Fans of Ren & Stimpy, cheesy Don Johnson vice squad shows, and Pamela Anderson as a hand-drawn stripper can rejoice. Viacom's (NYSE:VIA) Spike TV is alive and well. The company's repositioning of its tired TNN cable channel into a testosterone-rich network for men is now a go after the company has settled with filmmaker Spike Lee.
Last month Lee had obtained an injunction against Viacom, alleging that the Spike in Spike TV hit too close to home. Was there really any confusion here? Were folks going to tune in expecting to see round-the-clock heckling from choice courtside seats at New York Knicks games?
Still, it's hard to say who would have won if the case had made its way through the court system, and Viacom really didn't have the time to wait. One can argue that the case is similar to the instance three years earlier in which the music world's Sting went after the Web-gaming owner of Sting.com and lost, presumably because sting is a common word. Spike? Sting? However, Sting was up against the World Intellectual Property Organization. The California Supreme Court is obviously an entirely different judicial body.
But before you think you have to clear your pet dog's name with Lee's lawyers, let's not gloss over the real question here: Do we really need Spike TV in the first place? Yes, we have Oxygen and Lifetime for women and Disney's (NYSE:DIS) Disney Channel and Viacom's Nickelodeon for kids. But do men really want to be tagged as diehard fans of eighties fluff like Miami Vice and The A-Team?
Billed as "America's First Network for Men," this is what cable television was supposed to do. It was supposed to take a Ginsu Knife to the demographics so advertisers would be able to fine tune their target audiences. Great. But why does the male population have to be saddled with Star Trek reruns and wrestling? Was The A-Team really a defining moment in manhood? I pity the fool that thinks so.
Discussion Board of the Day
According to his biography on IMDB.com, Spike Lee was born Shelton Lee. His mother nicknamed him Spike because of his tough nature. Now that Lee has settled with Viacom to let Spike TV air as named, can we start discussing Lee as a filmmaker again? And since Lee doesn't have any movies out in the theaters this summer, care to share any gems of celluloid that you've come across? All this and more -- in the Great Movies Discussion Board. Only on Fool.com.
