Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV | RIP MTV News
2024-05-01 00:37:42
For nearly four decades MTV defined youth culture -- today it's a shell of its former self. What happened? How did MTV build a brand that stayed relevant to young viewers for decades, just to throw it all away? Who Killed the Video Star is a new 8-episode Audacy original about the rise and fall of MTV hosted by former MTV VJ, Dave Holmes.
One of the defining moments of my career arc was I was in high school watching a studio show and one VJ was basically telling a story about his weekend. And he was talking about how he was at a club and somebody put out a cigarette on his hand and he was showing, ah, I got a burn on my hand. And I just so remember being a kid in California and saying to myself, New York is so cool and crazy that you're in a club that's so wild that someone will just randomly, by mistake, put out a cigarette on your hand. Like, what a crazy town. I have to move to New York.
That is like burned into my memory. And when I was like thinking about college, I was like, I only apply to colleges in New York City. It's like, I'm only going to live in New York as an adult. And not only did I get to live in New York as an adult, I also got to work at MTV.
That is Ocean McAdams. He'll go on to become the managing editor of MTV News before his 30th birthday, the senior vice president of that department not long after that. And to my knowledge, he'll do it all without anybody putting a cigarette out on him. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a wild journey. On this episode, I'll talk to Ocean and a few other MTV News alumni.
We'll tell you how what started as hourly music news reads from the original VJs became its own division within the network, how it evolved to incorporate film and fashion and politics, and how it became the first major news organization to take young viewers and voters seriously, and how, as a matter of fact, while we were interviewing people for this very podcast, MTV News went away for good. I am Dave Holmes, and this is Who Killed the Video Star?
As you may remember, when he started at MTV in 1984, young executive Doug Herzog was given three main assignments. He had to create a game show, which became Remote Control. He had to create a dance show, which became Club MTV. But that third assignment would turn out to be his biggest and his most enduring.
I got hired to create a news department. Basically, prior to that, you know, the VJs, they had a couple of writers who would rip,
you know, articles out of Billboard or whatever, and kind of rewrite them, and the VJs would read them, and that was what they did for news.
And then I got hired to be news director, so I built a staff and convinced them to give me a budget, and then we created actually separate news slots, you know, do-do-do-do-do, MTV News, right?
Well, of course we do. But in the early days, before,
there was just one hourly news segment read by the VJs. MTV executive Bob Pittman initially didn't see the need for anything more formal than that. Even Pittman, I remember back then, he was like, nobody cares about the news, Doug.
They did.
But the truth is, they did. And the audience wanted as much information as they can get, and we figured that out. MTV News got put to the test on a hot July day in 1985.. Live Aid was the first massive global rock benefit concert, put together by Bob Geldof to raise money to fight famine in Ethiopia. Live Aid was actually two simultaneous concerts, one at Wembley Stadium in London and another at John F.
Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. And you know this, but it was a big deal. U2 and Queen and Madonna and a Led Zeppelin reunion and Phil Collins playing Against All Odds in London and then getting on the Concord and playing it again in Philly. MTV aired the entire thing. live.
Live Aid was the first time since MTV's debut that rock music was the top story. Herzog's MTV News crew stepped up to the challenge, capturing live performances and backstage interviews in the July heat. The event raised $127 million for famine relief. Bob Geldof was granted knighthood. Altogether, it was a huge success.
But critics felt that the original VJs lacked the authority to meet the moment. They dismissed Martha Quinn and Alan Hunter, and even Mark and Nina and JJ as frivolous. USA Today said the MTV video jockeys should hang their heads in shame. Rolling Stone complained of the network segwaying from performers to close up shots of swaying VJs. Doug Herzog kept those criticisms in mind as he got going on creating MTV's weekly news show that would become The Week in Rock.
This is Sebastian Bach of Skid Row.
This is David Snake and you're watching The Week in Rock.
