Shane Smith, in the thick of it for VICE (Vice/HBO)

When Shane Smith, one of the founders of Vice Media, pitched a television show to MTV in 2010, it seemed unimaginable that the company that came out of Vice magazine could establish itself as a respected informational source about, well, anything (other than how to decorate your heroin stash). And yet the network bit, and The Vice Guide to Everything ran for eight episodes, balancing ridiculous segments against heavier fare.

With its latest television program, VICE, which premieres next Friday, the media company is once again trying its hand at American television. Not just television. HBO. And this time, it’s not trading on its nihilistic reputation. Instead, it’s asking audiences to trust in its international-relations acumen. It wants to be taken seriously. Or at least as seriously as it takes itself.

“This is the grown-up, smarter, more erudite version of Vice,” Eddy Moretti, Vice Media’s executive creative director (and one of the producers of VICE), told Off the Record. In addition to being more earnest than its predecessor, Mr. Moretti said, this show is intensely researched.

Like Vanguard but shorter and with more cursing, VICE features three correspondents whose job it is to “expose the absurdities of the modern condition”: Mr. Smith, Dos & Don’ts book editor Thomas Morton and a former intern named Ryan Duffy.

For the show’s first season, the trio treks deep into dangerous international terrain, with a special focus on the Middle East, India and the North Korea/Thailand/China region. (We hear that if HBO gives them a second season, they’ll cover domestic terrors as well.)

“News from the Edge” is the slogan that HBO has given VICE, which makes one wonder what counts as “news” these days. VICE goes to dangerous locales and puts its correspondents in inhospitable situations, but it is less current-affairs journalism than novelty of access.

Indeed, immersion and danger are the points of the show, facts that the hosts allude to throughout the segments. “The world is changing,” Mr. Smith intones in the credit sequence. “No one knows where it’s going. But we’ll be there.” It’s the ultimate humblebrag.

Bill Maher, the only non-Vice executive producer of the show—the other two are Mr. Smith and another Vice Media co-founder, Suroosh Alvi—is a natural fit to back the program, as his own off-color TV show is to politics what the Vice brand is to traditional reporting. Fareed Zakaria, who is a consultant on VICE, is a much stranger bedfellow. The fact that a CNN host would be involved in Shane Smith’s project suggests the media company is making a prime-time play for legitimacy with VICE.

Mr. Moretti stopped just short of calling VICE a “news” program—but that may be semantic. “I think it’s a documentary show,” said Mr. Moretti. “News, to me, is everything that happened in a day, from the weather to the president visiting Israel to, you know, a cat in a tree.”

It’s a potato/potahto situation: it’s not news in the timely sense, and yet meeting Taliban leaders is newsworthy. And in recent months, the media company has gotten used to finding itself in the news cycle.

With stunts like sending Dennis Rodman and the Harlem Globetrotters to North Korea (where “The Worm” became the first American to meet Kim Jong-un) and the accidental leaking of John McAfee’s whereabouts in Guatemala through a photographer’s metadata, Vice Media has become a newsmaker—if not a newsbreaker.

Dennis Rodman and Kim Jong-un in North Korea (Vice/HBO)

Still, VICE is having some trouble finding where it fits on the spectrum. It seems as though the show wants to stay true to its roots, in some ways, but also wants to be taken seriously; a hard line to toe, especially when your program is composed of two rushed 15-minute segments about “showing some of the scariest, weirdest and most absurd customs and practices known to humanity,” as Mr. Smith has referred to it.

That tongue-in-cheek tone is difficult to maintain when dealing with VICE's surprisingly serious subject matter: child bombers of the Taliban; India and Pakistan’s fights with Kashmir; political unrest in the Philippines. Half of each episode is the correspondents telling the audience how “fucked” the people in a particular region are, with interstitial shots of shockingly explicit footage from bombings, shootings and massacres. It’s not exactly “fun TV.”

In fact, several sources questioned whether HBO has gotten what it bargained for with VICE. They suggested that HBO was hesitant to work with the company—president of HBO Entertainment Sue Naegle in particular—but agreed on the condition that the program would deliver a scoop about Mitt Romney’s polygamist family in Mexico during the election cycle. (That particular piece ended up online, but the show proceeded anyway.) Mr. Moretti denied the existence of such a condition.

Others said HBO was expecting more of the old Vice.

“[HBO] actually wanted a hate-Brooklyn, pissing on themselves [show],” said one source close to the situation, who agreed to talk on condition of anonymity. “And then they got all this serious shit.”

“HBO was shocked by that,” our tipster continued. “But Vice likes to do really serious stuff now.” Still, the source floated the possibility that the network was actually impressed: “Maybe HBO was shocked in a good way.”

As Mr. Moretti tells it, there was no resistance from the premium channel.

“It was just kind of a meeting of the minds. It was a wonderful process,” he said. “A lot of people can experience a traumatic pitch process, but with HBO, we just felt like these people knew us, understood us. They have a passion for news and documentary.”

To be fair to Vice, it’s not your older brother’s Canadian grime-core magazine anymore. (Hell, it’s barely a magazine anymore.) Vice Media has become a huge digital content creator, especially with Vice.com, which hosts 60-plus video channels. According to a spokesperson, 80 to 90 percent of what Vice Media produces today is online video.

In 2011 alone, Vice Media made $110 million on these video series, from pre-roll ads to YouTube partnerships. The programs range from the silly to the somber.

The stern of Vice’s skateboards-and-boobs ship began to turn in 2007. That was when Mr. Moretti and Mr. Alvi premiered their documentary, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, about an Iraqi heavy-metal band, Acrassicauda. The video struck all the right notes: it had the hardcore, DIY underground music scene that already fit with Vice’s original conception as a punk magazine, but it was also covering a reality about the war-torn country from a unique perspective. When the accolades began pouring in for the documentary, Vice transitioned—overnight, it seemed—from a hipster outfit to an international “news” presence. The HBO show appears to be the natural culmination of this Vice 2.0.

