Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV | TV Mattered, Nothing Else Did

Part of the brand was that we have to change all the time, we can't stand in one place too long. We have to constantly be moving forward. You know, we never wanted to be like Rolling Stone, which we felt, you know, never really, to a certain degree, kind of let go of their sort of 60s origins and that audience. And you know, they decided to grow old with them, rather than what we wanted to do at MTV, which was, you know, we wanted you for five years and then we wanted your little brother.

In the space of a year, MTV has gone from the brink of cancellation to becoming the force that is changing television. By 1984, they've produced their first big awards show. They've made megastars out of British bands like Duran, Duran and Spandau Ballet.

1984 was like the Mount Rushmore of music video. That was what was happening in culture. And, honestly, there was nothing bigger than MTV.

And now the people who are making it, like executive Doug Herzog, are watching popular culture catch up with them. MTV has had a breakthrough year, but that presents a problem. Once you break through, you can't slow down. You have to keep trying to please an audience that, more than any other networks, is not so much changing as regenerating.

You know, it was still trying to hold on to music, but it was pretty clear that, you know, kind of original programming and lifestyle and that sort of stuff was the future.

In this episode, we'll find out how MTV, a network that seemed like it was making traditional network television obsolete, survived by learning how to be a traditional network. I'm Dave Holmes, and this is Who Killed the Video Star?

Things were good. It was the purity of the demographic was what was so great.

That is Chris Connolly. In 1984, he's an editor at Rolling Stone. MTV is minting a new generation of pop stars, and Rolling Stone is starting to put some of them on its cover. Culture Club, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper. Younger readers are picking Rolling Stone up, and the magazine is starting to get a second wind.

It's like you couldn't get that pure slice of young people any other way. And you know, like you put a show on the air and then you'd run it all over the schedule like lots of times. Right. At least that's what I sense was going on, because people just left the TV on all weekend if you were on MTV.

And the programming the young demographic was watching over and over in the early years was cheap. In fact, you could even say so much of the programming was free.

They were going to be all right. It was an amazing business to be in.

The cable television business model in the 1980s was indeed pretty sweet. The big broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and later Fox, made their money from the advertisements that they ran. Most cable channels made money that way, too. Plus, they would get a chunk of the money you paid each month for your cable package. Cable channels still come in bundles.

This is a thing that started, I don't know exactly when, probably, let's say, rumors. You know, it used to be the Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, they put out two albums a year. James Brown put out three, four albums a year. And then we entered an era where the life cycle of an album was four to five years. There were, I don't know how many hit singles off Rumor, six of them.

The first in-house MTV programming that left the studio and expanded beyond VJ segments were those Spring Breaks that we talked about in the last episode. Those evolved into a series called A Muck in America, a summer's worth of unscripted segments, with original VJ Alan Hunter hitting the road and mixing with the people. A Muck in America!

I went on a road trip for 30 days and we kind of started the whole reality TV thing. That and my hosting Spring Break in 86 and in 87 with the Beastie Boys. That was the change for MTV when it was, let's turn the camera on the audience now. Let's send Alan out on the road, because he's the one who likes to be wild and crazy. And I love being out of the studio.

So the network is growing up, and so is that first generation of MTV viewers. By the mid-1980s, the college kids who had shown up for those early Spring Breaks and made up MTV's first dedicated audience were in their mid-20s. As Doug Herzog said, the network started to go after those older viewers' younger siblings. And those younger siblings wanted something a little different.

You know, the first major thing that happened was probably 1987.

What the network learned in those early Spring Breaks was that when they gave viewers a half-hour show with a narrative arc, more of them stuck around to see how it would end. What they learned from A Muck in America is that when a bunch of VJ segments could be thematically tied together, they were easier to sell to advertisers. So a few years into being a television network, MTV got to work developing television shows.

I actually was the guy charged with making the first three shows for MTV. Bob wanted to do a game show, a dance show, and a news show. And they all happened to work out of the box, which was amazing. But that was the great thing about MTV. You know, we didn't spend a lot of money on things.

Kenny wasn't like the other kids.

Remote control.

TV mattered.

Nothing else did. Remote control was the first assignment, the game show. The conceit was that its host, Ken Ober, had spent so much time in front of the TV in his parents' basement that a game show just kind of grew around him. It was kind of a game show, kind of a sketch comedy show, but here's where it really broke new ground. To win, or to play along successfully at home, you needed the pop culture knowledge that came naturally to you as a Generation X latchkey kid.

It didn't have a ton to do with music. It had a lot of attitude. I mean, that was our whole thing. So we first got into original programming, thinking, OK, well, any program we make has to be music-related, right? Or then it's not MTV.

Late Night with David Letterman was a talk show. that was about 25%, a parody of talk shows. Even though it was buried at what was then the unthinkable hour of 1230 AM, it was influential. The spirit of 1986 was irony. Everything kind of had air quotes around it.

