"HitRECord on TV," Based on the Artistic Crowdsourcing Site The deeply inessential "HitRECord on TV," which begins Saturday on Pivot, is a variety-show outgrowth of a website started by the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his brother in which contributions from various creative types are crowdsourced to make short films and songs and other things. On the show, all of the contributors are identified by the screen names they use at hitrecord.org. Mr. Gordon-Levitt's is RegularJoe. That tells you everything you need to know about this vanity project masking as generosity, which plays like the intersection of "This American Life" and the original version of Current TV. Each episode has a theme - for the premiere, it's the number one - and uses a combination of stock footage, animation and illustration, green-screen videography, acting, singing, voice-over work and so on to bring a handful of stories to life. What this show reveals is that there are plenty of people willing to participate in bringing someone else's vision to life, which is heartening, or interested in seeking the approbation of Mr. Gordon-Levitt, which is reflective of the thirst level of Internet talent scrambling to be heard. The contributors are compensated, a representative for the show said. There is a cute cartoon, by the illustrator Wirrow, about musicians banding together to fight silence that has echoes of "Adventure Time," as well as a short film based on a story by the writer Roswell Gray, who has retinitis pigmentosa, about seeing the stars for the first time with the help of military-grade night vision goggles her father bought her. The role of Ms. Gray is played by Elle Fanning. On their own, these pieces are charming, but the specter of Mr. Gordon-Levitt hovers possessively over them all: is he a magnanimous spirit or a ham looking for a platform to prove he's a polymath? Consider that the final sketch is of Mr. Gordon-Levitt unleashing his inner Timberlake onstage at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, singing, in a just-serviceable voice, an awfully tepid song about loneliness, with lyrics he wrote himself. Number one, indeed.