Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV | The Robots Have Taken Over

It was like a master class at an art school, right? Like you, were going to see the external expression of all of these creative minds that were figuring out how to visually represent their music, their ideas, their poetry, their style, all of it.

You remember Tracy Grandstaff? She started as an MTV viewer in Kalamazoo, Michigan, back in the 80s. She made a vow to work there someday, and I think we can agree. she did what she set out to do. She moved from a desk job in MTV's creative services department into editorial.

They stopped believing that they could offer the things that this young generation might be interested or want. They tried to reflect it to the point where it was like, you, tell us what you want, and that's what we will do, if that makes any kind of sense. And young people are like, I don't know, I don't know who I am, show me some options. Show me a little variety pack, I'm a little of this, I'm a little of this, I'm a little of this. And that was what MTV was really good at in that heyday of, you know, we'll offer you a ton of stuff, you can definitely get into MTV raps and still really like Headbangers, Ball or whatever it was.

As MTV's parent company, Viacom, began to take more of an active role in MTV's programming, Tracy, like a lot of us, started to get disillusioned.

I personally sort of look at. when any company that's in entertainment is run by people who are passionate about the entertainment that it's providing, more so than the commerce that it has to generate, you've got a good thing going on. It's sort of like when you have one visionary who's running their own show, like a Jerry Seinfeld, like Veep might judge on Beavis and Butthead or Silicon Valley, or something where you have one visionary, and the network trusts it. And that show is either going to hit or not hit, but you have to not note them to death and give them the freedom they need to express. Jon Stewart had it with The Daily Show, it's just like that works.

Let's talk about how you know Tracy's voice. One of the many MTV shows that Tracy wrote on was the original 90s run of Beavis and Butthead.

I didn't take it very seriously, because it was sort of like you had your day job and this was just run into the booth for a half hour and do these lines and then get back and write some more stuff. But the fun part was sitting in a room at lunch and just making fun of music videos with the writers. And that's what ended up being most of the dialogue for Beavis and Butthead. Just wise-ass, smart-ass, winger jokes, endless stream of winger jokes. Hey, Butthead, check it out.

I'm going as a wolf.

She's only 17.

She voiced a couple characters and in 1999, one of those characters got her own spin-off.

Doug Herzog and Judy McGrath went, how about we think of a smart show for women? Remember? You know, women watch this over, too. They like music. So there were a few different pilots that came about it.

So that is how you know Tracy Grenstaff's voice. She's Daria.

She has low self-esteem.

I don't have low self-esteem. I have low esteem for everyone else.

What would Daria have to say about the state of MTV in this time in history?

What MTV? I don't know what she would say. She'd be in her little padded room going, let's let the robots take over. Why not? What could possibly go wrong?

In this episode, we'll see where MTV and the rest of cable television is now that the robots have taken over, what our media and entertainment landscape looks like, whether anybody could have stepped in and helped MTV stay ahead of the culture. And we'll take a look at Ridiculousness, a show that's on MTV more in 2024 than Rod Stewart was in 1981.. I'm Dave Holmes, and this is the final episode of Who Killed the Video Star?

You had had all of these people that were responsible for the establishment of the brand, and then you had people who had come a couple of years after them, you know, had been responsible for the growth and expansion of the brand in the subsequent decade, in the 90s. And I think the management style was to pit those people against each other to see who would come out on top. And it's sort of famously. the story, I believe, of Brad Gray and Tom Freston is that Sumner Redstone was like, you two do get out for ownership of my legacy, go play boar on the floor or whatever it is that they do in succession.

There were still executives around who understood the MTV brand. Some of them helped develop MTV and MTV News in the first place. They understood the corporate culture at the place and popular culture and how those two cultures could evolve alongside one another.

People like Doug Herzog and Linda Cordina and Judy McGrath and, you know, Van Toffler, like they were just amazing human beings that just really were accepting.

And I also think, as a woman, sort of being at the man's table, having another woman like.

Judy and so many department heads, actually, and just like our whole community, it was.

very accepting. It was very diverse.

Within a few years, Judy McGrath and most of the rest of those executives would all be gone. As part of a huge media conglomerate and now, with a CEO more interested in a good quarterly earnings call with shareholders than with cultural relevance, MTV became too big to be nimble. Here again is Rob Tannenbaum.

