Then I immediately and frantically took to Google to learn about this thing I thought I was supposed to know about. He might be right, but American television viewers have always had a strong stomach for violent content and a never-ending appetite. But while Ridiculousness has been a regular winner for MTV for a while, it has lately been on so much that it has all but taken over the entire network. It's the ultimate Mailtime and I need to know more about why the hell they do it. None of its shows are the cultural touchpoints they were a decade ago, or 20 years ago, or even 30 years ago. Just consider, as Tannenbaum mentioned to me, the symbolism of MTV’s first logo, which has shifted and changed constantly since its inauguration. The show pretty faithfully sticks to a script: Rob—joined by friends Chanel (last name: West Coast) and Sterling—reviews various video clips and laughs along at the expense of others. ViacomCBS has quite clearly made its peace with that. It’s just tossing bodies.” For game purposes, they paused each clip while a person was in midair, then Chanel guessed “heads or tails.” She went 6-for-7. Or "Road Rules"?? “I’m surprised to hear that.”. They’re not dead.”. This mostly resulted in lots of “Oooohs” and “Oh nooooos” from Rob, Chanel, Sterling, and the studio audience. MTV now is about the MTV generation, not the music. It was just another content provider that allowed you to zone out and watch something like 16 and Pregnant or Teen Mom. Hopefully, with the grunge and underground revolution of 1991, MTV slightly shifted it's focus to the more musical perspective, to the beliefs and perspectives of the people of the music scene (as they always did.) By choosing I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Hope they get their lessons. According to Billboard, from 1995 to 2000, the number of music videos shown on MTV dropped 36.5 percent. The speech in question was so bad that wedding guests booed the famous bridesmaids, and Angelina got up from her seat and screamed, "That was so f--ked up!" It also asks the question: Why complain about MTV's lack of music videos when we can now watch any music video we want, any time, on the internet? Every time you assume the line has been drawn, that an especially violent video represents the absolute limit of what is permissible, something even more cringeworthy comes along to disprove the notion. The first season of The Real World aired in 1992. Yay. So why won't he drop the f-bomb? They eliminated "Headbanger's Ball", "Beavis and Butthead" and other shows that defined the era, and even quit showing videos from bands that were not either rap, r&b, dance, or alternative. originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to … But it did quickly feel familiar and formulaic. “If someone gets hit in the nuts by a baseball, people want to see that,” Bob Saget told me during a different discussion. People have been trying to bury MTV for nearly four decades—but thanks in part to Ridiculousness, it’s not dead yet. MTV’s mega-commitment to Ridiculousness isn’t surprising, it’s straight from the playbook. He’s still hosting Total Request Live, better known as TRL, a once wildly popular program that promoted new music videos and featured celebrity appearances from artists in front of an adoring, age-appropriate crowd. In 2017, TRL was brought back from the dead—and then canceled once again the next year. 1 decade ago. That might be overstating things a bit considering this year’s VMAs featured a joint performance by Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga, while Miley Cyrus sang her new single “Midnight Sky.” Still, Marks has a point as it applies to the long-term appeal of the network, which naturally led into this year’s VMA’s with … several episodes of Ridiculousness. “I have never found humiliation funny,” Rob Tannenbaum told me. That’s not hyperbole. He was mostly joking. It is all just another channel devoted to yuppiedom, sleaze, bad music and the American way. skateboarder turned reality TV personality is fascinating. As his writing partner, Tannenbaum, explained it, MTV launched August 1, 1981, with the first in a limitless wave of “MTV is washed up” stories following shortly thereafter. That’s fun for the whole family. What the hell is "Undressed" but a slinky sleazy perverted show that feeds the raging hormones of prubescent teens? No longer (unless you count the memes about Ridiculousness’s ubiquity). The sad thing is now, America's majority ideas perfectly represent all that being shown, exploited, and cashed on at MTV, Media Television. They don’t play them. Even VH1 is turning ever so rapidly to satisfy the teen mainstream audience... BECAUSE THE SAME COMPANY OWNS BOTH OF THEM. The violence and raunchiness of Ridiculousness aren’t bugs, they’re features. It's actually pretty mind boggling. The challenge facing MTV now is different than the ones the network has dealt with in eras past. Ridiculousness ranked 13th overall and was most popular in “rural Alaska, New Mexico and Montana, and least popular in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and San Francisco.” That tracked with the rest of the study, which found that only Duck Dynasty and The Voice were more popular in Red America zip codes. In another, they guess whether the videos came from Florida or Georgia after rolling clips of a woman shooting a 12-gauge shotgun in the woods and a man sharing a dip with his girlfriend, which gives Rob the opportunity to try out his Southern accent. And yes, the show got in trouble for encouraging pyromania. I asked one of the senior producers why MTV decided to abandon the old format. for the last 2-4 years i have been wondering what the hell happened to Disney channel. Every episode opens with the same don’t-try-this-at-home whiff of a warning that used to come stapled to the front of every installment of Jackass because corporate lawyers exist and those billable hours do not come cheap. This person got a bruised collarbone.”