All. The. Time.

March 30, 2021 9:45 AM

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 is on all the time. All. The. Time. ALL THE TIME. John Gonzalez of The Ringer asks: How Did MTV Become the ‘Ridiculousness’ Network?

Related: Eddie Murphy thinks "Ridiculousness" is "the perfect show ... a microcosm of the world."

posted by chavenet (84 comments total)

I actually remember a time when MTV actually played music videos.

Now it seems like a million years ago when MTV2 came out promising to play only music videos only to quickly devolve into the Real World network.
posted by drstrangelove at 9:49 AM on March 30, 2021 [19 favorites]

(Although I have to admit I really liked Remote Control. It's where I learned to sing popular songs in a flat, off-key way like Colin Quinn.)
posted by drstrangelove at 9:51 AM on March 30, 2021 [7 favorites]

Hey, if it means DEVO gets a royalty check every time they play the theme song, I'm for it. Not like I watch MTV anyway.
posted by SansPoint at 9:52 AM on March 30, 2021 [10 favorites]

Is this just a reflection of the idea that music videos are a dying genre ?
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:00 AM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I also have some bad news about The Learning Channel.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 10:01 AM on March 30, 2021 [51 favorites]

No I think it's that everyone just listens to music on their personal devices.
What the hell is "network television?"
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:01 AM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Is this just a reflection of the idea that music videos are a dying genre ?

As opposed to corpses long rotted to slime and preserved only as thin layers in prehistoric sandstone?
posted by y2karl at 10:14 AM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have even worse news about what happened to The Travel Channel.
posted by Ber at 10:20 AM on March 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

I was trying to explain to somehow how MTV used to never show rap music and how weird that was. Then I realized I was talking to someone young enough that I had to explain MTV used to show music videos.
posted by Nelson at 10:25 AM on March 30, 2021 [18 favorites]

People were complaining about MTV not showing music videos anymore back in the late 90s, when it was the Total Request Live + Reality TV channel. I don't think it's an internet problem or a music video problem as much as it is a problem that haunts a lot of cable channels. MTV went from music videos to "lifestyle programming," VHI went from music videos to lifestyle programming, G4 (remember G4?) went very quickly from video gaming content video games + wrestling to lifestyle programming, the History channel went from history to Ancient Aliens, TLC went from educational content to lifestyle programming...

There are some cable channels that, for whatever reason, actually stick to the kind of content that they originally promised; but my theory is that there are a lot of cable channels that find themselves floundering because no one actually wants to watch that much video game content, or music videos, or earnest history documentaries, or because they're not successful to license enough content - so they start showing lifestyle programming, and gradually show more and more lifestyle programming until they show essentially none of the content they originally branded themselves on. In some cases this is a brief stop on the way to death (remember G4?); in some cases a channel can survive for decades that way, ignoring whatever tension there is between the name of the channel and the content they actually show.
posted by Jeanne at 10:25 AM on March 30, 2021 [15 favorites]

I think the very fact that this show has been on cable television for over 10 years and I'm just now hearing about it pretty much says it all with regards to whether MTV is still an unavoidable cultural force. And yes, I do own a TV.
posted by Strange Interlude at 10:26 AM on March 30, 2021 [17 favorites]

G4... I remember when it was ZDTV and was mostly shows on tech tips for computer hardware/software. Is Leo LaPorte still around?
posted by drstrangelove at 10:33 AM on March 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

Is this just a reflection of the idea that music videos are a dying genre ?

It's more of a reflection that YouTube beats the crap out of MTV (and the original music-video playing version of MTV). Music videos are most assuredly still being made and a viable art form. It's MTV that sucks, not music videos.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:34 AM on March 30, 2021 [11 favorites]

RE: Ridiculousness, on the slate of shows that show and comment on internet content, I'd put it above Tosh.0. (which I don't think is aired anymore).
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:37 AM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also that lifestyle programming seems to be a dark pattern and a profitable one. I hate read the current "apartment therapy" realtor-licking headlines more than is good for me.
posted by clew at 10:39 AM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Up until the 90s, a lot of cable channels didn't show advertisements. And why would they? You were already paying extra for them! You know what they used to show on Bravo? Opera. Dance. Philharmonic shit. Man, you kids have no idea what it was like before you showed up on my lawn.
posted by phooky at 10:43 AM on March 30, 2021 [49 favorites]

20 seasons - 628 episodes - it's a juggernaut!
posted by fairmettle at 10:45 AM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'd put it above Tosh.0

Seconded. Tosh is intentionally abusive and demeaning. Ridiculousness, while it occasionally struggles with messaging around body appearance (there's a fair amount of fatphobia, especially in the earlier seasons), tries hard not to be insulting.

