Welcome to VICELAND

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Welcome to VICELAND

Find the nearest TV set, stock up on beer and Funyuns, and tune in.

This article appeared in the March issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

Whoever said "the revolution will not be televised" had never heard of VICELAND—our new cable channel that brings you your daily dose of VICE-flavored music, food, travel, and culture… 24 hours a day. At home. On your television.

But why, in the age of "unplugging," are we even bothering with TV, a medium long declared dead? "It's us trying to understand the world we live in by producing pieces about things we're curious about, or confused about, or that we think are funny," says Spike Jonze, our longtime creative director and co-president of VICELAND. In other words, out of the tenderness of our hearts (and a compulsive need to create entertaining shit), we just want to give you more. More documentaries, more stories, more personality. "It feels like most channels are just a collection of shows," says Jonze, but VICELAND is a grand kaleidoscopic vision of what it's like to live in our world, the land of VICE.

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The channel went live on February 29, so find the nearest TV set, stock up on beer and Funyuns, and tune in.

VICELAND is available on TV, iTunes, Apple TV, and the VICELAND app for iPhone and Android. Samsung TV, Roku, and more viewing options are coming soon!

BALLS DEEP: Host Thomas Morton travels the United States trying to be someone else… and he just may be finding himself along the way. In Arkansas, he becomes a Pentecostal tent-preacher, and in Dearborn, Michigan, he enters the country’s largest community of Muslims to observe Ramadan alongside them. Balls Deep is an extra-immersive cultural exchange program, with Morton at the center as he seeks to better understand what it’s like to walk a mile in the shoes of everyone from high school students preparing for graduation in Gary, Indiana, to a group of burly gays during Provincetown’s “Bear Week.”

Morton gets limber at Love Yoga Studio in Venice, California. Photo by Olivia Wyatt

Morton wades through “Bear Soup” at the Provincetown Inn during Bear Week, the “Shangri-La of Beef and Fur.” Photo by Olivia Wyatt

Driving stakes into the ground, Morton anchors Pastor Harvey Perdue’s revival tent. Photo by Dominic Musacchio

Morton helps salvage a sunken shipwreck in the Hudson River with Glen Miller aboard one of his tugboats. Photo by Dominic Musacchio

Pastor Harvey Perdue and Morton sing praise during the second night of Perdue’s tent revival. Photo by Olivia Wyatt

FCK, THAT'S DELICIOUS: Fck, That’s Delicious follows rapper and epicurean Action Bronson as he and his longtime friends and collaborators, Meyhem Lauren and Big Body Bes, eat and drink some of the most delectable food and drink they can find. Bronson shows us his epic appetite for new people and places, and he reminds us to always keep an open mind when it comes to sampling even the strangest delicacies. Watch him grub at some of the best restaurants in the world and try unexpected recipes in the kitchen.

Lauren and Bronson sample oysters with the fishmongers at the Pike Place Fish market. Photo by Jack Newton

Meyhem Lauren, Action Bronson, and Big Body Bes wander around Jemaa el-Fna while filming in Marrakesh. Photo by Chris Grosso

STATES OF UNDRESS: In States of Undress, Hailey Gates strips the fashion industry down to its skivvies. She explores fashion and beauty standards outside of those typically seen at fashion week in New York, London, and Paris, in order to better understand the cultural idiosyncrasies and sociopolitical shifts happening all over the world today. By investigating and celebrating the garments people wear and the people who make them, as well as the great and terrible things we do to our bodies all in the pursuit of “beauty,” the show highlights the complicated forces that make fashion the perfect lens through which to view a culture. States of Undress is part travelogue, part accidental trend report. From Pakistan to the Congo, Venezuela, Russia, and beyond, Gates sniffs out trends while examining the stickier topics—gender, race, religion, and economics—that are often left out of discussions about fashion.

