Over the Edge
HBO's two-year-old, award-winning documentary series Vice—which immerses smugly self-assured journalists in trouble spots to whitesplain the locals' problems to American audiences—was always ripe for parody. Now The Onion does so with Edge, a faux news series that directs viewers, in the words of faux correspondent Nic Moss, to "get fucked on truth."
Edge newscasters' over-the-top profanity and insistence that their reporting is too fringe for other journalists—"Nothing but silence from mainstream media," tweeted Chase Vaughn, an Edge personae—is a joke at the expense of Vice, which was a magazine before it was a media empire. The documentaries have won oodles of critical praise, but have been deservedly mocked for promoting a very specific archetype: the college bro who travels the world getting drunk, high, and into fights while simultaneously pretending to understand complex problems of poverty and politics. Edge's parody of modern gonzo-style journalism deftly highlights the limitations of the form.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Over the Edge."
