up for debate. But we are richer for it.
Pedestrian is available to stream via 9Now