The funny thing about new media companies is that after a couple of decades, they become old media companies. And, you know, old media companies are slow to move and change and evolve. So one of the things that held Rolling Stone magazine back for years is that they were so late making a significant investment in a website. They thought it was a passing fad, the same way that people in 1967 thought Rolling Stone was a passing fad. You know, people don't learn.

Now, in fairness, the 2010s were a challenging time to run a television network at all, even if the person at the top did know and care about art and culture. A massive leap forward in tech was underway. And to paraphrase Weezer, another massive pop culture brand, we all have complicated feelings about, the world had turned and left MTV there. Here's Chris Connolly from MTV News.

Buying a $16 CD for the two songs you liked was just not happening anymore. The record business had been built on the back of that and that vanished. And then they invented the Internet. I don't know if you've heard, but the Internet eventually kind of ended the magazine or dealt a hard blow to the magazine. And kind of did the same for our beloved Clubhouse there.

And then, when streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music came along, everybody had access to the entire history of recorded music, except for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and Def Leppard. And even they gave in a couple of years ago. Teenagers could listen to whatever they were curious about without even that frictionless little 99 cent click on the iTunes music store that we all thought was so easy. They could decide for themselves what they thought was cool, without gatekeepers like magazines or radio stations or record company promotional departments or music video cable channels. And the idea of using a musical genre as a thing by which to define yourself, or, more importantly, with which to freak out your parents, instantly fell by.

the wayside. We had just kind of assumed all this time, you know, that music was what defined youth culture from adult culture. And I think that changed, too. I don't think it became like the dividing line. I don't think a lot of parents were kind of banging on their kids door saying, turn that down anymore.

MTV was blindsided by the changes in technology and culture, but so were those magazines and radio stations and record companies. Pretty much everybody got caught with their pants down.

You think about record companies that are complaining about Napster streaming services. First, it was Napster is stealing our music. Streaming services are devaluing our music. People would rather buy iPods and iPhones than our records. Yes, exactly.

The simplest and most obvious answer to the question, what happened to MTV, is time. Time happened. Time marched on, as it always does. And as, trust me, young people who are listening, it always will.

I had an uncle who was an ice salesman back in the day, who used to sell ice to bars. We used to, at Rolling Stone, have a typewriter repairman who would come to our office and fix the typewriters. You know, sometimes technology just changes and there's not much you can do about it.

In October 2017, nine years after they took it off the air, MTV relaunched Total Request Live from the old studios above Times Square and into a world nine years more fractured and siloed by streaming and Spotify and social media and YouTube. Damien Fahey and I were watching and we were rooting for it and we were texting each other about every five seconds.

Yeah, I remember just watching and I was like, this is way too loud, way too big. There's nine people posting that. camera angles are chaotic and crazy. And it was like, we got TJ from Zoobie here, TJ from Zoobie, and he's got four million followers on Zoobie and TJ is yelling and he's like got a hat, flat brim hat turned to an angle I've never seen on a human head. And I'm just like, wow, I go, either I'm 70 years old or like.

The new TRL would be off the air by March of the next year. When we get back, we'll take you through the development of the show that MTV currently plays more than any other. And we'll tell you why. it is the perfect example of what works on cable television in the 2020s. And I think you'll agree.

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Can you explain to, let's say, my mom, what's ridiculousness?

Ridiculousness, we take funny videos that people have posted online, either Funny Falls or something that has gone viral that a bunch of people have clicked on and liked, and we group them into categories and we play them on a stage and let our cast sort of dissect them and find the funny.

That is Shane Nickerson. Shane is the co-creator and the executive producer of MTV's Ridiculousness. Ridiculousness is hosted and also co-created and executive produced by skateboarding legend and entrepreneur Rob Dyrdek. Rob got his start on television by doing a car race with his bodyguard and best friend, a 6'6", 375 pound guy named Big Black.

You know, I had originally been approached by Ruben Fleischer about the idea of doing a television show, right? And Ruben had directed Six Days in May, which was a film about the Gumball 3000 race across Europe. And me and Big Black had did that race together and he was filming a documentary and was like, hey, like, could you mind if I film you guys? And before the documentary was out, Jeff Tremaine had saw the documentary and was like, these guys need a television show.