The Week in Rock was developed to serve dual purposes. It needed to bring MTV viewers closer to the artists the network was playing, but it also needed to address a lingering artist-relations problem. In the mid-80s, there were some artists who were a little reluctant to talk to the channel. Older and more established rock stars like Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen demanded a little more respect. And particularly as the original five VJs got replaced by a new, younger crew, Kevin Steele, Downtown, Julie Brown, Carolyn Heldman, they might have worried about looking old by comparison.
So for The Week in Rock to work, it was going to have to have a different, more mature kind of a feel than regular MTV. The face and the voice needed to convey authority. Dare we say gravitas. And the perfect guy for the job just happened to have the office right next to Chris Connolly at Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder.
You know, Kurt, I think, took a sabbatical to write the Tina Turner autobiography, which he did a fantastic job with and which remains an amazingly compelling read and worth your time. And, as I recall, you know, MTV decided they wanted a news department. And so who better to reach out to than Kurt, you know? And so Kurt went over there and instantly he did a great job. He started doing all the, you know, great interviews that he had always done for Rolling Stone.
And he was a big success there, because he's a great guy and he knows everything about music, and he gave the network exactly what they were looking for.
The Week in Rock and the new MTV news department made MTV seem a little more respectable. With Kurt Loder at the helm, your more serious artists began to trust the network to cover them more seriously. The way early MTV was pop radio on television, The Week in Rock was a rock magazine for TV. And serious music fans like a teenage Ocean McAdams were watching.
I tell this to my kids all the time because my kids are big music fans. My son's a drummer in a punk band. And there was just no way to interact with your favorite bands. There was only really two ways. It was reading magazines.
And I was the kid who read Rolling Stone every month or every two weeks. And I was the kid who would like, if you could afford, to buy, like an import copy of NME at the record store, like I was that kid, right? You could do that. You could buy the record. And then once a year or once every couple of years, because people put out albums less frequently, then the band would come to your town.
But I lived in a small town and I didn't have any money to go to a concert. So you didn't really have a relationship with them outside of that. And so all of a sudden, like, here's, your favorite bands, got music videos. They're showing up on set. You're doing concerts.
And so it just completely changed your relationship with the bands that you loved.
And while MTV was getting cooking in the early 80s, Hollywood was entering its blockbuster era. The success of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises brought in the age of the big budget, high concept, mass appeal movie. And with the dawn of the multiplex, there were more screens for them to be seen on. So get this, the first Star Wars movie came out in 1977, and the total domestic box office for that year, for all movies, was $443 million. By 1989, total domestic box office was nearly $4.2 billion.
The MTV News Department wanted to do for movies what The Week in Rock had done for music. And Chris Connolly would join his Rolling Stone colleague, Kurt Loder, at the network that they were once skeptical about.
By. then I'd moved on to a magazine called Premiere, which was a movie magazine. And they wanted to do the same kind of thing, you know, for movies. They wanted to do a movie show. And so they asked me if I'd be interested in auditioning to do it, which I guess I did.
And then months and months and months went by. And they said, oh, yeah, well, let's do this. And so I stayed working as an editor at the magazine and then got hired to do the show, The Big Picture, which was going to be their movie show on MTV.
Kurt and Chris had natural gravitas. They had deep knowledge of popular culture. And they were in their 30s.
I was 31. then. I was already out of the demographic by the time I started on MTV. And I had, you know, these producers who worked very hard and diligently and with great kindness to try to make me suitable for television, which could not have been easy.
Soon enough, MTV had a place at Hollywood's grownups table, a spot on the Oscars red carpet.
People that nowadays get like 10 weeks of parental leave, you know, for both partners and a couple, which I think is phenomenal. And I remember, in 1991, I took 10 hours of parental leave. My daughter was born on Oscar Day at two minutes before three in the morning. And I was on the red carpet for MTV by three o'clock in the afternoon, telling any number of 1991 figures that I just had a daughter.
But then why let the Oscars be the only place all the movie stars descended on? MTV wanted something to be to the Oscars, as the VMAs were to the Grammys. So in 1992, the MTV Movie Awards were born.
