Flip through the channels (if you’re the kind of person who still does that) and you may find yourself wandering into an unfamiliar neighborhood, somewhere between Animal Planet and the safety of your “Fixer Upper’’ marathon. First thing you notice: Everyone is stoned, even the toddlers, who run in ecstatic slow motion across verdant lawns. Down the street, gangster rappers and Japanese transvestites bump up against crooning Pentecostal preachers and salty sea-captains. And everywhere you look, there are beards. There are so many beards.

Bienvenue à Viceland! Vice — once just a bratty little Montreal-based alt-weekly, today a massive multimillion-dollar multimedia empire (and now with 5?percent more Disney!) — has launched its very own TV channel, a little blast of Brooklyn in the deep end of basic cable.

Thus began the gentrification of cable.

While your requisite mixed feelings triggered by the G-word come to a simmer, some background: Through the mid-to-late ’90s, Vice was the second most popular paper product in middle-class collegiate skatepunk bathrooms across North America. For those of a certain attitude within a certain subset of a certain generation, Vice served as both almanac of taste and bible of cynicism. It came across a lot like your friends at the time: eagerly into things and effortlessly over them, a little drug hungry and a lot rude, but oddly endearing all the same. And its savage, candid takedowns of wannabe fashionistas in the wild of Brooklyn became its most popular party trick (they still do them). As such, they also became stubbornly emblematic of Vice’s chronically misdirected energy.

These days, the Vice brand is all grown-up (valued at ohhh around $2.5 billion) and a little more complicated. It owns a whole block of Web properties (Motherboard, Munchies, Noisey, and Broadly among them) and publishes city guides for the self-conscious traveler; it’s got an eponymous documentary series and a forthcoming daily newscast on HBO; and with Viceland, it’s now got an A&E-partnered network that will be left largely in the hands of visionary director Spike Jonze.

Suddenly, there’s a place on TV where Ellen Page visits Japan with her (bearded) BFF to meet a man who hires friends through an agency so he won’t be alone when he comes out to his mother (“Gaycation’’); where reliably baked (bearded) rapper and erstwhile chef Action Bronson sucks down malts and blunts and swoons over platters of grilled meat (“[Expletive] That’s Delicious’’); where (bearded) host Krishna Andavolu doses himself with powerful THC oil to experience a 10th of the high of a toddler taking cannabis to fight cancer (“Weediquette’’); and where Compton opens its doors (one in the back of a barbershop) to reveal the thriving hip-hop ecosystem that launched Kendrick Lamar (“Noisey’’). 

There are shows exploring the circuit of hovels holding the underground stand-up scene together (“Flophouse’’), travelogues that check into Provincetown Bear Week (“Balls Deep’’), and extended tributes to Werner Herzog. (Beards, beards, beards!)

That is, Viceland is actually quite good — really good, considering the iffy location. Many of Viceland’s shows are direct extensions of its many Web series. Those soft-focus cinematics so common to web video feel fancier on the bigger screen. The woozy, gauzy feel of “Weediquette,’’ for instance, doesn’t just make the show feel stoned, it puts you on the level of its subjects, softening the blow dealt by its often brutal storytelling.

Even coming from an unknowably huge yet somehow still alt-media monolith, there’s something kind of charming and disarming about an old-timey brick-and-mortar cable TV storefront. Of course, that may be part of the point.

On one hand, Viceland feels like an investment in a dead end — a benevolent expression of market optimism: corporations being people being cool!

On the other, it feels kind of like a Starbucks or an Apple Store — a telltale sign that cable’s sleepy storefronts will soon just be remodeled as outlets for the online catalogs of whatever massive corporations snap them up.

An hour spent watching Vice is like an hour passed at a Gap: At all times, you are aware you are at the Gap. Everything is white space and black Helvetica, and the untested airtime is so heavy with house ads, they take winking jabs at themselves: “(BLACK LOGO ON WHITE BACKGROUND),’’ reads one. Gauzy teases for Viceland shows are interspersed with surveillance-style clips of the Vice newsroom — a kind of veal pen of bored bloggers, tweeting hard and hardly working. Vice, you are reminded over and over, is a thing.

Whether the boutique feel of Viceland (somewhere between precious and too cool for cable) ultimately proves to be a selling point or a turnoff, we have yet to see. For now, Viceland makes for an intriguing case study of what happens when the Internet starts playing fixer-upper with old media. If the goal of Viceland is to make the network feel like a hermetically sealed, immersive experience of the brand (that might be the Disney talking), it’s working. When, once or twice an hour, an ad for Bosley hair replacement barges in, it feels like an embarrassing breach of vibe — like a drunk storming into his old haunt, only to find it’s a Starbucks.

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.