If you grow up a kid who's watching TV and consuming TV like I had been, and then David Letterman shows up and he's kind of saying, all these talk shows are for old people and the conventions of them are ridiculous. So it's starting to skewer the rules from the previous generation. But then remote control? was that for game shows. Suddenly there's this show that the goal is to be funny first, and the game show was secondary to the being entertaining.

The premiere of remote control is also the premiere of a complaint that would follow the network around for decades. MTV doesn't play music anymore.

And it was really controversial. When it was happening in real time, even inside MTV, there was like a faction of people like, this is a mistake. We should not be doing this. This is not about music. They believe that the M stood for music, and if it wasn't about music, it shouldn't be on MTV.

Sort of.

I mean, you still get people this day saying, MTV doesn't play music anymore. MTV hasn't played music since, you know, since 1987.. What are you talking about?

When we come back, we will see what MTV was playing as they tried to figure out how to balance the music and the television.

Hey, I'm Rhett. And I'm Link. Maybe you know us from our daily YouTube show, Good Mythical Morning. But this is a little trailer for our podcast, Ear Biscuits, where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. And nothing is off limits.

In 1987, MTV is still mostly playing music videos. The pop of 1984 has slowly given way to pop metal, Whitesnake, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi. But there's one half hour a day when MTV is not playing music videos, and it's working. Remote Control is a hit. Not just because it's a great show, and not just because it's speaking so directly to the TV-damaged, ironic, latchkey kids of Generation X, but because it is, unlike Spring Break or even A Muck in America, a show.

The transition from blocks of music videos to programs, it's really because of TV Guide. TV Guide was the highest circulation publication in the United States. That was the only way you knew what was on TV, except for your local newspaper. So every home had TV Guide. And that created an advertising problem for MTV.

The problem was that inside TV Guide, MTV didn't have much of a presence. On any given weekday. in 1987, ABC would go from one show to another. Ryan's Hope, into Loving, into All My Children. All those different shows would have their own separate entry in the TV Guide.

MTV, in TV Guide, all it said was music videos. 6am music videos, 8am music videos, 10am music videos. Why would someone advertise at 8am as opposed to noon? It was harder to sell to advertisers, even though at this point MTV was extremely successful. And what they discovered was they could have separate shows listed in TV Guide, and it didn't cost that much money.

At right around the time Doug Herzog and his team start work on the second assignment, The Dance Show, MTV gets its first new VJ since the original five.

My audition was super, super fun. I hope I remember it the way that anybody else remembers it.

That, of course, is downtown Julie Brown.

I got called into the big office and met with the top brass. And they had said to me, yeah, why don't you go to the studio and just sit down at one of the stages at the studio? And basically then they had an MTV news script so you could read it off the teleprompter. So they had me do that to make sure that I could read, I suppose. And then they just took the teleprompter away and said, just chat about music.

A little bit after Julie Brown joined The Fold, a young man happened upon an open call for VJs on his college campus. His name was Kevin Seal and he got the job. And he approached the job very much in the ironic spirit of the 1980s.

So what MTV was like then was that the videos would come on, very often people with long teased out hair and spandex pants. And then the VJ would come on and say what they'd just seen, tease a couple of things coming up. And then you couldn't take more than 90 seconds in between videos and so on. And I would try to fill up that 90 seconds as much as I could, just talking about whatever came to my mind. All just trying to make it into a glittering, shiny globe.

The second of Doug Herzog's three assignments from Bob Pittman was a dance show. That would become Club MTV.

It wasn't just dance music. It was anything you could dance to. So, yes, you would dance to Paula Abdul, but you'd also dance to the Red Hot Chili Peppers or the Dead Milkman, you know. So it was just anything you could dance to. So for me, that was the wonder of Club MTV, that it didn't have to be in your dance top 40 on the dance charts or on the R&B charts for you to dance to it.

Club, MTV and downtown Julie Brown were pure enthusiasm. Kevin Seal himself was a little postmodern.

I couldn't really take MTV at its face value, and I don't know how many people did. It was very consciously a marketing tool for record companies. My first week there, my boss handed me a book about marketing and says, this is what we do here. But it might be that, like, making winking fun, was a successful form of marketing. You know, most of the music that we played was not quite to my taste.

For the second wave of MTV VJs, cable fame is a very strange thing. Julie Brown's having a pretty glamorous experience.

It was unbelievably crazy. It wasn't just about going to work, doing the job, and then leaving that all behind and going home and just chilling out with your friends. Chilling out meant going to work after you finished your VJ shift, which was, you know, either going to the Hard Rock Cafe for somebody's performing their new song, or going to visit a band that were playing that night and just being a part of the music scene. I mean, I don't think I ever went to bed before four o'clock, or most of the times, we would just go straight from going out straight into the studio the next morning. It was the walk of shame.

Kevin Seale, on the other hand, is a little more approachable, which means people are approaching him.

Pretty quickly, people did recognize MTV. And this, I have to say, always made me shrink a little. So people would see me, they'd recognize me from the television, and they'd shout MTV. And then I'd kind of try to hide. And the MTV studios were across the street from the CBS studios where they did the evening news.