It was a perfect example of what MTV did at its best, which was to take a kind of traditional programming form and make it MTV.
By the end of the 80s, MTV News had real cultural influence. And Judy McGrath wanted to do something significant with it. So they began to cover politics with programs like Choose or Lose.
A lot of our political coverage, as you know, was doing youth forums, so you could put young people in a room with somebody of importance to ask them questions directly, right? The boxers or brief question was not an MTV News question, right? That was a kid asking that question. And so we really felt that that part of our coverage was bringing our audience to their favorite artists, to situations that they wouldn't normally be able to be in, we thought was always important. We want to help you guys find your own voice.
It was slightly irreverent. It took popular music and movies seriously. It got presidents talking about their underwear. MTV News in the 80s and 90s was a balance of wildness and gravitas. And as Generation X had its defining rock and roll tragedy in April 1994, it was the only place to go.
I'll never forget where I was that day. I was a senior in college and I was driving back to my campus in Worcester, Massachusetts, from Boston. The news came through that a body had been found at Kurt Cobain's house in Seattle. Once I got on campus, I raced back to my apartment. My roommates were already there sitting in front of MTV, because the news wasn't real until Kurt Loder said that it was.
Hi, I'm Kurt Loder, with an MTV News special report on a very sad day. Kurt Cobain, the leader of one of rock's most gifted and promising bands, Nirvana, is.
dead. And this is the story as we know it so far.
Cobain's body was found in a house in Seattle.
When we come back, we'll talk to the younger generation who took over MTV News in the late 90s and early 2000s, as the culture for young people got darker and the music got lighter.
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So, by 1993, Ocean McAdams, that California teenager who had parked himself in front of MTV in the 80s, hoping to get burnt by a cigarette, was now a college graduate in New York City looking for a way into the music business.
I was at a kind of corporate consulting job and I was utterly miserable. And I was like, I just can't do this anymore. And I ended up calling basically everybody I knew and everybody they knew and everybody they knew. And I was like, I will take any job in the music industry. I wanted to be in music.
But a lot of people told me, like, I don't work for a label. It's not really a great world. And I ended up having lunch with a guy who basically said, hey, I work at VH1 and I just got promoted and I need to replace myself, like tomorrow. And I was like, I'll be there tomorrow. It's like, well, don't you have a job?
I was like, I will be there tomorrow. And so they needed basically a researcher. And so literally, I was like, I showed up the next day and it was, hey, I need information on the Huey Lewis reunion tour, you know, that kind of stuff. I did that for about a year and then, kind of out of the blue, I got a call from MTV News. They were in there looking for a new junior talent relations person for MTV News and leapt at the chance to interview.
And then that became a 13 year run at MTV News.
By the time I got there in 1998, Ocean was already a bigwig at MTV News. An elder statesman, if you will, which you could be at MTV at his age, which was also my age, which was 27..
We were really young. The whole company was young. I mean, I think about how much authority we were kind of given at the time. It's pretty unprecedented. People always ask me, like, what was it like?
I just, we worked really hard, but I just remember being fun. We were really passionate about what we were doing. We cared deeply about music, but also about kind of youth culture. And we were living in New York City and working at MTV. I mean, it was an incredible time to be at MTV and an incredible place to be living in.
New York at the time. At around that same time, out in Queens, a young man was sitting in front of a television and taking it all in. His name was Gideon Yago.
My era where I fell in love with MTV, my era where it was my best friend, was, I want to say, like 1991 to 1996, junior high and high school. And I mean this without a shred of irony. It was one of my, if not my, best friend. I was a dork who was alone and into comics and things that felt iconoclastic or fringe or outside of mainstream culture, counterculture. And not getting invited to parties on Saturday nights meant I would sit in my basement in the dark, alone, and I would watch MTV, and then I would go to sleep and I would wake up and I would watch Kurt and Tabitha do The Week in Rock.
And then I would skateboard to my job as a stock boy in a record store. And that was my life.
At the other end of the country, in a San Francisco suburb, Siu Chin Pak was having pretty much the opposite experience.
