Word: channelized
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What Disney and Playboy offer, notes Paul Kagan, publisher of Pay TV New-letter and a respected analyst of the industry, is "a departure from the essentially movie based programming of HBO. Showtime, Cinemax and The Movie Channel. They are not trying to be all things to all people." As exponents of the technique of "narrowcasting" (aiming at a relatively small and well-defined audience), the two channels add what cable pros call "complementary tiers" to the mix of available programming...
...Playboy Channel, which airs daily from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., E.S.T., is an expanded video version of Publisher Hugh Hefner's glossy magazine, minus the good writing. Ribald Classics presents softcore, soft-minded dramatizations of often less than classic tales in a visual style somewhat reminiscent of gauzy old Clairol commercials. Playboy on the Scene brings the monthly centerfolds to life, though not intelligent life, in filmed segments showing their phantasmagoric photo sessions (as Miss December dutifully undrapes for the 9th time, she purrs: "I'm a very touchy-feely person"). The two smirky anchors of Sexcetera...
...which overzealous but ever smiling amateurs take it all off (except for a G string) in hopes of winning a crisp $1,000 bill. Marginally less revealing, but equally energetic, is Shake It Sexy, an intermittently topless American Bandstand for grownups. No matter how crude the content, the channel's packaging is often stylish, and its standard never exceeds medium-core (full frontal nudity for women only). It is suffused with blow-dried sensuality and is innocently convinced that S-E-X is the single most important thing in the universe, period...
...channel's masterstroke is Mouseterpiece Theater, in which George Plimpton, doing a droll parody of Alistair Cooke, introduces classic cartoons from an overstuffed leather chair: he annotates a Donald Duck short called Straight Shooters by reciting a Baudelaire poem in French to explicate Donald's existential behavior. About 40% of the channel's programming is mined from the Disney library, a Golconda of 60 years of treasures that include 450 cartoon shorts, 561 episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club, 75 episodes of Zorro ("He makes the sign of the Zeee!") and 200 never-before-syndicated hours...
...Disney Channel features hardcore wholesomeness for 16 hours every day. On Mousercise, mini-Jane Fondas are instructed to bend and stretch while imagining that they are puppets pulled by strings. The Edison Twins is a kind of scientific Hardy Boys in which 16-year-old twins discover the meaning of life and thermodynamic entropy. You and Me, Kid features a Pied Piper-like host who leads children through such activities as storytelling and "let's pretend" fantasies...