So the new generation of VJs are mostly having fun. But because the new generation of MTV shows are starting to move the network away from being a 24-hour music video channel, the first generation of viewers are starting to make some noise. When we come back, the Sunday night shows that Generation X will remember forever. And another musical genre MTV has to be convinced to play.

Late night. on Sundays, there would be videos from acts that are, you know, self-described as alternative. But in the company, that was seen as like a niche, that it was about establishing credibility.

Once again, here's Tom Sharpling.

By that point, I was deep into figuring out just college music or alternative music, whatever you want to call it. That was the stuff that truly spoke to me. And now MTV gave a platform for that.

But I think that show in particular was appreciated the most from people that I've talked to, since. Lots of people say that I was always so tired at school Monday morning, things like that. I once talked to a man from Russia who said that he had every tape of 120 Minutes. Before the Soviet Union fell, he was like getting tapes of 120 Minutes.

120 Minutes defined a moment in what we would soon be calling alternative music, a genre of music that would blow up and disrupt the mainstream radio. yet again, just a few years later. Alan Hunter also hosted 120 Minutes a few times.

People began to miss the video jukebox. But 120 Minutes, those kind of shows started to be special shows. I loved hosting it for a while with Dive Kendall. And then there was Headbangers Ball on Saturday night. So as they began to sprinkle in programming like that, that had a timestamp to it, people, I think, were really starting to do a little bit of the must-see TV.

But here again, alternative and metal were genres that were almost completely white. By 1988, another style of music was about to blow up into the mainstream. And once again, MTV had to be convinced to support it. Remember earlier how Rob Tenenbaum said the popularity of Michael Jackson taught the network's programming executives a lesson, kind of?

And here's the kind of. Having been proven wrong once about not playing R&B, they were proven wrong again about five years later about playing rap music. And this story starts with a very young MTV employee. He might have even been an intern or an assistant. And his name was Ted Demme.

By the time I got to MTV, Ted Demme had left and graduated to making movies like Blow and Beautiful Girls and The Ref. But he was a legend. People still talked about how much fun he was to work with, how enthusiastic and tenacious he was. Which, believe it or not, he needed to be to convince the network to do its first hip hop show.

He was a scrub, but he was a scrub with a big mouth. And so he would go to the programming people and say, hip hop show, hip hop show, hip hop show. Now, Ted, that's not our format. Hip hop show, hip hop show. They say, all right, fine.

I'm DJ, Jazzy Jeff.

And yo, I'm the Prince.

And I'm Ready Rock C.

Hold up, what's this?

We want to let everybody know where it's at. It's right here. Yo MTV Raps. Yo MTV Raps started as a weekly Saturday late night show, but it blew up. It went daily in the 5 p.m.

And it's just not fair that we're not going to be able to be shown.

In this era, MTV also began to branch out into what's called acquired programming. Shows that already existed and had aired elsewhere that they felt fit. the MTV brand. Daily reruns of The Monkees, actually got that band to reunite, release a new album, go out on tour. Monty Python's Flying Circus.

I loved it and it was great because it was kind of like, I'm a kid in the US and suddenly this show gets dropped on us with no like instruction book, no manual. And you're just kind of like, what? It was obviously such a funny show, but it was also just music. was this driving force through it where suddenly, like Motorhead, are playing in their living room or wherever. And you're just like, yeah, that carried a lot of weight that I kind of forgot about.

I remember Motorhead being on The Young Ones and it felt like the brand still. That is, writer and producer Shane Nickerson.

And it was obscure enough for most people, at least in the US,

that it just felt sort of counterculture in a way, I guess.

Because the other thing that is hard to explain to a younger.

generation is that they were tastemakers.

So, as an audience at the time, you just had this sort of implicit trust that.

if they put it on, it must be something good. It must be worth a watch.

So I'm sure it's why I can still quote Young Ones episodes.

I know these episodes back to front myself, which I guess makes sense because they only ever made 12 of them. Shane Nickerson will go on to co-create the MTV show Ridiculousness. Ridiculousness is on MTV on Sunday nights and Monday nights, and Wednesday mornings, afternoons and nights. I just looked at MTV's programming grid and it is on 72 times this week alone. Ridiculousness got a new series order while we were recording this podcast.

You know, MTV started as a music channel and ultimately became a lifestyle channel for young adults. But, you know, that transition took a long time and, you know, not everybody was on board.

I'm going to leave you with the words of future MTV News correspondent and producer, Chris Connolly, who was hearing the complaints about MTV no longer playing music from the day he got there.

Just as I started, Remote Control had become a massive hit. And Remote Control was more about like the attitude of youth culture for that era. And the guys who were on it, the men and women who were on it, were becoming big stars. And so were the people who created the shows. It was a real phenomenon and it was exciting to watch.

In our next episode, we'll talk about the show that, for many people, represents the end of the golden age of MTV, but was the start of a television revolution.