I grew up in a very fundamental Baptist Christian, non-English speaking household where secular music and secular TV were not things that we were allowed. And also we were dirt poor. So paying for television was never an option. And that was my thing with MTV. Like pop culture, entertainment in general was such a black box, you know, and maybe in some ways that's why I was so drawn to it.
And I am so drawn to it just because it was the thing that I was never given much of. I truly do have a journalistic view of music, because the only way I've come to learn about pop culture is to report on it and to research it, not to have that connection that a lot of people have, which is like this, visceral, I remember when that first Nirvana album dropped and where I was. And I remember, you know what I mean? I don't have those kinds of memories.
And though they're approaching it from different angles and different coasts, Gideon and Soo Chin are about to end up at the same place.
It's now the fall of my senior year. I went to college at Columbia and, you know, MTV would always do its casting for gay minded young people at like Pace, Columbia, John Jay and NYU. And I was there getting my mail and there was a sign up that said, like politics, like MTV. And I had this friend who was like super political. And it was like a Friday, I think we had been drinking early in the afternoon.
So I was like slightly buzzed. And I was like, oh, yeah, man, go in.
Well, you know, I had been doing TV since I was 16, like local news stuff, teen shows, that kind of a thing without any real serious consideration that this is something I could do for a job. You know, those things felt like flukes. It wasn't like I had this in mind and that sort of thing. But it was better than an after school job, you know, making smoothies.
And they sat down and they did a test tape of me and I got a call back. like a week later. I thought I was going to law school. I'd gotten in early to law school. It's like what you do when you don't know what the fuck you're going to do.
And like a week later, they were like, hey, if we gave you a camera, what would you shoot to tell a political story? And I said Rudy Giuliani, who's the mayor of New York City at that time, had allowed for the first time. How telling is this? How fucking prescient is this? The KKK to march in front of City Hall.
So it was like 20 dumpy idiot dudes from like South Jersey and like the drag queens and like the homeboys from uptown. And it was like a party to tell these people, fuck you, you don't belong here in New York. So I just like kind of shot that.
Things kind of got more serious when I moved out to New York, when the Oxygen network was launched. I did a two hour live daily talk show for them. And then, when that came to a beautiful crashing end, a lot of the producers that were working for us went back to their gig that they were doing before they came to Oxygen, which is working at MTV. And word kind of got around that they needed a girl in the newsroom. And that's how I got my job.
And I shot this test tape and then they made me a fucking offer. And they said, for 30,000 United States dollars, how would you like to spend a year on the road just shooting stuff on a home video camera as a junior correspondent for MTV? And they were like, but you'd have to let us know now, because we'll send you to New Hampshire and you got to go sit on a bus with this guy, John McCain, that was in prison in Hanley for a while. And so I said, yeah, fuck it. Yeah, why not?
Like, I have nothing better in my life going on right now. So let's just ride this wave. And then that was seven and a half, almost eight years of my life.
Gideon took off on John McCain's campaign bus, while Suchin's first big assignment was something even more intimidating. MTV's 20th anniversary show.
That 20th anniversary show was so terrifying for me because, like I told you, I grew up in a black box of pop culture. And so for me, and still to this day, you know, there'll be a song of, you know, Bruce Springsteen or whatever. And I'm like, I don't know this. Like, I just did not grow up with this, you know. And it's like, I don't have those kinds of memories.
So an MTV 20th anniversary show where you're doing past and present is actually the Venn diagram of my worst nightmare.
And through all of this, Suchin's parents never did bother getting cable.
And so I would record my new segments in the makeup room, our makeup artists would pop in the tape and hit record. And then I would get to the end of the tape, maybe have, I don't know, 15, 20 new segments on there. And then I would send that tape to my parents and then they would be late on their VCR. I think my parents have always been very confused, still are confused, even more confused today, about what my career has been.
Before I got to MTV, I pictured the news department as kind of like the coolest college newspaper on earth. And according to Suchin, that assessment was pretty much right on the money.