. ViacomCBS is more pressingly concerned with what to do about programming the network right now, and it seems to have found its answer. The first Real World was actually good, and based on a good idea, taking a bunch of different people and having them live together. Shortly before this MTV made it's long heralded program, "The Real World". It was around this time that it all rotted down. MTV invented the show "Singled Out", as well as an entirley new facelift that heightened all the worst values of the generation it is programmed to. That worried him then and now. To Daly’s dismay, his career remains largely unchanged. Giles said that since MTV began running the show in giant chunks, it’s seen repeat viewers jump from twice a week to six times a week, and the network has “increased our time spent viewing by 21 percent with our stacks of Ridiculousness.”, “One of the things they’re getting with Ridiculousness, they’re finding this appeals across the board to everyone in the house,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University who has been an industry expert for three decades. When I randomly checked in on the station one weekend in August, the show ran for more than 36 hours uninterrupted from Saturday morning through 3 a.m. on Monday, when it finally went off the air in favor of Catfish: The TV Show. “That person died,” Sterling shrieked. Hope they get their lessons. Ridiculousness exists as a traditional TV show, but a single clip can be chopped up to drive engagement and traffic to MTV’s social media platforms and website. While there were even more great relations with the musical/artistic values of the videos, there was still "House Of Style" and their own award shows, but they were strictly now MTV "traditions" that had to be shown. That graveyard includes shows such as Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d, Xzibit’s Pimp My Ride, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica starring Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson, Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, Viva La Bam with Bam Margera, Shot at Love With Tila Tequila and Paris Hilton’s My New BFF. But...why? It has turned into what it was in the past. Turn on MTV—on any day, at any time—and you’re likely to find an episode of Ridiculousness, a home-videos-ripped-from-the-internet-style show hosted by skateboarder Rob Dyrdek. It’s the YouTube or TikTok experience produced on a macro scale with assembly-line efficiency. He just burned 80 percent of his body.’”. There’s a broad sort of appeal in a way that maybe Jersey Shore and The Osbournes and Real World and certainly music videos and TRL would not have been.”. In one prescient episode from the first season, the show flashes forward to give us a glimpse of what eventually becomes of one of the most well-known television personalities from the turn of the millennium. In that way, Ridiculousness is perfect for the network—even while MTV could clearly use more shows that tick those same boxes and gobble up programming slots. MTV was the place to go to hear the newest most popular music. How Did MTV Become the ‘Ridiculousness’ Network? Everyone knows that. MTV has been reinventing itself ever since, launching and then forgetting about programming almost as quickly as it was created. He has bags under his eyes and his skin is as gray as the V-neck he rocks along with an ugly mustard-colored plaid shirt. With each successive clip, Saget figures we’re sliding collectively toward a “cage-match mentality.” He said we’re closer to that now than ever. Bad actors. He’s gone fat and mostly bald, save for a thin patch of hair on the crown of his head that flows as a tributary into a mighty mullet along the base of his neck. For laughs. I grew up with MTV it it use to be really good. Check out full episodes and video clips of most popular shows online. MTV as everybody knows stands for "Music Television". Exploiting trends (at least they were, "retro" at that time, right?) An episode of Ridiculousness from Season 12 featured a segment called “Bad Tree Vibez.” In one clip, a very large tree collapsed on a much smaller car, crushing the driver’s side completely. “And they’d tell me, ‘Oh no, he was OK. I kept watching. and MTV creations is what MTV has always done best. When she resurfaced in 2001 on her MTV Unplugged 2.0, she performed alone and with damaged vocal cords. "MTV Jams" covered the rap/r&b circut, while on Saturdays at midnight MTV showed it's metalfest "Headbanger's Ball" program. Because so many teenagers watch MTV on a daily basis, they let IT chose the music for themselves. The music is what made MTV so famous." I would strap myself to the couch and not get up until all the Ridiculousness had been consumed. It also doesn’t