Jeff Tremaine, along with Spike Jonze and Johnny Knoxville, created the show Jackass. So he's got some clout at MTV.

And I knew Jeff from skateboarding and Big Brother magazine. And so really him validating it made it feel a little bit more real. OK, he has Jackass, and, you know, there's at least a more plausibility. And then, as I began to look at, you know, what had happened with Bam Margera's product, I knew that, like Bam's, exposure on MTV had led to him selling more skateboards and shoes than any of us other pros. And so I began to look at it through this sort of business lens of like, all right, maybe there is a real opportunity to use this platform and create a show.

Shane Nickerson becomes a producer on Rob's new show, Robin Bigg. Robin Bigg focuses on the odd couple. friendship between Rob Dyrdek and Big Black. It becomes one of the big hits of MTV's celeb reality years. It airs from 2006 to 2008,, around the same time as Wilmer Valderrama's competitive Mama Joke reality show Yo Mama.

Nobody knows who a pro skater is in 2006.

know. It's the same kind of fame. the original VJs got in 1981 and the housemates of the real world got in the 1990s. But Rob has an enormous amount of hustle. He understands how to monetize it.

The way that skateboarding worked was, you know, you were a professional skateboarder and when you turned pro, you have a signature skateboard and you get, you know, two dollars a board for a signature board. And then a handful of us had signature shoes. where then you get two or three dollars for a signature shoe. And so the top echelon pros would make, you know, between 150 and 200 thousand in royalties between their board and shoe sales. But when Bam's board and shoes hit the market, and then the exposure that he got from MTV, he was making hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from his board and making millions from shoes.

Rob and Big is making Rob and Big famous, and Rob's boards and shoes are selling like NSYNC albums in the year 2000.

It was an absolute nightmare because for me, I loved what television was doing for me, but I just could not deal with people being in my house all the time and this grueling shooting where they would show up at my house at like eight o'clock and be there till 10 o'clock for like months at a time. Like I just. it was really taxing on me. It was taxing on Big Black and our relationship. And I was really hunting for.

Shane could tell Rob was looking for something else and that that something else could be both easier and much bigger.

So during Rob and Big, Rob actually was always obsessed with viral content, was a big America's Funniest Home Videos fan.

So I was like, I'm going to make the cooler version of America's Funniest Home Videos. And so we initially myself, Jeff and Shane put together the initial concept. And what we did is we took a episode of America's Funniest Home Videos and showed that look, of this hour long show, there's really only about 10 minutes of it. that's really funny videos. And if you package them up and group them in segments and then break them down, that this would be the cooler, faster way to make the show, instead of having, you know, I think it was 15 videos spread out over an hour.

It was just sort of putting a modern spin on a classic and proven format. Specifically for an MTV audience, accelerated, you know, don't linger too long. We're not going to rehash clips five, six times. We're going to rip through it. And if you don't like this one, the next one's coming quick.

So the pace was faster and that we would shoot them in these segments. All of that was like the map out. And for me, it was like, then I can go to a studio and shoot a show instead of being in my house.

At the time, the show was called Money Shot and they pitched it all over town.

I got the videos on a disc and put it in my Xbox. And when I would go and pitch it, I would use the Xbox controller to rewind and pause and be like, look at this right here, like almost to the T of how the show works today. And then we went out and pitched that everywhere because it was like, oh, this should be on the network. So we pitched it everywhere and nobody saw the vision. And then we took it to MTV as sort of the last resort of like, hey, this is what we have.

They called us and said they want as many as you guys can do. And I was terrified because our fear in that first season was we are going to run out of content. There's just not enough. So I think they wanted 20.. We were a little too nervous to commit to 20..

When we shot the show, in the beginning, it was difficult to get videos, right, because it was like we had this unusual process, like it was very complex and very difficult. And you had to scrape it off the Internet. And there just wasn't as much content as you would think. But as the show grew, so did the technology of cell phones, and then the quality of the cameras on phones. And then the propensity to upload content became cultural and normal.

And as MTV's production budgets continued to shrink, Rob and Shane found a way to do more episodes faster and cheaper. In by nine, out by three, 80 days a year, and nobody's in Rob's house. It's a good gig, and it's good that it's a good gig because it's going to be around for.

a while. This episode order was 2,352 episodes with 1,680 picked up. So essentially, 336 episodes for five years picked up, with a two year extension to make it to 2,352, which is mind numbing. You know, it's wild, to say the least.

