The introduction of a new network to the 14-and-under cable market is certainly a big development, but what catches my attention most about the news is the way that Hasbro and Discovery are choosing to brand the new channel.  Questions of branding for networks/channels (terms I’m using interchangeably here) seem even more complex in our current media climate, where the proliferation of channels seems to necessitate cohesive, strong brands, but the unmooring of television texts from the actual channel into their own contained identities (DVD box sets, DVR items, online downloads) can undermine or make unnecessary those same network/channel brands. Nevertheless, brands are still important – TNT knows drama, USA loves characters, and NBC wants to be more colorful. Brands are especially important in the kids cable game, where you have to please both children and parents – Disney’s legacy mantra of fun and childhood magic appeals to kids and keeps parents’ trust,  while Nickelodeon espouses education for the adults and autonomy for the young (kids rule!).

Hasbro and Discovery’s new joint venture, though, is trying to do that and more. The press release last month revealed the new channel’s name and logo – The Hub.  Talk about aiming for convergence.

The rhetoric in the release talks mostly about The Hub as a convergence of two other brands as opposed to a variety of media platforms (the spiral logo “symbolizes a catalyst of action and imagination,” the result of bringing together  Hasbro’s core tenet of play and Discovery Kids’ core tenet of curiosity, so says the presser), but the new brand clearly lends itself to notions of changing media experiences. It at once recognizes the mobility of both television texts and viewers, while offering a shared location for both. In this way, ‘The Hub’ has the potential to be quite successful, both as a network and a brand.

But with a name like ‘The Hub,’ I can’t help but think back to the mid-late 1990s, when we all thought hubs/portals were the way we’d conceive of space the internet, and what a failure it turned out to be for all those companies not named Google or Yahoo!. (I’m looking at you, Disney and Go.com.)  And of course, Hasbro and Discovery aren’t the first ones to try a sense of mobility in a television brand – ABC’s “Start Here” concept has been hard at work since 2007. It’s not exactly clear just how well The Hub will make use of its franchises across platforms – its website, hubworld.com, is just a landing page for now. Even so, Hasbro and Discovery are laying a notable foundation in the brand. Could The Hub actually live up to its goal of “reimagining the future of children’s entertainment”? Who knows. But I’ll be watching (and clicking. and downloading) when the channel goes live this fall.

Continuing with our series (film still to come, TV and websites already here and here), what musical recordings would you nominate as the most important of the decade? We’re discussing albums primarily, though singles are certainly welcome as well. As with the other lists, we’re not asking for the “best” per se, and we’re leaving it open with regards to what constitutes “importance,” but humor us and play along. We’ve started the ball rolling with a few personal picks, but the list needs your participation too.

All we ask is that you only list one item per post, then let others have a turn, since we want this list to form communally, not simply to be a collection of everyone else’s lists. Also, be sure to say why it’s important.

Death Cab For Cutie Narrow Stairs (Andrew Bottomley): If you were to ask me to name the “best” albums of the 2000s, Death Cab probably wouldn’t feature anywhere in the Top 100, or at least certainly not with this 2008 effort. But this album is significant for entirely different reasons, namely that it debuted at #1 on the Billboard charts, the highest chart position reached by an “indie rock” band during the aughties (besting The Shins, who entered the charts at #2 with Wincing the Night Away a year earlier). The fact that indie rock music even reached the Billboard 200, yet alone outsold the likes of Neil Diamond and Frank Sinatra, is what I find remarkable, and it is representative of the rise of “indie” both as a genre and as an aesthetic over the past decade. Now, indie has always been a vague and contestable term, and one that I’m not about to debate here. But what the popular culture loosely regards as “indie” music became increasingly pervasive throughout the 2000s, soundtracking everything from cell phone commercials (lots and lots of commercials) to primetime dramas to major Hollywood motion pictures to shopping malls (I recently heard Animal Collective’s “My Girls” in a Timberland outlet store of all places). Indeed, indie became a sensibility denoting anything that was young and hip yet quirky and sincere, and indie rock by the likes of Death Cab was used to underscore it, moving from the subculture to seemingly everywhere.

Amit Trivedi Dev.D (Sreya Mitra): Ask any Hindi film connoisseur about the best/most important film soundtrack of the decade and it would invariably be a A.R. Rahman album. After all, not only is the man extremely prolific, but also somewhat of a musical genius. It’s hard to ignore the “Mozart of Madras,” but my two cents would be for Dev.D, a rather psychedelic take on Devdas, a 1917 Bengali novella that has seen nearly ten cinematic adaptations. Though the film was lauded by the critics, for me one of the most interesting aspects is its soundtrack. The film has 18 tracks (yes, 18!) but they aren’t in the mold of the run-of-the-mill Hindi film song and dance sequences (in fact, there are hardly any “dance sequences” in the film). Rather, the songs function more as a score, often interpresed and interrupted by dialogues and narrative events; the songs of Dev.D do not offer the “break” or respite from the narrative trajectory that is often associated with the generic Hindi film song. Music director Amit Trivedi (this was Trivedi’s second feature) offers an eclectic mix that fuses Indian classical and folk with rock and western beats. While the brass band version of “Emosanal Atyachar” (“Emotional Torture”) offers Elvis wannabes and a north Indian wedding band, its rock version brings out the angst of the film’s coke-snorting alcoholic protagonist. Then there are the folksy “O Pardesi,” “Payaliya,” “Dhol Yaar Dhol,” “Mahi Mennu,” and the more fusion tracks like “Nayan Tarse,” “Saali Khushi.” What makes Dev.D more interesting is that it simply doesn’t eschew the generic convention of making its protagonists “sing” the songs, but rather the songs add and enhance not only the narrative but also the characters – while Paro has the folksy numbers and Dev the angst-ridden tracks, Chanda’s story is in the songs, “Yahi Meri Zindagi,” “Aankh Micholi,” and “Dil Mein Jaagi.” For Bollywood, Dev.D is certainly a “hatke” (different) soundtrack.