hurt that Ridiculousness is ostensibly cheaper, by comparison, to produce than a reality show like The Challenge, which shoots on location and requires a big budget. At least there is still VH1, who are really in it for the music. "Behind The Music" kills anything MTV ever created. Tannenbaum and his writing partner, Craig Marks, literally wrote the book on the network: I Want My MTV. I guess it turns out the magic of being there when the MTV Moon Man was born along with watching the fatherly charm of 90s Bob Saget has led to the chaos that is Rob Dyrdek and Coco Chanel's banshee laugh living on MTV for roughly 160 hours a week (for reference there are 168 hours in a week, h/t Google). Time. The network itself has done the same for nearly 40 years. To Tannenbaum, any show that centers on someone’s degradation is “repulsive.” Although, in fairness, Tannenbaum hasn’t watched a lot of MTV lately and had only a fuzzy understanding of the program. MTV, television network that began in 1981 as a 24-hour platform for music videos and by the mid-1980s had a noticeable effect on movies and television, as well as the music industry. (Despite being a near-omnipresent fixture on TV, Dyrdek is surprisingly elusive; several attempts to contact him—through his agent, his production company, his website, ViacomCBS, and personal intermediaries—were unsuccessful.). It’s unlikely that anyone under 30 (or even 40) is sitting around lamenting why MTV isn’t cool anymore—probably because MTV was never cool to their generation in the first place. The only time I consider MTV really good is when the showed only music, music video, and some of the most creative, witty cartoons ever back in the 90's. “I think more and more we look at each of those brands as content factories, as makers of content for a particular group or demographic or psychographic group that exists beyond the cable channel,” David Nevins, CBS’s chief creative officer and chairman and CEO of Showtime Networks, told Variety. ALL THE TIME. MTV now is about the MTV generation, not the music. Besides, as my lovely zygote editor guffawed, who even watches linear TV these days? It's so inconsistant that I could be watching and every few seconds the playback quality will fluctuate from bad to worse; going as low as what looks like 240p or even 144p: It's ##### UNWATCHABLE. MTV, too, has also seen trouble. And then they make fun of it.”, “What a relief. Maybe that’s because Rob and the show have helped MTV do something it’s done since the network launched: adapt and survive. That was two decades ago. Actually, is he still a skateboarder? In one segment, Rob and the gang make fun of a man with a mustache and thick black eyebrows who gets assaulted by a camel. Extra shows like "Beavis and Butthead" and the great "Liquid Television" offered viewers more variety and programmers more experimentalism. REQUEST @SB19Official @MTV #FridayLivestream SB19xChynnaMamawal MERCH SB19 Comeback D-7 #Happy9MAlabMV #SB19WHATTeaserClip1 “They were like a record label that just relies on hits,” Marks said about MTV’s constant reinvention, referring to erstwhile peaks spurned by Punk’d or Jersey Shore. But like communism, this utopian idea attracted some bad vibes. It has even become it's own corporation- How can you explain MTV stores, merchandise, or MTV Movie Productions. As the old-timers like to point out, they use to play videos ’round … REMEMBER, IT WAS CREATED FOR CASH PURPOSES ONLY. MTV is what made MTV famous. There was a time—when music videos were king and Kurt Loder delivered counterculture news straight to the camera—when the network not only had buzz, it created it. Millions of teenagers all across Ameica watch MTV. As someone who had an eight-year run hosting America’s Funniest Home Videos, he’s no stranger to voicing over clips that make you question whether someone just got seriously injured. The channel once known as a home for music videos and, later, reality television, has reinvented itself again by broadcasting a comedy clip show for hours each day. In doing this, they have also depleted whatever reason and logic there is in the world. This was at the height of Carson Daly’s “Total Request Live” and Britney Spears was rocketing up the charts. I don’t fucking get the appeal.”, And yet plenty of people plainly do—especially during a pandemic with a literal captive audience that is home regularly and might be looking to switch off their brains and momentarily tune out the flood of bad news. Thus, I resolved to binge the show and throw myself headlong into one of the many marathons forever running on MTV these days. Favorite Answer. In 2009, the network revived MTV Unplugged. (Justice for Nicole Richie!). Also, there are animals—lots of them, because everyone loves cute pets and they’re a good respite from the violence and near-death mishaps. (It needs polishing.) MTV had a shit ton of good shows that they could be rolling like True Life, Two-A-Days, Room Raiders, Next, etc., but they still just trot that line up out week after week. Yes, but only if MTV changes again, and realizes what it has done to the Music Business itself. Because if we’re actually asking—as future, fat Carson Daly once did—how excited viewers can be to see something they’ve seen 58 times in a row, the answer turns out to be pretty fucking excited. So why has this particular time in TV history—both for the content-consuming nation and the network—brought about this latest programming metamorphosis at MTV? The Video Music Awards—which he called “by and large the crown jewel of MTV’s programming”—have “really fallen off as far as star power goes.”