So I'm saying these words on a Friday, and I just scrolled through the MTV grid on my cable systems programming guide all the way to next Friday. at this time. In the following week, MTV will show Ridiculousness 184 times, 52 times in a row over the weekend. And then, after an episode of Catfish and a rerun of the Adam Sandler Jennifer Aniston movie Just Go With It, they'll air it 62 more times in a row.

But you got to understand, I also, on the business side, since I own the production and built the production company, there was a point where the show was too expensive for the network. And I was able to renegotiate on the unit economics of the way we produced the show and reengineer it so that we could continue to make a highly profitable show for them. Then they aired it more. Then it took on a new energy that allowed it to get to this scale.

Now, Rob's a smart guy. He's made a lot of money. He says the word scale like three times in every sentence. You can't blame a smart guy like Rob for giving the network what it needs to keep chugging along the way that it has decided to keep chugging along. You can't blame Rob for MTV making Ridiculousness more than half of what it airs on its linear channel in any given week.

It's such a small portion of my life. You know, you have to think that three hundred thirty six episodes a year is four percent of my time. And it's so highly optimized. And it's just sort of this thing I do four times a month, for five hours at a time, in between, living the rest of my life and chasing all the other ambitions that I have.

Again, I don't blame Rob Dyrdek for any of this, but if you look at the whole arc of MTV, you can't help but notice something. This network, this culture shifting, life altering network that exploded the worlds of music and film and fashion and art and celebrity and sex and politics, got started because a giant corporation wanted to sell credit card memberships. And now it's a zombie linear cable channel because a cool skateboarder wanted to sell cool skateboards. What is that? Is that symmetry?

I'm not saying let's go back to the linear TV days of the 90s and try to recreate that. What I am saying is that there was a place for the MTV brand in the modern media ecosystem, and the owner of MTV completely flubbed that and failed to transition it over to the.

digital age.

That's Matt Bellany of Puck and the podcast The Town. He was starting out as an entertainment reporter as the media landscape began to change. And, as I've mentioned, the CEO of Viacom decided to sue YouTube in a lawsuit that lasted seven years and ended up being settled out of court. A huge waste of the time and the money that could have been spent innovating and adapting rather than trying to sue the future to stop it from happening.

And you would have also had to potentially sacrifice some of that sweet cable cash to invest in your future. And the Viacom of the 2010s was not run by visionary television executives. It was run by Sumner Redstone's lawyer while he was ensconced in his Beverly Hills mansion with his multiple girlfriends and his warring executives, who were just out to make their quarterly earnings and didn't really care about the future of the company if it didn't impact their bonus. So it was a kind of macro fail there. I don't understand why MTV wasn't a digital offering in the 2005-2006 realm.

And in the early aughts, as streaming television became a viable alternative, young people began to turn away from cable. Matt Klinman is a comedy writer, currently of the show High Science on the streaming television service Max.

I worshipped television growing up, but then, by the time I was in college, I was a cord cutter, like nobody would really have a TV. And it was like, well, why? Everything I want to see is on the computer.

Matt Klinman went on to work on some of the early stuff that had us glued to our computers instead of our TVs, the Onion News Network, Funny or Die. And as computers gave way to smartphones and websites gave way to social media platforms, he saw up close how the culture changed.

Here's my overall thing, which is that social media, though, made it impossible for something like MTV to exist, because the whole idea of social media is that it is a machine made to erode all institutions, and any institution that comes in contact with social media will be the foundation of it, will be eroded away, and it will ultimately crumble and fall. And it gets rid of institutions in order to uplift individuals, right? Like. that's kind of the thing about it, where it's like we get rid of the gatekeepers, and now individuals will rise and they will become powerful. But, like the truth is, a music culture institution like MTV wouldn't stand a chance against social media, because MTV itself prided itself, or it made its bread, on being able to corral individuals, to bring them on TRL, bring them in front of people.

So the artists don't need MTV and it turns out the kids don't either. Here's Tim Healy. My children do not watch MTV.

