Once upon a time, Headline News was created as an alternative to CNN for people who didn’t want a bunch of talking heads talking about the news, they just wanted hear the actual news and newspapers hurt their soft brains. And then, people lost interest in what was basically a half-hour newscast with slight modifications repeated over and over, so Headline News changed up its format to be very much like it’s sister station, CNN, only louder and even more abrasive, by hiring people like Nancy Grace, who rolls her eyes for twenty minutes and then turns into a beast and swallows the souls of her guests.


In 2011, Headline News became the Casey Anthony channel, but then the Casey Anthony verdict came down, and Headline News had a hard time finding someone else that Nancy Grace would work up enough rage about, and there’s only so many white, suburban children that go mysteriously missing every year. Now, the channel has been relaunched as HLN. Basically, they’re reaching out to younger viewers and tailoring the network toward the “social media generation,” i.e., the millennials. Apparently, the people in charge of HLN do not think much of the intelligence of millennials, because this is the slate of programming they are rolling out (and honest to God, I thought it was a joke at first):

Keywords — A game show of search and tag trivia for internet addicts. We put your browser history to the test by challenging you to guess a search term from five keyword clues. Celebrities, song lyrics, ailments, gifs, memes, photobombs — everything is fair game.

What is this, like Jeopardy for memes? I don’t get it.

I Can Haz NewsToons — Finally, a place on TV for social media’s best satire cartoons. We’ll scour the internet to present the most original e-cards, caricatures and doodles, and for the first time bring people’s favorite political and social cartoonists from the world of print to TV.

Actually, there’s something that does that already. It’s called tumblr. And you know what? There aren’t 8 minutes of commercials every half hour. And I CANNOT BELIEVE they are actually using that as a show title.

One.Click.Away — The untold stories behind the online classifieds…the world’s biggest yard sale. Going beyond the hyperlinks, HLN digs into such stories as the unused wedding dress for sale on Craigslist and the people behind those strange and hilarious roommate ads. Online classifieds greatest stories are now just One Click Away.

So, basically Behind the Music documentaries, only instead of being about celebrities, they’re about people who post to Craigslist? Uh, OK. Thrilling TV.

Vacation Hunters — One tweet, two vacation teams, one amazing vacation. Viewers send in a 140 character description and our two vacation adventurers, and their travel agent teams, compete against each other to stretch a vacation dollar as far as humanly possible…all for the cause of giving a user the vacation of a lifetime.

Any vacation that begins with a 140 character description cannot be anyone’s definition of a “vacation of a lifetime.”

Videocracy —- This series counts down the most talked about entertainment ripped from social media. Hosts and a team of panelists comment on the stories and the people creating the shared content we’re all talking about.

Again, this already exist. It’s called Uproxx. Why would we watch on TV for an hour what we can get on the Internet in five minutes? (Will they do True Detective theories, too?)

#What’sYourFomo -— This app will collect your list of FOMO’s (Fear Of Missing Out) and guarantees that you never miss a thing. J-law gifs? Ugly sweaters? Lamping? Everything you are afraid to miss out on in one place.

This is just a joke dreamed up by those guys who replaced Dan Harmon last year on Community, isn’t it? This can’t possibly be real. Is FOMO an actual thing, or did some executive come up with that?