ObDisclosure: I like Ridiculousness. I've seen most of the episodes a dozen times, and I still laugh at the human foibles on display.
posted by hanov3r at 10:47 AM on March 30, 2021 [7 favorites]

This makes me realize that I haven't watched MTV since the last millennium.

I definitely remember when music videos were kind of a weird concept. And thinking shows like The Real World would never catch on. And when it became passe to ask "remember when MTV used to play music videos?"
posted by Foosnark at 10:50 AM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Ridiculousness kept me sane while recuperating from a stem cell transplant. I watched it in bed at the cancer center and then on the couch of the hotel room near the cancer center I was required to stay in for three months after being released. I needed cheap, easy laughs and that’s what you get with Ridiculousness. I used to occasionally skate with Dyrdek back in the day and he was good friends with a few of my good friends. With Dyrdek, what you see, is what you get: a goofy but earnest guy from the Midwest who’s as surprised as the rest of us that he’s on MTV 24 hours a day. Chanel is sweet and kind and I’m surprised Steelo hasn’t broken out on his own yet. Yes, some of the clips are crass and disgusting and some of the old episodes can be uncomfortably misogynistic. At the end of the day it’s a show about poking fun at people who make bad decisions. As far as commentary on MTV as a network goes, watching Idiocracy is probably a better gauge of our trajectory as a society.
posted by photoslob at 10:52 AM on March 30, 2021 [10 favorites]

Yeah I'd hazard to guess that music videos are more popular and easier to watch than ever before. For hip hop, indie rock, folk, punk, folk punk, funk electronic, you name it, from acts anywhere in the world too. And it's right there in your pocket.

The barrier to entry is lower than ever and its a great way to promote your work. I'm not sure but I think some artists might even make ok money from their YouTube videos.

Anyone who says music videos are dead has either not been looking —at all— or for some reason has made it a point to not see.
posted by SaltySalticid at 10:54 AM on March 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

I have even worse news about what happened to The Travel Channel.

Speaking of travel, I once watched a few episodes of a show that captures some of the same cultural flavor as Ridiculousness.

I stumbled across Get Out (not the movie) about 15 years ago when traveling in San Diego. The hotel's television package included HDNet, to display any and all HD content. The network would show a random assortment of programming as long as it was filmed in high definition; movies, concerts, space shuttle launches, comedy performances, wrestling, etc.

Get Out (YT Video with bikinis) was ostensibly an HD travel show, but with an added focus on young women having tropical tourist adventures. The bikini-clad and semi-nude frolicking was typically placed in a travel/adventure context (outdoor photo shoots, open-air massages, clothing optional resorts, secluded waterfalls, etc.) It was startling, as there was no indication that this minimally-narrated almost ASMR travel show was also an "after dark" cable show.

The combination of well-filmed HD nature scenes combined with the relatively "wholesome" nudity and minimal dialogue made it a compulsively incongruous experience to watch.

I have just learned that this show ran for 17 seasons (240 episodes)! It faded into obscurity, as HD programming became more and more common on all channels. Perhaps the same fate awaits Ridiculousness.
posted by JDC8 at 10:58 AM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

_____ killed the video star?
posted by clawsoon at 10:58 AM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Our son, age twelve, asked:

"Outside of sports and news, why do live television networks even need to exist anymore?"

I have been thinking on that one for days.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:58 AM on March 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

Ridiculousness, while it occasionally struggles with messaging around body appearance

So literally the first clip in the linked example video here, a clip from 2020, is a fat joke. It's all about "Big Karen" on a water slide. Let's watch the large lady in a bathing suit slide down the slide and fly through the air. Let's reverse it. Let's laugh at "Big Karen". That's it, that's the joke. They sort of make a half-show of laughing with her ("she's living her best life") but it's pretty transparent the intent is to demean a woman because of her weight.