They watched MTV a little bit when I was there and they would come to set. They would come and, you know, they would be around the projects that I deemed PG enough for my kids to be around. But no, my children are not MTV watchers. That said, my 15 year old is way in the music. She was bragging the other day that one of her Spotify playlists has gone viral with.

like 200,000 likes or something.

My oldest daughter and my youngest daughter, they love live music.

They consume music.

They love going to shows, but they never got it from MTV.

Now, way fewer people have cable at all, and those who do tend to be older. The one thing that's keeping cable alive is live sports. And even that's slipping away.

Nobody has cable, and especially not young people. So there's this huge mismatch between the people who are online, making things go viral and huge, and then the people who can even watch TV at all, even like sports, which is like a debate that I have with a friend of mine who's a sports writer, a lot about like, why are sports declining in ratings? And I think a lot of it is just young people simply don't watch cable. So they can't watch sports.

Live sports has been the main reason for people who have cable to keep having cable, as that's been the last form of entertainment that's not really available on streaming. But while we were making this podcast, ESPN, Fox and Warner Brothers announced that they would be offering their own a la carte streaming sports service. The cord cutting that really started. cutting into cable's customer base around 10 years ago might just be getting started.

Cord cutting started in earnest in about 2013, and the cable companies knew it was coming. They initially downplayed it significantly, said, oh, we're not worried about this. You know, this is going to be minimal, if anything. But after 2017, 2018, when some of these other services started coming online, Disney Plus is 2019, Paramount Plus, Peacock, all the sort of second round of the streaming services, those came online. And then the drops started to be precipitous, like several million per quarter.

And so far, traditional cable has reacted to the lowered ad revenue by just adding more ads.

I just made a TV show and the ad clock was 20 minutes and 30 seconds of content for every 30 minutes that somebody watched. And I think, just like the amount of ads that started filling up, cable became too much, at least for somebody like me, to the point where I cord cut. I was cold turkey. I was like, I'm never going to watch this shit anymore because I'm not actually watching anything. It's just wasting your time.

It's a little bit like what private equity has been doing with newspapers over the last decade or so. Cut costs as fast as you can, faster than your revenues are declining, in order to deliver more value for your shareholders, all while delivering a cheaper and less satisfying product for the people who are habituated to being customers. As we've said, MTV is still on the air. It's just that the viewers are no longer the young people the network built itself on. I asked Brian Graydon if he knew the average age of the MTV viewer right now.

From what I understand, it's about 20 plus years older and it's mid 40s. And that was a conscious decision because they understood that young people were turning away from cable. And yet MTV was very bound to cable, because cable companies paid MTV tons of money for that content and they would only pay it on the condition that you don't have your own Netflix service, because I don't want to compete with you if I'm paying you all this money. And so, as a result, a lot of cable channels like MTV just had to grow smaller and older with the medium itself. And by the time they got into, say, a Paramount Plus, they were pretty darn late to the party.

Linear. MTV basically just plays five shows. now. Ridiculousness is four of them. I'm exaggerating, but just barely.

Well, they still have a base level of audience. You know, when you're airing Ridiculousness 35 times a day, you're doing that because that show generates a number. And while it's much smaller than the heyday of MTV or even the early 2010s with Jersey Shore and that kind of mini renaissance with reality TV, you can still generate a number there. And it's cheap. So they make money off of the carriage fees they're still getting.

In addition to whatever's happening on the main linear channel, MTV Entertainment is still making hit shows. They just don't go on MTV anymore. Here's Brian Graydon.

They've used the MTV Studios banner to label a lot of that programming, but that programming really emanates from what was the traditional Paramount Studio doing scripted content. And they always, by definition, sold other people. They didn't have their own distribution. And so what really happened is MTV said, well, we're not making much money exhibiting this content on our old cable channel. Let's see if we can't sell it to other platforms where we can make money as a producer.

It's always been a mystery why they kept the name MTV Studios, because you look at Yellowstone like. what does this have to do with the MTV brand? Nothing like. you watch Yellowstone, which is like, primarily targeted, a kind of middle America, older audience, although it's a big enough hit where a lot of other people watch, too. And then every episode starts with the MTV Moon Man and the logo for MTV Studios.

OK, so I am recording this on Friday, May 3rd at 10.

to drop. The cable bundle kept growing and growing until the early 2010s, when it got over 100 million subscribers in the U.S.

