Last night I was about to turn the TV off when my roommate asked me what Pluto TV is. I had absolutely no clue; this Roku was my grandma’s until a month ago, and I had no clue what half the apps she had downloaded were. All it said was “Pluto TV: It’s Free TV!” So, of course, we were up for the next two hours watching it.
Have you ever thought about what it would be like if cable would’ve been entirely sponsor-funded when it came out, kind of like the radio? I’ve lost many hours of sleep trying to figure out why this couldn’t work. Sure, we’d have a few more ads and quality might go down a little, but I’d think most people would take that if they had an extra 85 bucks in their pocket every month. I was dead wrong. Pluto TV did turn out to be actual TV that was actually free, but almost everything it offers is a jank version of real TV to the point that it’s comical.
Listen, I don’t even know how to coherently include everything I feel like you need to know about this app outside of just giving you a list. So, here you go, a list of everything I remember watching (or at least turning on) between 1 and 3 a.m. ranked from most entertaining at the top to least entertaining at the bottom:
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- Jeff Goldblum Likes to be Called Daddy While Eating Spicy Wings, a show where Jeff Goldblum rates a variety of wing sauces, each getting “10 Goldblums out of a possible 10 Goldbulms,” before the last one, the winner, becomes the “first sauce to ever reach 11 Goldblums.”
- Kitten Love, which described itself in a graphic as “Kittens 24/7” but was set to end in thirteen minutes.
- Sports, but the talk shows are three days behind, college football is Montana vs. Montana State, NFL games are from 2010, and all the other sports are Major League Lacrosse.
- Wipeout UK, in which a 75-year-old (estimate) didn’t complete a single obstacle and got bronze.
- 24 hour live streams from a NASA space station and some guy playing Minecraft on back-to-back channels.
- Looney Tunes
- A horror movie I don’t remember the name of. There was no music and most of the effects were bad, but the acting was just raw enough that it might have given me nightmares a little.
- A camera set up in the front of a trolley going through Norway. I hoped it was a live stream, but I wasn’t sure. My friend Matthew found a review left by some guy who’s obsessed with trains and loves the app just because of this station, so it’s a good app for train people I suppose.
- Imagine That. When I saw it on the guide, I said, “oh, it’s that bad Eddie Murphy movie that was like, the fifth highest-grossing film of 2008.” It was actually 119th highest-grossing film of 2009, another example of how much my mind has inflated Eddie Murphy over the course of my life. When I was probably eight, I was with my parents walking through the furniture section at Wal-Mart, and my dad referred to himself as “just a regular guy,” and to comfort/inspire him I said, “Eddie Murphy was once just a regular guy.” I still don’t know why I did that.
- Christian music, but the graphic on the screen didn’t match the song playing.
- The exact same thing but with all other music genres.
- The Passion of the Christ
- Fat and Furious
- Dr. Who, which just calls itself Dr. Who, but is actually the pre-reboot Dr. Who that aired for over 25 years starting in 1963. I started to call it Bad Dr. Who here, but that would be dangerously close to implying that a Good Dr. Who exists, and I have to protect my reputation at least until they let me on the A&E podcast.
- Dora the Explorer
- Family Feud (non-Steve Harvey version), where very literally within two seconds of turning it on, the host, a man who couldn’t have been under 55, says to a contestant, a woman who couldn’t have been over 25, “you’re just too cute, give me a kiss,” then kisses her on the lips. This was the last thing we watched.
- Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. I don’t remember much at all about this, but I found a note in my phone from that night that reads “SD camera set up in the corner of the room with a witch running around tryna bake a couple kids.” We’ll call it off-brand Hansel and Gretel.