“The secret of Vice was to stick to the core template I created. Stupid in a smart way, smart in a stupid way. Never be serious,” said Gavin McInnes, a founder and former employee of Vice Media, who left the company in 2008 following a very public dispute after Viacom was brought in. (Viacom maintained a partnership with Vice’s online video content from 2007 to 2009, when it was VBS.TV.) “I think they are trying to do serious journalism now.”

In a 2007 interview with Wired, on the occasion of the launch of VBS.TV, Mr. Alvi said, “Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since Day One with the magazine, we never believed in that.”

In fact, when VBS.TV first launched that year, its motto was: “Rescuing you from television’s deathlike grip.”

Oh, the irony.

“I think it’s a maturation of our natural form of documentary storytelling,” Mr. Moretti said of the show. “A maturation of the Vice brand, in a way. It’s consistently more serious, and the stories are told with a lot of diligence.”

When asked if this evolution represented Vice’s bildungsroman, Mr. Moretti answered with a laugh: “Totally. Actually, it’s my personal bildungsroman.”

Like a lot of things about Vice, though, we couldn’t tell if the executive was being totally serious. Which might be a problem when it comes time to teach Americans about the Pakistani and Indian factions currently tearing apart the region of Kashmir.

In the meantime, we’ll take Vice’s new conscientious-citizens-of-the-world shtick with a grain of salt. Or, if they can spare it, a bump of blow.

Additional reporting by Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke

Dre Skull and Max Glazer, mixing it up.

A crowd of music fans, including Fab Five Freddy, spilled out onto West Houston Street on a clear night last week. The occasion was the record release party for Kingston Story Deluxe Edition, the latest album by Jamaican dancehall superstar Vybz Kartel, a k a the World Boss, a k a Gaza Don, a k a the Teacher, a k a Adija Palmer.

The event featured two DJ sets—one by the album’s Brooklyn-based producer, Dre Skull, and another by Max Glazer—made up of bumping Kartel remixes and “dub plates” streamed live on the restaurant’s internet radio station. The album, which originally received a digital release on Mixpak records in 2011 but had been repackaged with additional tracks by Vice’s Noisey Records, was for sale in CD and vinyl formats, as was Mr. Kartel’s recent memoir, Voice of the Ghetto, a heartfelt jeremiad directed against the forces of “Babylon,” the powerful interests who seek to enslave the rest of us. Little buttons bearing the word Gaza, one of the two sometimes warring musical syndicates that dominate Jamaican music, were also available, though as one attendee pointed out, the logo “could be misconstrued.”

So what was missing?

There appeared to be no Vybz premium handcrafted Jamaican rum on hand, for one thing. Mr. Kartel’s self-branded Daggering Condoms were nowhere to be found, nor was any of the Vybz Kartel cake soap the recording artist marketed a while back, after claiming that he used a similar product to lighten his skin. (Mr. Kartel’s unabashed defense of bleaching has sparked a soul-searching debate throughout the Caribbean—though cake soaps, which are used for laundry, are not actually effective for the purpose.)

Perhaps the most conspicuous element missing from the proceedings was Mr. Kartel himself. The DJ, who is widely considered the most talented and prolific performer to emerge from the dancehall scene, has resided at the Horizon Adult Remand Centre in Kingston for 11 months, awaiting trial in connection with two murders.

It’s an awkward situation. Mr. Kartel’s influence in Jamaican society is hard to overstate. Olympic runner Usain Bolt flashed a “Gaza Empire” hand sign after his 200-meter run, and a number of other Olympians adopted the gesture. Not only does Mr. Kartel’s music and that of his protégés dominate West Indian radio, he is a beguiling provocateur—a little like Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol rolled into one.

“He’s truly a conceptual artist, in my mind,” said Dre Skull, the album’s soft-spoken, impressively bearded producer, who studied critical theory at Penn before entering the music business. “He still dictates the cultural discussion in Jamaica. In terms of what pop stardom can be, he is pushing it beyond what’s been done anywhere.”

Dre Skull and Mr. Kartel recorded the album in Kingston, and they were set to produce a video when the singer was arrested. “I didn’t have even the remotest sense that it could be something serious,” he said. “And when it came out that there was a murder charge, I was just totally shocked and surprised.”

Like most of the party attendees The Observer spoke to, Dre Skull said he had no idea whether there was any truth to the accusations. The Jamaican criminal justice system is notoriously corrupt, and there is no shortage of conspiracy theories claiming the charges were invented to silence a critic of the island’s power elite (a k a Babylon).

In any case, there seemed to be little question about Mr. Kartel’s musical output. Vice cofounder Suroosh Alvi said he became “obsessed” with Kingston Story while in Jamaica earlier this year making a documentary about Snoop Dogg’s new reggae-inspired album which Dre Skull helped produce. “Kingston Story became the soundtrack to my life,” Mr. Alvi said. “I just thought, ‘This guy Dre Skull is incredibly talented and has made a gem of an album—poppy and melancholic and so different than a lot of dancehall—and it needs to be heard by more people. So I suggested we do a rerelease.”

Mr. Alvi recalled his first encounter with Mr. Kartel’s oeuvre during an earlier visit to the island. He had landed at 5 a.m., “unaware of Vybz Kartel’s mythology,” he said. But during a four-hour drive to his destination, the driver blasted Kartel the whole way. As Mr. Alvi became hooked on the music, the driver grew wistful about the incarcerated superstar.
“I miss him so much,” the man told Mr. Alvi.