I mean, in some ways, it was very traditional newsroom. You know, we would have our 9 a.m. meetings daily, where we would go around the room and you would pitch your story, you would give your sources, you know, and then the day's rundown would be given out. So, in that respect, you know, news was very much like every day was an audition to get on the air, to be in that room. And you can say that that brought a lot of ambition and perseverance and a certain work, ethic.
Great. And then, on the other hand, it was just like blackout, adrenaline depletion, for, you know, eight years, because who can survive in that mode for very long? So it was a bit of both. You know, it was very, very intense. Like nothing was chill.
The vibe at MTV News was really passionate about telling stories that were important to our audience. It was definitely rooted in music, but it didn't have to be. We obviously were covering politics at the time. We were obviously covering culture. We were covering a lot of issues when it came to race and gender and sexuality.
And we kind of felt like we were the only people at the time speaking the language of our audience, because we were our audience. I know it sounds kind of silly to say it, but it felt important. And we felt like we actually had a real duty to our audience.
Covering news at MTV had always been about. number one is how does this affect young people, period, bottom line, it's the only thread. And number two, I do like to believe that we took our jobs very seriously and understood that, for better or worse, a lot of young people were getting their news just from MTV News. And that I think, in this time of fractional, personalized news channels, you know, into the millions, there is some kind of romantic notion that there's a place that will just give you the facts that matter to you. I mean, that's a romantic notion of what news was and what I want news to be today.
So now let us try to answer the question that I honestly still get asked about once a week, and I didn't even work at MTV News. What was it like working with Kurt Loder?
It's everything you wanted it to be, right? I mean, that was the thing. I mean, it's always hilarious that, theoretically, I was Kurt's boss. I never thought of myself as Kurt's boss. He was an icon.
But the best part about it was he never thought of himself as an icon. He thought of himself as a working journalist, music journalist. And that's what he cared about. And so it was fantastic. He didn't suffer fools.
He was an incredible writer. And he got as big a kick out of doing the first big interview with the Spice Girls as he would have going to talk to the Rolling Stones. Like he really genuinely cared about music.
Kurt is the driest comedian in the history of fucking 20th century comedy, and he's so good at it. I remember him doing a piece on Do They Know It's Christmas Time At All, the Christmas supergroup single. And his outro was, No, they don't. They don't celebrate Christmas.
Brutal.
My first real interaction with Kurt Loder was part of Wanna Be a VJ. There was a segment where we had to sit with him on set and talk about music. I mentioned that my first real musical memory was listening to Paul McCartney and Wings in the backseat of my family's station wagon. And he said, Hmm, did it bother you at the time that they're awful? And I thought, Yeah, that's the Kurt Loder experience you want.
But the thing that kept him engaged, even through the boy band era, was the same thing that kept Ocean and probably most of us still engaged. And that was that we knew we were all making television, that the younger versions of ourselves would have loved.
One of the things that I always felt deeply, and I think maybe was part of the reason I ended up staying at MTV for so long, was like, I'm a fan of fandom. I don't have to love the bands that you love to appreciate your love for them. And so, like, I never had a problem with the boy band thing, A, because I thought a lot of those guys were pretty talented. I think NSYNC stood the test of time. But even the 90 Degrees guys were fine.
But, more importantly, like, I loved the fact that people were into them. I feel the same way about my kids. Like, you know, some of the bands that my kids listen to, I don't love. But, like, I love that they love them. And I think Kurt felt that way before.
He loved the passion people felt about music.
And, sure enough, out there in the world, there are people who were watching or who were a part of it, and they remember.
A couple years ago, I was in a meeting and this guy, this guy in the meeting just says, You're Ocean McAdams, right? And I said, Yeah. And he's like, You do not remember me. And I was like, I don't remember you. I'm sorry.
