It looks like Gavin Newsom’s Current TV interview with director Oliver Stone at 11 PM tomorrow about Stone’s new movie Savages is going to be a doozy. Stone, explaining both the movie’s plot and his opposition to the drug war starts out with the genesis of the film: “We have the best weed inthe world—I’m telling you that from my own experience for 40 years,” he tells California’s Lt. Governor. “We started on Vietnamese weed, Thai weed, Jamaican weed, Sudanese weed and it was all great stuff. But now, actually, because Americans are so technically-minded and mad chemists—they have really taken the Afghan seeds from the Afghan war—that’s the hypothesis of our movie—and brought them to California, rededicated themselves and made the finest seeds in the world, the finest grass you could smoke.” Current gave me an exclusive first look at the interview:

It is, of course, an illustration of the disparities of the drug war that a prominent white director can talk so extensively about his drug use without fear of prosecution. But I’m more intrigued by Savages, which apparently is about border violence and the rise of drug cartels as well as Blake Lively living in a threesome with two drug-dealing brothers, than I was before I saw this interview. The more the drug war and the militarized culture it enables loses cultural credibility, the happier I am.

As Current TV heads into what is likely to be protracted litigation with Keith Olbermann, who it hired away from MSNBC to be its star anchor and News Director, the network needs some good news. But I’m not sure that the announcement that Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom will be doing a weekly interview show on Current is exactly the proof the network needs to regain its momentum and to rebuke Olbermann’s charges that Current is a tin pot imitation of a serious news channel.

There’s nothing objectionable about Newsom in theory. But he’s hardly a national political figure, and he has no experience whatsoever as a journalist. Current has tried to sell former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to viewers in part by suggesting that her political experience means she can call out talking points and hypocrisy when she sees them. But Newsom’s job at Current will involve doing interviews rather than delivering opinion pieces, which makes his credentials seem even slimmer.

Beyond that, Newsom is a sitting public official in California. The two tranches of people Current’s release said he’d be interviewing are from Silicon Valley and Hollywood, key constituencies for the administration Newsom is a part of. It’s highly unlikely that Newsom will ask anything close to a tough question of someone who is a potential donor, or who makes a substantial contribution to California’s tax base. Current officials spend a lot of time arguing that their network, unlike MSNBC, will speak truth to power. But hiring Newsom feels a lot more like Current becoming an adjunct of an administration, providing a politician who’d awfully like to have a national profile with a platform where he can burnish his media credentials and make nice with the people whose money could launch him on to greater stardom.

What does Current get out of this? If they’ve tired of the combative model that Olbermann and Cenk Uygur represent, he could be a transition towards something gentler, and more Hollywood oriented. If they’re trying to assemble assets to make the network more attractive to someone in a sale, Newsom seems more like the contents of a junk drawer than a major asset. And it doesn’t precisely make Current look committed to the principles it’s articulated as the network’s main selling point to viewers.