MTV 2.0

This week's Gitlin reading got me thinking about television and demographics. Everyone born after 1970 grew up with MTV from its inception in 1981, MTV changed the way adolescents watched TV. Moreover, MTV itself was constantly changing. Instead of going into an entire drawn out history of MTV from "Video Killed the Radio Star" to "Room Raiders" the main idea is that MTV completely watered down their programming. At first, it was fresh, inventive, and cool, not like the boring crap your parents were watching on CBS, but now it has become a cesspool of pseudo-reality shows where you can almost see the "actors" reading their lines off a teleprompter. It's just trashy. So how did this happen?

Somewhere over the course of almost 30 years, the bigshots at MTV must have decided that America's youth didn't want to watch music videos or shows about music anymore and switched their format to compete with other networks that started to heavily rely on reality television. However, reality TV that is geared toward adolescents doesn't quite work the same way, and in trying to make it appeal to teens, I think they dumbed it down to the point where it is unbearable to watch. All of the shows, ranging from The Hills to My Supersweet Sixteen, and from MADE to Date My Mom, showcase adolescents acting (for lack of a better word) retarded. When did it become cool or entertaining to watch obnoxious rich kids either do nothing, berate their parents, try to become prom queen or send their moms on dates? At least with TRL we got some MTV news with Kurt Loder or Gideon Yago, and there was actually music.

I recently read an interview with Alexa Chung in PAPER Magazine's 25th Anniversary issue. Alexa Chung came on to the American scene last year as the host of "It's On With Alexa Chung" which airs on MTV. After becoming very famous in Britain for her devil-may-care attitude and style and ecclectic and offbeat look, she landed in Williamsburg to become MTV's own little hipster host. I had mixed feelings about her until I read her interview in PAPER where she states "People always assume that the audience is dumb when they're not. I think the idea of youth TV got shifted and everyone probably assumes that young kids only want to watch shit reality shows when that's not really the case. I think the audience is intelligent and there is definitely the desire to watch something that is a bit indie or irreverent or sarcastic." I couldn't agree more, and neither can MTV's viewers. Her little show has achieved much success in its random timeslot and hopefully this will ignite the return to some of MTV's better programming of yesteryear.