Where do you think cable, where will it bottom out subscriber wise?

Well, that's a good question. A lot of the projections into 2027 and beyond have cable slipping below 50 million. And that's a real interesting projection, because once it gets down that low, the entire economics of the system start collapsing and these networks will start folding. You will see cable networks go away.

So, finally, I had to ask Brian Graydon the question I've been putting off asking this whole time. Do you think there will be a time when MTV goes off the air for good?

I would be very surprised if Viacom hasn't planned for that, because there's no way you could run a cable programming entity and not be thinking about what the end looks like. And therefore, by definition, what the future looks like. You know, some entities, like FX, having their own tab on Disney, seem to have demonstrated the kind of transition they can make and still be relevant as an entity. But you don't see an MTV tab on Paramount Plus. The shows aren't particularly branded that way.

It is a bit like realizing that rock and roll will eventually end.

That is so true. Or realizing that kind of universal life lesson that everything has a.

season. Doug Herzog agrees with that analogy to seasons.

This is just my theory. I look at the streamers and I see they are the modern version of the old broadcast networks. You know, so Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney, HBO, Max. These are the broadcast networks that are big. They're broad.

Television might be cycling back to where it started, but social media, where all the kids and all the rest of us are, is entering a season that's brand new and kind of shitty. Do you remember when the Internet and social media were fun? Because they were for a minute there. For a while, social media could kind of scratch the itch for interaction and for finding cool new stuff. You could get a recommendation from a friend and find a new band you liked, or follow a comedy writer who made you laugh, or find a good video on The Onion or Funny or Die.

But now that we're in this, like, fully algorithmatized world, I actually think we've slipped back to, like, essentially passive. You know, when you flip through TikTok or these things, you actually don't control what you see. Some machine is controlling what you see and you're stuck. And I actually think, if you ask somebody, like, what TikTok videos or what things they saw on Instagram today or on Twitter today, I bet they couldn't even tell you. Like, it does.

Throughout this podcast, I've been trying to answer the question, what happened to MTV? But for myself, as I go, I've been trying to answer another, deeper question. Why do we care? I know why I care. I loved it and I ended up getting to work there, and it changed my whole entire life.

If you didn't grow up in the MTV era and the classic MTV era, it's hard to wrap your head around how big and how influential and how omnipresent MTV was in the 80s and 90s, particularly for any young person. I mean, it was everything. It was the center of the cultural universe. It really was. And I am not overstating that.

And here's Matt Klinman to bum you out a little more.

Television was like cocaine for everybody. Right. And it was amazing. And it like swept the world. But like social media, is like heroin.

Can we bounce back?

Can we bounce? I don't know. I think we really all need to get sick of this shit. And then I think we'll like ache for it. Friend of mine, I once argued with a friend of mine about this and he like laughed at me.

So everything is on demand now, served up by algorithms, and nobody's happy. I want to point out something that I noticed when I was interviewing people for this podcast, almost to a person, when I asked about their first interaction with MTV, like pretty much everybody said this.

I grew up in Londonderry, New Hampshire. We did not have cable, but my grandmother had cable in Manchester. So when we'd go to my grandmother's, I didn't have cable and my parents didn't get cable for a number of years. But my best friend had cable.

Gathering like the lounge, in the lobby or something, and then fight between General Hospital and MTV for time.

Only one of us was rich enough to have one of those giant like 20 foot satellites out on their farm property. And so he was the first person, you know, anywhere to have this thing called MTV. And we sat there and just watched MTV videos for hours transfixed, because there had never been anything like this.

And it's true for me, too. My parents were dead set against getting cable in the early years. But my friend Pete down the street had more permissive parents. So I would go to his house and sit in front of MTV until they threw me out. We had to jump through a hoop, go to a friend's house, visit a grandparent in order to watch MTV.

Into my heart, an air that kills. from yon far country blows. What are those blue, remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content.

We're at the end of a golden era of media and nobody knows what's next. There's only one thing we know for sure. And since they had the first word of this golden era in media, it's only fair that the final word should come from the boggles. Video killed the radio star, video killed the radio star.

In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind, we've gone too far.

They're right. We can't rewind. We've gone too far.