Kanye West The College Dropout (Nick Marx):  Forgive my bombast, but methinks the subject matter warrants it:  Kanye West is 2000s hip-hop.  I’m not sure what that means, but, goddamn, it sounds right.  Yes yes, most of us first met Kanye on Jay-Z’s 2001 The Blueprint, a fine and important album in its own right.  But whereas Jay-Z tends to fixate on the past and how his legacy stacks up to his predecessors, Kanye’s gaze is focused on the here and now, in all of its indulgent, vainglorious glory.  It’s tough to think of another musician in the aughts who courted both commercial success and critical acclaim as aggressively (and successfully) as Kanye did.  Or one as inextricably linked to so many zeitgeist-y moments.  Or one as instantly recognized and respected by everyone from hipsters to the khaki khrowd, from rappers to rockers, from club DJs to wedding DJs to those DJ machines that excrete top 40 playlists and inane chatter (at 7:43).

Danger Mouse The Grey Album (Josh David Jackson): Let’s go with Danger Mouse’s marriage of The Beatles and Jay-Z in his The Grey Album (2004), which received glowing reviews from dozens of newspapers and magazines (including The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, NME, and Spin) while at the same time being totally copyright illegal.  Chased out of independent Los Angeles record stores and onto the web by rights-holder EMI, The Grey Album quickly became a cause célèbre for the information-wants-to-be-free folks, who used it as an opportunity to organize a little civil disobedience (most notably Downhill Battle’s Grey Tuesday, which purportedly resulted in 100,000 additional album downloads over the course of the day) with little legal repercussions (a few perfunctory cease-and-desist letters). Virtuosic, brazen in a you-got-your-peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate sort of way, and generally pretty damn listenable, The Grey Album put the word “mash-up” on the lips of the general public, got people talking about fair use, and inspired dozens of imitations of variable quality from bedroom producers and aspiring pros.

All we ask is that you only list one per post, then let others have a turn, since we want this list to form communally, not simply to be a collection of everyone else’s lists. Also, be sure to say why it’s important.

Craigslist (Jonathan Gray): I chose a slightly more arcane pick for the TV Show list, so I’ll go mainstream here. Nowadays, when people talk about the death of newspapers, it’s blogs that get the blame, but back in the early to mid 00s, it was Craig who they all wanted to kill, and most nashing of journalistic teeth had Craig at the center. He took away a huge portion of their revenue stream, allowed many of us to find apartments without evil brokers, gave local TV news broadcasters yet another site to have a moral panic about, and showed that you don’t need flash graphics to succeed online. For all those who have ever bought, sold, given, or found something or someone on Craigslist, raise a glass to Craig.

Google News (Andrew Bottomley): It’s almost too obvious to state but over the past decade the Internet has drastically changed how we access and consume media. On a daily basis, most of us consume a greater quantity and variety of music, video, photos, reviews, personal correspondence, and the like than ever before, and that information comes to us from both more numerous and more diverse sources. There are a lot of sites that have enabled these changes – Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Yelp, Digg, to name a few – but few were more consequential than Google News. The Internet search giant’s news aggregator revolutionized not only how people read the news (online and for free) but what news they read, as the service pulls from more than 4,500 English-language news sites. As a result, readers can instantaneously find news sources, both big and small, from all over the world. This decentralization of the new industry has allowed readers to freely seek out whatever news they wish – no longer confining them to the major TV networks, cable news outlets, and major daily newspapers and news agencies. Moreover, it helped transform the news into a two-way medium by enabling readers to effortlessly share it with other readers and subsequently engage in discussion about it through other alternate channels of communication such as Twitter.

YouTube (Josh David Jackson): The one-stop site for music videos, viral ad campaigns, cute animal videos, hate messages, TV theme songs, machinima, lip-synch videos, ghost riding the whip, beauty tips, bloopers, local news segments, home videos, live performances, recut trailers, Viacom content, college lectures, live TV slips, incredible amateurs, old commercials, grassroots agitation, Astroturf, coming out stories, science stunts, fan films, home improvement demos, executions, dumbassery, animation, language lessons, wedding entrances, nonsense, video game walkthroughs, tired memes, funny babies, student films, marriage proposals, comedy bits, international TV, odes, guided meditation, protest footage, rants, editing virtuosos, gross-out videos, workout routines, public service announcements, confessionals, AFHV clips, historical footage, awesomely bad TV, conspiracy theories, etc.

