A bewildering trek through MySpaceTV

If you watch MySpaceTV, as I did for the first time yesterday, you’ll find a lot weirdness, disorganization, dysfunctionality, nonfunctionality, and a four-letter word at the top of the page that may explain it all.

Beta.

I don’t remember Jason Kirk using that word when he spoke to us last week, so I was surprised how much of Captain Kirk’s ship didn’t work or was just plain crappy during the hour or two I spent aboard.

I started off by stumbling or being funneled into (I’m not sure which) a brief video featuring three people in an elevator. A young woman asks the guy up front why he is always so tired. Doesn’t he get enough sleep at night? He tells her he was up all night using his super powers. It’s pretty funny, has a surprise ending and lasts only a minute or two. Have a gander.

The quality deteriorated from that point.

The elevator short turned out to be part of a series of shorts, what used to be called black outs, called Elevator. The series is apparently produced by group calling itself Runaway Box, which has another series, about life in cubicles, called Man in the Box.

I must have watched seven or eight Elevators. The humor in most would do a ninth-grader proud. In one, a nebbish with a guitar serenades a comely coworker. They apparently hooked up at a drunken office party, which she obviously regrets. He expresses his feelings in a love song, which includes the line “We boned on the mail room copier.”

In another episode, called "EWF," a couple of guys get into a WWF-style wrestling match in the elevator. The winner directs the utterly confused bystander to raise his, the winner’s, arm in victory, as a referee would. Which he does.

Starting with this episode, I began reading the user comments under the videos, which were sometimes more entertaining than the videos.

Of “EWF,” someone calling himself Alonso wrote: “Man that's awesome.. but I still don't get what EWF is =/>” I have a feeling Alonso won’t be attending Yale.

Someone calling himself or herself (I’m betting himself) THE OFFICIAL SPANKING THE MONKEY MYSPACE PAGE™, commented, “What kind of gay bullshit was that? This elevator crap is lame.”

A number of baffling chain-letter-style comments appeared among comments under other Elevator episodes, like this one from *@(->[J£SSY]<-)@*:

“This is fake. don't read this. THIS IS THE STUPIDEST THING EVER!!! BUT I LOVE MY MOM AND DON'T WANT TO TAKE ANY CHANCES! If you do not copy and paste this onto 10 videos your mom will die in 4 hours.”

I ran into plenty of dead ends in MySpaceTV. One video kept locking up halfway through. Actually four videos in a row froze.

One video supposedly had six pages of comments but wouldn’t let me past page 2.

During one video an ad for Colgate MaxFresh popped up in front, offering me the opportunity to “Choose Music’s Max Fresh New Sound!” It wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I stabbed the close-window X.

Weary from trying to negotiate the “user-contributed” content, I ventured into MySpaceTV Primetime, which links to material from past and present network TV.

I started at the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and was surprised to read, in a box on the left, that the program is “108 years old” and living in “BEVERLY HILLS, US.” This may explain why it wouldn’t play.

Continuing down memory lane, I clicked on McHale’s Navy, which also was identified as 108 years old and living in BEVERLY HILLS, US. McHale played, but I quickly lost interest in the plot, which had the crew of the P.T. 73 sewing sarongs.

Still in a military mood, I moved on to the classic Irwin Allen submarine nonsense Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Yes, same age and hometown as Alfred and McHale.

This time I clicked the program’s “pics” link (empty) and then its “profile.” In the profile I found this surprising message in large letters in a box:

“Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is in your extended network.”

The same page told me Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea is “single” and a “Capricorn.”

Which gave me an idea.

I would set Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea up with McHale’s Navy.

Unfortunately, when I clicked McHale’s profile link it just returned me to the MySpace Primetime start page.

I guess I’ll never know if they’re compatible.