It's a lazy Sunday morning, and we're watching Al Gore's Current TV venture. And it's not as bad as everyone's been saying. Since flipping it on we've seen an unnarrated collection of film shot in Gaza over the past week or so; an extremely affecting piece on Darfur from Doctors Without Borders; and a really interesting 1981 CBS News segment on the rise of the personal computer that featured some awesome CGA graphics and a very young Steve Jobs. All three were excellent pieces of content. And all three were immediately followed by some idiot in a Puka shell necklace robotically reading from a teleprompter. I suppose it's to his credit that he didn't even try to pull off the inevitable transition from pondering tragedy to namechecking internet youth culture. What can you do besides push through?

I get that the network needs some kind of framing device, but it isn't these folks -- they make the whole enterprise ring false. These VJs, or MCs, or Pod-people, or whatever they're called, are all culled from the same pool of rich-but-accomplished, attractive-but-not-vain, smart-but-not-interesting, and 100% earnest young people whose defining characteristic is that they're no fun to talk to at parties.

So Al, buddy: allow me to join the chorus of people offering suggestions while doomsaying. Put on some ugly but impeccably qualified people. Don't let the lightweights near issues that involve people getting killed. Cut to a tasteful commercial after every non-superficial segment. Better music wouldn't hurt, either. Remember the NPR rule: political earnestness is inversely related to a person's ability to select music that isn't godawful.

Really, it's not a bad start. But when a news operation's most credible presenter is a guy who shares half his genome with Deepak Chopra, it wouldn't hurt to keep tweaking.

UPDATE: Made two minor embarassment-reducing but content-neutral edits.