Real Clear World/Politics/Markets (Matt Sienkiewicz):  There is perhaps a bit of recency bias with this choice, but the Internet is nothing if not fleeting.  Between 2008’s compulsive poll-checking and 2009’s onslaught of bad news, RCW/P/M has provided a wonderful, truly global alternative to the Wild West World of the blogosphere.  The sites are essentially just filters and aggregators, but they’re really good ones. Just like any skillful montagist, they have the ability to take two items and, through juxtaposition, make them worth much more than the sum of the parts.  Wall Street Journal articles on Finance sit next to John Nichol’s work in The Nation; a China Post analysis of terrorism in Malaysia resides, perhaps a little bit uncomfortably, right below an NY Post story about drones and the War on  Terror.  RCW/P/M shows how the Internet can complement Old Media by being fast, global and creative without sacrificing the editorial oversight and long-term research that makes newspaper writing so important.

All we ask is that you only list one show per post, then let others have a turn, since we want this list to form communally, not simply to be a collection of everyone else’s lists. Also, be sure to say why it’s important.

(Note: soon to follow will be Film, Music, and Websites).

Family Guy (Nick Marx):  Like most Simpsons acolytes 25 and over, I used to loathe Family Guy.  I devoted an entire chapter of my terrible, terrible master’s thesis to “Cartoon Wars,” the South Park episodes that pick apart the supposed laziness of FG‘s “Hey, remember that time we…” aesthetic.  I’m still not entirely sure I like the show, but there’s no denying its importance.  FG was rightfully razed, then rightfully raised from the dead by Fox, and creator Seth MacFarlane now controls 75 percent of network television’s most hallowed ground for primetime animation (not to mention the program’s thriving syndication, DVD, and merchandising lives).  But its real importance can be seen as catalyzing the spread of flashback- and cutaway-driven humor on situation comedies and beyond, from How I Met Your Mother to 30 Rock to Saturday Night Live to the movies of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (check the B.O. numbers, y’all).  Certainly, Family Guy is not the first or funniest program to do this, nor is it the most watched.  It is, however, a window into the mind of millennials, a useful case study in post-network era politics, and an ineluctable talking point for any discussion on comedy in the aughts.

The OC (Jonathan Gray): Of all the shows I’d put on my list, this is probably the one that I liked the least, so let’s be clear that it’s not here out of personal bias. But important it was. The show ushered tawdry, guilty pleasure teen viewing back into network primetime, and in doing so cleared the way for 90210, Melrose Place, and Gossip Girl. But rather than simply target a new generation of teen viewers, The OC also aimed to bring the previous gen along with them. And it led to Laguna Beach (and hence The Hills) on one hand, and The Real Housewives of Orange County on the other. And through the character of Seth Cohen, it arguably played a key role in instating geek chic, which led not only to geek friendliness across primetime but also to helping geek chic cinema (cf. The World According to Apatow).

The Wire (Andrew Bottomley): I may be over exaggerating here but it seems quite possible that more words have been written about The Wire than the series had viewers during its original run. Thus, it is perhaps unnecessary that I add to the heap of critical and academic musing now. But it is for precisely this reason that I’d choose The Wire as one of the most important programs of the 2000s: it is a show that will continue to be talked about, analyzed, rediscovered, and, if we’re lucky, emulated for years to come. Relatively few TV shows have attracted the kind of serious examination and respect that The Wire has received from observers outside the traditional realms of Arts & Entertainment beats and media studies departments. Granted, praise for The Wire is too often cloaked in notions of “quality” and its successes are described as exceptions from the televisual rules. Nevertheless, as someone who both studies and cares a great deal about TV, I consider the venerability afforded to The Wire a great achievement because, despite efforts to define the show in terms of film, literature, sociology, political science, et al, it is TV and, as such, its merits highlight the value of the entire medium.

The Sopranos (Josh David Jackson): The Sopranos was at the very epicenter of one of the most significant television trends of the ‘00s: the rise of the cable drama. It was truly a popular phenomenon. Few, if any, other programs during that period could match the series in terms of its critical regard and commercial success. Consider the final episode, which captured nearly 12 million viewers with its premiere alone, won an Emmy, and launched ten thousand water-cooler discussions and internet tirades (and, of course, a Family Guy gag). It also punctuated the different ways people consumed TV in the ‘00s. The Sopranos shepherded viewers to premium cable and to DVD on TV (indeed, HBO has released a new “complete box set” for the series every holiday season since it ended in 2007, including its full Blu-ray treatment last November). Moreover, unlike other dramas on premium channels, The Sopranos lives a happy afterlife in syndication. Finally—and this is a little more subjective but what the hell—I thought it was often pretty damn good, and that’s better than I can say about 90% of the other shows I’d put on a “Most Important TV” list.