Pivot Touts Pluralistic Viewing Ahead of Network Launch

Ahead of Pivot’s launch on Thursday, network pres Evan Shapiro beat back comparisons to the network with Current TV. “Last I checked, I don’t think Current had a scripted comedy or music variety show,” he said. “We’re a general entertainment network, so we have comedy. We have music-variety. We have talk. We have reality. We’ll have films… It’s a completely different approach to television.”
 
Pivot will offer a variety of ways to view its content, including via the Pivot app (made available for DirecTV subs at network launch), a broadband connection and interacting with shows like Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “HitRECORD” and nightly news show “TakePart Live.” Millennials prefer to watch television on multiple platforms, and that’s the future of television, Shapiro said. “I think too often the industry sees everything in binary terms. This is pluralistic.”
 
An important distinction about the network was made by “Raising McCain” host Meghan McCain: “I came to Pivot because I think there has to be some kind of middle ground between the Kardashians and C-SPAN. Young people can’t just be given these two options.” Journalist and host of TakePart Live Jacob Soboroff added that they’re “not afraid of taking people on on both side of the aisle if they’re doing things that are harmful to our generation.”
 
For Joseph Gordon-Levitt, creating HitRECORD has been a dream come true. “I always sort of dreamed that my traditional career in showbusiness would one day meet up and intersect with what I was doing on HitRECORD… It’s like a fantasy for me that this is now happening,” he said. The series takes interactivity to the next level, through creative collaborations in music, short films, comedy, docs and conversations. “Everything that’s going to be on the show will have been contributed and collaboratively made by a community of hundreds of thousands of artists from all over the world,” Gordon-Levitt said.
 
Additional Pivot announcements include the scripted “Please Like Me” being renewed for a second season, to air next summer. The first ep of the series will be available for free online, and season one will be on the linear network and on demand, said Shapiro. He also announced “Eyes Wide Open,” a multi-platform social action initiative about digital and media literacy featuring docs, Pivot series dedicated to the theme and a dedicated online hub (www.pivot.tv/eyes).