I didn't watch a lot of the VMA's last night. When I did, I happened to see a couple of commercials MTV was running for itself, one of which was them trying to refute the charge that they don't play music. They do, in fact, play music. They are right about that. Unfortunately it’s often late at night or in the early morning, or at any other time where the majority of their audience won't be watching. The problem with MTV, and I know I'm not alone in saying this, is MTV, like ESPN often does, has lost its original mission. Some of the original stars of MTV included Rick Ocasek and other not so attractive people. Today, even if one looks at the shows MTV puts out, the not incredibly attractive people are shunted to the side.
What we're seeing now is that shows like Laguna Beach, Room Raiders, and other shows essentially celebrate the importance of wealth, of the rest of u watching spoiled children acting like spoiled children, and having it passed off as some kind of hard earned or superior maturity. It’s not.
Last season, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone explicitly went after Paris Hilton, they had Mr. Slave tell us that parents essentially need to teach their children that people like Paris are not to be admired, but to be despised. What MTV is essentially telling a generation of American young people is to be as vapid as possible, and that when they are, they will be that much more superior to those who aren't. The only time we see nerds, geeks or other not incredibly attractive people, its them being changed, essentially being told to stop being themselves and be a part of the faceless mass worshipping the beautiful vapid people. We see this in the Real World as well. In the beginning, it was a fascinating character study of people being placed in an unfamiliar situation, with unfamiliar people, and asked to live their lives. They were real people essentially continuing their own lives, not people plucked from an A&F catalog to make out in a hot tub. While MTV embraces the idea of being the channel of youth culture, the one that sets trends in the teeny-bopper set, they might have done so too much, to the point where it is obviously no longer about good music, but about selling MTV as a product. Those original VJ's, the one's who attended Live-Aid and were as swept up in the emotion of the day as anyone, those that brought us Headbanger's Ball and Yo! MTV Raps, shows that were actually about expanding the audiences of metal and hip-hop, that themselves are considered defining moments in the history of those genres, they at least seemed to give a damn about music, to actually care about what they were playing. They had opinions, and if something socked, or was much too poppy to be considered anything but selling out, they would let you know. Those people are gone, and the ethic that spawned them seems to have been killed in some meeting room at Viacom. Now, its nameless, pathetic hipsters and a few of the old guard who've compromised themselves so much they're barely recognizable. That's not what made us want our MTV.
It's odd, but MTV was really one of the first networks on cable to put out their own shows. Now each and every one of their reality shows, and their scripted ones, is found wanting when compared to the shows on channels like F/X, Bravo, SciFi, and, perhaps worst of all, by VH1. Each, in their own way, has taken on the limits MTV used to pride itself on pushing. Nip/Tuck , The Shield and Rescue Me are all incredible shows, but each push limits and also show real pathos and heart. SciFi might have the best show on TV. Bravo's reality shows, no matter what criticisms you want to make of them, at least show real people. Do you think Wendy Pepper or Austin Scarlett would have been on Project Runway if MTV did it? Of course not. It would have been some neophyte graduate of the Fashion Institute who looked good in low-riders. VH1, despite their obsession with lists and celebrity news, at least shows us what real people look like on a show like Celebrity Fit Club. And to be quite frank, Gary Busey is a far more real person than the cast of Laguna Beach combined. Hell, if you want a realistic picture of high school, go find The N and take in a few episodes of Degrassi.
When I was in high school, I always imagined there'd there would be some sort of show made about our class; that we were just small enough to be manageable, and just large enough to provide good characters. Now, I realize that while our problems were often petty and immature, we would never have made good TV. We probably wouldn't have been thought of as pretty enough and those who didn't drive Escalades home wouldn't count.
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