He's like, Do you remember? you guys did a huge piece on the Weekend Rock where you went to the Warped Tour and you found two Warped Tour kids and you took them to the Lilith Fair because it was on the same weekend in the same city. And then you took two kids from the Lilith Fair and took them to the Warped Tour and, just, like, had them walk around and experience it. I was one of the kids from the Warped Tour who went to the Lilith Fair. And I was like, Wait a minute, were you the kid who was hanging out backstage and started playing hacky sack with Sarah McLachlan and didn't know that that was Sarah McLachlan?
He's like, Yeah, that was me.
Chris Connolly left MTV News in the early aughts, and he, too, had a memorable interaction with a viewer.
It was after the VMAs that year and Melissa Aftamar came up to me. She was the bassist from Hall and she was so nice. And she came up to me and apologized to me for thinking I was Kurt Loder for so many years. It was the perfect note on which to end. I was a huge fan of hers.
She was so nice. All this time, she thought I was Kurt Loder. So it was the perfect note on which to complete an incredibly joyful for me time at.
MTV. As we were recording this very show, MTV News was discontinued and its staff laid off. When we come back, we'll give it a proper eulogy.
Thirty six years after launching the iconic news division of MTV known as MTV News is.
done. To be honest, I was surprised that it still existed.
That is Matt Bellany, entertainment reporter and founder of Puck, and literally about an hour before our scheduled interview, we both got the push notification that, as a part of a massive round of layoffs at Paramount, MTV News would be discontinued.
I feel like the end of MTV News has been this kind of slow moving car crash for a little while now. And the owner of MTV News didn't really ever, at least for the last five to 10 years, didn't really know what to do with it.
They knew they had this brand that meant something to a certain audience and they had.
tried to reboot it a couple of times, but it was sort of a half hearted reboot. It never really got the resources it needed and the positioning, and it just sort of languished. So it's honestly like it's probably best that it was put out of its misery.
Even while he was working there, Ocean McAdams remembers feeling a change in the wind.
I was there the last five or six years of the week in Rock. And the week in Rock was a artifact of a different age, right? You know, there was a time if Guns N' Roses or Madonna were going to announce a tour, number one, who else would really care except for MTV News? And where else would you find that information? But then it became clear, like very quickly, that, OK, the week in Rock, why would you wait around for Friday to get all that kind of stuff?
So what is the week in Rock if all that stuff is immediate? And so we eventually got rid of the weekly show and focus more on daily news. Slowly but surely, the need for MTV News had to change a little bit and evolve. But the shift in the way the culture was working had a pretty profound effect on MTV.
News. In the mid-aughts, MTV's parent company, Viacom, decided that instead of MTV News doing a weekly news show, it would be cheaper and more efficient to do a quicker and younger version of Entertainment Tonight, another Viacom property. So E.T. on MTV, was born and MTV News began to have less of a presence on the air.
Probably around 2004,, maybe 2005,, simultaneously, a couple of things had happened. So there's this attrition war cutting into the 10 to the hour, every hour news briefs. When I first started doing news briefs, we would shoot out between 45 to 90 minutes of content every day. And then it went down to, you know, we only have spot to do, like one or two stories that are three minute blocks and one or two stories that were. So it was just like you were watching it winnow down.
It was like, I'm coming in every day to work, but there's less and less actual work to.
do.
MTV News tried to adapt to the changing times more than MTV itself, you could argue. MTV News existed as a channel on YouTube. It was a good Twitter follow back. when there was such a thing as a good Twitter follow. It hired the former editorial director of Bill Simmons' excellent sports website, Grantland, to help turn MTV.com into a place for long form journalism.
It ran a digital series and a Twitter feed called MTV News. You Need to Know. It kept doing red carpet coverage for the VMAs and the movie and TV awards. And then, over the last decade, slowly and then all at once, with the rise of smaller and faster brands like TMZ, not to mention user generated content, it vanished. MTV News had been the authoritative voice for a couple of decades in American popular culture.
But also slowly and then all at once, there ceased to be such a thing as one single American popular culture.
It was the last gasp of maybe not monoculture, but right before the real splintering of culture, where everybody watched MTV. Of a certain generation, everybody watched MTV. And there's very few things outside of maybe Taylor Swift in pop culture that is unifying in that way.