. And if that’s the case, if hardly anyone is watching the proper network on cable the way they once did in the old days (sadly defined here as, say, the early aughts), you might as well run marathons of something cheap and dumb that will get some eyeballs as opposed to something expensive and dumb that might not. Let's just say the bride didn't take the "jokes" very well and she left the venue with her husband, Chris. Video submissions of any kind are not accepted by MTV or the producers.” With that necessary bit of business out of the way, Ridiculousness quickly gets to all the stunts and activities that are definitely dangerous and would certainly lead to serious injuries. Finding a product to peddle that people want to consume is a smart business decision, or at least a necessary one. Tanya Giles, the general manager and head of content strategy and programming for ViacomCBS’s entertainment and youth division—that is a very long title and it makes me tired imagining how often she has to type it—told The Ringer that Ridiculousness is a good show for the moment because it has that “comfort food” appeal across multiple generations. The key to MTV success was a new group of performers who introduced pop music to the world. The program exists because of the lowbrow content, not in spite of it. Why We Need MTV Now More Than Ever ... There’s a ton of good underground hip-hop that isn’t whacked out on lean and covered with bad face tattoos. “People don’t look away at that. On the penultimate video, they showed a wrestler fail to execute a moonsault and crash down hard on his face, which Chanel speculated resulted in “a full broken neck right there.”. (If the GOP had consulted us, they could have freaked out about “WAP” months in advance.). In the episodes I screened, there were trust falls gone wrong, soap box derby collisions, a toddler smacking a slightly bigger child in the face, and endless face-plants into walls, rocks, and the side of a pool. REQUEST @SB19Official @MTV #FridayLivestream SB19xChynnaMamawal MERCH SB19 Comeback D-7 #Happy9MAlabMV #SB19WHATTeaserClip1 MTV has reinvented itself countless times, from its roots as a music video station that made it part of the pop culture firmament in the ’80s and early ’90s to a transition that produced an extensive catalog of reality shows including The Real World, Laguna Beach, and The Jersey Shore. Change was on the horizon, but it was never imminent. Pop-Metal (a la Warrant, Bon Jovi) began to dominate MTV as all videos then appeared to look the same, eithe they had dancers, blow-died guitarists with rollercoaster solos, o just dances and lights and ounds, occasionally with very unusual themes. Because while MTV moved on from Daly, it’s since leaned all the way into the idea of replaying shows on loop. To show how equal, generous and balanced MTV was in the days of yore, they had different shows covering different styles of music. In one episode, longtime NBA swingman Iman Shumpert joined the show to play a game called “block or charge” in which he watched various people get demolished and then made a call. The mutually beneficial union between the network, the show, and the former (current?) The. Why does MTV suck so bad now? Ridiculousness first premiered in 2011 and has shot 17 seasons to date, and Dyrdek has been a fixture on MTV for 14 years and counting. The network's audience dropped by almost 50% in the lucrative 18-49 demographic (an age category that is particularly important to MTV… Ridiculousness was on. There are lots of reasons why Chappelle’s Show is rightly hailed as one of the best comedies ever—including its uncanny knack for periodically predicting the future. This is snuff. I can’t watch snuff,’” Saget said. “Is MTV still on the air?” Craig Marks, the coauthor of I Want My MTV, asked when I called to ask him about the network. “I could see how Ridiculousness would do that. But good music is not what anybody is interested in. “Stunts such as these,” Nunan said, “are the best way to send a loud and clear message to viewers: This show is what we’re all about and we want you to look forward to more shows like it on our air.”. He looks tired—physically, and with his gig. But hits are expensive and hard to come by. Part of it comes from the immense amounts of money at stake. WRONG. It is on all the time. In his day, the production crew would show something that he didn’t find funny—say, someone catching on fire—only to watch as the audience doubled over with laughter. On August 1, 1981, MTV: Music Television goes on the air for the first time ever, with the words (spoken by one of MTV’s creators, John Lack): “Ladies and By SHEILA MARIKAR. MTV is what made MTV famous. MTV's president said last year, after it was discovered more people watched MTV than ever before, that "people watch it for the music. In 2018, the Jersey Shore cast was dusted off and put back to work. In classic Dave Chappelle fashion, it is mean and telling and funny in all the right ways—and for more reasons than were initially intended. It’s not a bad show, not as these things go. What comes next for the network is a different problem to solve altogether.