What happened to MTV?

I’m usually a late bloomer when it comes to most things. It’s true for puberty (I was wearing a t-shirt in sixth grade, people!) and it’s true for all things music. I listened to old Bill Cosby comedy tapes and the radio until my mom bought me a CD player for my seventeenth birthday. I’m not telling you the first CD I bought (*coughsnsynccoughs*)

As soon as I bought the unnamed CD, I was a music freak. Within a week, I was glued to MTV. I would run home after school and watch “TRL.” I loved the other shows like “Making the Video,” “Diary,” and a lot of their other music-based shows. How MTV—Music Television—transitioned from a channel that played a tons of music videos, and had shows about making music and behind the scenes of the ‘biz to a nauseating mishmash of reality shows about spoiled, rich teenagers and crazy guys hitting each other in the junk with bats with virtually NO music content is beyond me. (I flipped to the channel over the weekend and saw a guy flying off his skateboard and landing head first into the concrete. Because THAT’s entertainment, folks!)

According to the article in the L.A. Times, MTV is planning to diverge further away from the music:

In an attempt to reconnect with young audiences that have drifted from the channel recently, MTV will begin to roll out series that showcase the best of the Web, require heavy viewer participation and feature the lives of real teens. While YouTube and MySpace made noise first by trafficking in do-it-yourself media, MTV will now put viewers in the driver's seat by serving teens the entertainment they crave most: the kind they create. Internet pages about themselves. Video shorts they direct. Sliced and diced bits of movies and TV shows, re-cut into something new.

It sounds like it’s going to be a hot, seizure-inducing mess. I don’t know why I’m picturing visual vomit of drunk teenagers pantsing each and poorly filmed parodies of videos of that the channel doesn’t actually air.

It’s funny that with all those high-powered executives with decades of experience can’t realize that by pigeon-holing the entire network to the high school demographic, barely showing music videos and churning out shows with absolutely NO celeb-factor is why people aren’t watching it.

I could fix it! And I come cheap!

Source: "MTV gets a new program", latimes.com