To be honest, when I had heard MTV News just recently had shut its doors, I was like, oh, it hadn't shut its doors already? Do you know what I mean? Like? for me, the death of MTV News came by like a series of small cuts. It wasn't that last shuttering, you know, when TRL went away, when the News Hour went away, when it went off the air and it was just became an online site.
Like these are all the diminishing of MTV News. And so when it finally closed, I wasn't terribly surprised. And I would also not be surprised if someone had said, oh, you didn't know, MTV News shut down, you know, five years ago.
It wasn't. I think MTV News could exist today. Do I think that there's any way that anybody could have that share a voice? You know? No, I think in this age, it's just impossible.
But I do think there's still a need for that. There's still a need for people covering youth culture in a way that feels different and genuine and honest. So I don't think that need is ever going to go away. It's just a question of who's going to fill it.
Popular culture in the 2020s, even if you just boil it down to popular music, is too vast for any one outlet to get its arms around. And honestly, maybe that's a good thing.
I read once that before the introduction of the CD, if you were a really dedicated music person, you could listen to every record that was released, like every album that came out. You could conceivably listen to it. That's how little music was released. And absolutely, that meant that the quality generally was pretty high. There was always crap stuff that came out.
But think about all the voices that weren't heard. Think about the ability for anybody in their bedroom and their basement that can create music now and find an audience. And I think that's pretty awesome.
I spoke to Tracy Grandstaff the same day that push notification went out, and she put it pretty succinctly.
It was like, oh, era is over.
What is? I don't even, I didn't even know how to feel.
This is just so many friends that you still know put their blood, sweat and tears into that department. And, you know, I think of Cyrillic and those guys, they were top of their game, award winning, newsworthy, breaking stories.
But yeah, now we've got TMZ.
So everyone who worked at MTV has their. here's what it was like to work at MTV story, and we'll end with Ocean McAdams.
So we did the VMAs in Miami and Dave Cyrillic, my boss, had the big idea was we're going to do the show in Miami. And he's like, I got a big idea for arrivals. You know, we always do limo arrivals. This year we're going to do boat arrivals. And so I was like, this is insane.
How are we going to do this? We ended up between us and the artists themselves, we ended up having about 25 different artists arrive on gigantic yachts, on paddle boats, on speed boats. And it just was this incredible thing. And doing the VMAs in Miami at the time, moving it to Miami was so incredible. And I just remember finishing the post show, sitting on the docks where the boats came in and going like, I cannot believe that.
I just worked on the VMAs in Miami and I have to get up tomorrow morning and fly and cover the Republican convention. And I remember being like, I am so lucky. I get to do the VMAs and then the Republican convention the next day. And that's what MTV News was.
I mean, listen, it's not a cigarette getting put out on you in a club in New York City, but it's still pretty cool. In our next and final episode, we'll take a look at the show that MTV is playing about 200 times in the coming week, and we will try to answer once and for all the question that got us here in the first place, who killed the video star?
Who killed the video star? The story of MTV is written and narrated by me, Dave Holmes, executive, produced by Jenna Weiss Berman, Dave Holmes, Jim Weber and Chris Cowan. Our story editor is Maddie Sprung Kaiser, produced by Lloyd Lockridge, Ian Mont and Terrence Malingone, edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basil, production support by Javier Cruces. Special thanks to J.D. Crowley, Maura Curran, Leah Reese, Dennis, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Allison Jeffrey and Hilary Shuff.
Who killed the video star? The story of MTV is an Odyssey original.
Hi, I'm PJ Vogt, here to tell you about my new podcast, Search Engine. Search Engine was one of the very best new podcasts of 2023, according to Vulture, Vogue, Time magazine and The Economist. We answer fascinating questions about business, tech and history, questions like why are drug dealers putting fentanyl on everything? Who should be in charge of artificial intelligence? How did ADHD medication get so popular so fast?
Listen and follow Search Engine with PJ Vogt and Odyssey podcast available now on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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