Pop Up Video (VH1)

POP UP VIDEO features trivia kernels that are served up in easily digestible thought bubbles displayed over music videos. These thought bubbles are, for the most part, designed to give voice to what viewers might be thinking as they watch the videos. The info-nuggets aren't purely informational, and on the best episodes, they're hilarious, catty, silly, and surprising. Who would've guessed, for example, that the video for Robert Plant's "Addicted to Love" was inspired not by mimes but by a form of Japanese theater? That greeting-card writers get paid in the hundreds for their sappy sentences? Or that the word "choreophiliac" refers to someone who gets sexually excited when dancing?

Some of the show's not-so-good episodes can be hard to digest: The information is sometimes ho-hum, the pop-culture references not esoteric enough. Sometimes it seems like the writers are scraping the bottom of the barrel for a piece of trivia worth including in the episode. (What could be worse than trivia that's so trivial as to be uninteresting and unfunny? Example: "More people drink tea than water." Big deal!)

Even worse are the potshots taken at the artists themselves; the show sometimes gives the impression that when writers run out of juicy details to dish out, they resort to poking fun -- which, more often than not, doesn't quite hit the mark (and doesn't really fit with the show's lighthearted, fun tone, either). Nevertheless, the tangential nature of the tangents themselves is what makes Pop Up Video so enjoyable. Writers rightly mimic the way that viewers tend to leap from one subject to the next while watching anything on television -- it's pure, pleasurable stream of consciousness.