It's an interesting idea (although the viewer vote isn't final) and one that allows for some pretty esoteric programming: among this year's pilots is The New Yorker Presents, an odd hybrid of interviews, sketches, poems and cartoons that aims to capture the flavour of the celebrated magazine in TV form.
In his sketches of his own babies he shows them not as cherubs, but as snuffling young animals.
I have been making many sketches and regret that I cannot draw every needle".
He thinks that the Eurozone's economic woes mean "the whole thing is beginning to crack", and sketches out the unlikely-sounding scenario of David Cameron realizing his current approach to renegotiation isn't ambitious enough, and somehow leading an argument that would lead to a "a whole new architecture in Europe".
The New York Times reports that this cache of whimsical sketches and playful literaria is owned by Tom Maschler, former chairman of the London-based publisher Jonathan Cape.
Sábado Gigante's interracial sketches illustrate the stubborn inequity among Latinos in the Americas: although we share a geographic region, Latinos are not one race of people.
Onstage, she's relentlessly scathing about her own appearance, though without ever straying into self-pity, while her sketches exist in an unforgiving world where women are judged fiercely for their looks and behaviour and often humiliated as a result ("I'm kind of putting myself through living a nightmare," is how she describes it).
In fact, sketches which initially seem out to skewer patriarchal society – like one where a man is deemed humourless after complaining about having to visit a gender-reversed Hooters-style restaurant called O'Nutters – end with a wry reinforcement of its ideals (the male customer is dragged into a "wet nut contest", enjoys himself immensely, is cured of misanthropy, etc).
He speaks to me from his office in Brussels, and energetically sketches out a vision that now stretches from his party into the heart of British Conservatism: of Britain cut loose from the EU, with no real downsides at all.
People loved those Tina Fey/Sarah Palin sketches because Sarah Palin is a terrifying, anti-intellectual, anti-choice, gun-toting ideologue who came within a hair's breadth of one of the most powerful political offices in the world, a dystopian potentiality that could have tangibly affected the lives of literally billions of people.
It's the fact that on radio playlists dominated by sanitised singer-songwriters and slick pop ballads, Slaves turn up with primal songs that throw together punk existentialism, sketches of suburban life and absurd narratives about manta rays and sasquatches in noisy three-minute bursts.