Gates witnesses a spritual “anti-aging” treatment in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photo by Jack Newman

Dressed in traditional Pakistani clothing, Gates poses at the Lahori Gate. Photo by Niall Kenny

NOISEY: NOISEY creator Andy Capper is a veteran VICE director, and Zach Goldbaum worked in our equipment room before becoming a music journalist. Together, Capper and Goldbaum turn their cameras on artists in the world’s most cutting-edge music scenes. This season, they head to Compton, California, the birthplace of gangsta rap, to meet Kendrick Lamar and his childhood friends, many who are members of the notorious Piru gang. The two also take their music-travel show to Las Vegas, where they party with some of the world’s highest paid DJs, and go to Detroit to explore what brought down Dex Osama, a notable street figure turned rapper who was murdered while on the verge of becoming the city’s hottest new artist.

Lil L (center), a Westside Piru gang member, drinks brandy on an afternoon in Compton. Photo by Jerry Ricciotti

Reggae artist Jesse Royal stands in a ganja field in an undisclosed location outside of Kingston, Jamaica. Photo by Joel Sadler

DJ Khaled denounces fuckboys at We The Best studios in Miami. Photo by Dan Cain

FLOPHOUSE: Most comedians are broke, and a lot of them are broke together. Filmmaker Lance Bangs chronicles the highs and ramen-fueled lows of a network of couch-surfing comedians and the grouphouses they inhabit. This season, aspiring comedians Solomon Georgio, Eric Dadourian, and James Austin Johnson host a party and stand-up show at “Babe Island,” their house in Los Angeles. The series also makes stops at a former convent in San Francisco, the Hangar in Atlanta, and Sam Tallent’s Comedy Compound in Denver.

Housemates James Austin Johnson, Eric Dadourian, and Solomon Georgio take a break in their shower. Photo by Lance Bangs

Millennial nuisance Brandon Wardell ignores the other performers. Photo by Jordan Kinley

HUANG'S WORLD: You may have heard of Eddie Huang. The guy has had many lives: He went to law school, became a lawyer, got laid off, did stand-up comedy, sold weed, opened a restaurant renowned for its delicious pork buns, penned a best-selling memoir that became a sitcom, and now he’s traveling the globe learning about different cultures through food for his new show Huang’s World.

Huang relaxes at his parents’ house in Orlando, Florida, for Chinese new year. Photo by Matt Yoka

Eddie Huang and journalist Luis Chaparro take a bicycle pub-crawl through the streets of Juarez, Mexico. Photo by Emerson Jaco

WEEDIQUETTE: The climate of opinion around marijuana culture is changing fast. On Weediquette, VICE correspondent Krishna Andavolu investigates pot’s integration into the mainstream by meeting doctors, legislators, and people whose lives depend on the drug. Along the way, he highlights the dichotomies of how we’ve come to think about weed, by speaking with kids using it to treat their cancer and a man serving a 13-year prison sentence for having two joints in his pocket.

Swami Chaitanya and Nikki Lastreto of Swami Select, a boutique cannabis brand, smoke at Ganja Ma Gardens in Mendocino, California. Photo by Nick Carew

While filming Weediquette’s third episode, “War on Weed,” Andavolu patrols the bayous of St. Landry Parish in Louisiana with the sheriff department’s maritime team. Photo by Karl Hollandt

GAYCATION: Actress Ellen Page and her best friend Ian Daniel travel the world—Japan, Brazil, Jamaica, the US, and more—to explore international LGBTQ cultures, both hidden and celebrated. On a road trip from the Iowa State Fair, where Page confronted presidential candidate Ted Cruz about discrimination against the LGBTQ community, to New York City’s famous Gay Pride Parade, the duo discover the multiplicity of LGBTQ experiences. Oh, and they also get friendshipmarried at a Buddhist temple, and they put in some time at a rent-a-friend agency that’s working to make coming out easier in Japan.

Page and Daniel report from a two-spirit gathering in Canada. While tribes have unique terms for gender identity, the term “two spirit” broadly refers to people who are queer and indigenous within the nations. Photo by Niall Kenney

Page and Daniel visit Jamaica, a country where violence and homophobia have made headlines around the world. Photo by Karolina Wojtasik