It's fucking awful. It's not funny, but to make up for it it's offensive. If that's "occasionally struggling," well, wow.
posted by Nelson at 11:07 AM on March 30, 2021 [7 favorites]

"Outside of sports and news, why do live television networks even need to exist anymore?"

I worked in local network television for about a decade in the early 2000's and I remember practically screaming at management that we needed to plan to go fully-online or end up dead and forgotten in the modern world.

I was right, local news stations have been hemorrhaging money for two decades and fuck-none-of-them decided the solution was to drop "broadcasting" and go fully digital online-only. Going online could have recouped some of that lost ad money that... all went online.

So to me what's really dumb is that for the better part of three decades you had tons of people working in the industry who saw the writing on the wall but management just kept papering over the writing on the wall as though it was unwanted graffiti.

I remember reading an article in the early 2000's about the panic at places like Disney, and the then-Disney CEO said something akin to "You'll have a TV in your dorm room if I have to nail it to the wall" in response to their college-bound child not actively wanting a television and only wanting a laptop.

The real issue is the industry dug its own grave. You can do live sports broadcasts online, too. Everyone running those industries is just a fucking idiot, and that has taught me to extend that to the leaders of other industries as well: They're a bunch of fucking idiots who refuse to look at the real situations in front of them because, you know, I don't really know why. It makes not a lick of sense to me. Especially that these people are constantly held up as paragons of the business community who know how to "succeed." Look like a bunch of fucking morons to me who didn't listen to me nearly 15 fucking years ago and I'm just some random dipshit that knows nearly nothing about the industry comparatively.

Anyway, they'll drive television into the ground before conceding that it was a giant waste of time, money, and resources to keep fighting against the future. What's that bullshit capitalists are always claiming about how capitalism is the most efficient allocator of resources? This alone proves that is total bullshit.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:16 AM on March 30, 2021 [24 favorites]

I've seen this show a few times--I watch a lot of TV and my standards are low. It is like scrolling through reddit, but with a posturing man baby narrating. Who needs that?

Also, I find the female co-host upsetting. She giggles uncontrollably, and acts like such a dimwit. I had to look her name up (Chanel West). I guess she deserves props for scoring a gig, but does she have to be such a moron?
posted by rhonzo at 11:24 AM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'd put it above Tosh.0

That's a bar so low it's indistinguishable from the ground.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:25 AM on March 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

deadaluspark, the world is full of those kinds of things. Xerox's PARC developed the Alto in the mid-70s but sat on it because they were a "bunch of copierheads", according to Steve Jobs. Kodak invented the digital camera in the mid-70s but sat on it well after the point in time when it would have been wise to start selling them, because they didn't want anything to compete with their film business and went full speed ahead with their inferior APS format. Through their online dial-up service (Prodigy) Sears provided the ability to order from their catalog all of the way back in the 80s. Had they run with it it's unlikely Amazon would have ever progressed beyond an online bookstore and would today be one of the world's most valuable companies but... they sat on it. Even worse, they killed off Prodigy and their catalog division in 1993 stating that they wanted to focus on their brick and mortar stores...

Some businesses and business models are just intent on dying.
posted by drstrangelove at 11:31 AM on March 30, 2021 [14 favorites]

Pretty much every cable channel does this every weekend -- you get a million channels but if you don't feel like watching Pawn Stars at 8am, you're not going to still want to watch Pawn Stars at noon or 5pm, so that channel gets 100% written off for the whole day. All Property Brothers! All Duck Dynasty! The Office All Day! Some Generic Show about Aliens and Ghosts from dawn to dusk! Wait, here's something different: this channel is running every single Star Wars / MCU / Harry Potter movie in order.

Single-show marathons are the majority of daytime TV it seems. Channel surfing sucks. It used to be every half hour you could flip around and find something different to watch, but that doesn't really happen any more.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:37 AM on March 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

Through their online dial-up service (Prodigy) Sears provided the ability to order from their catalog all of the way back in the 80s.

I think there was once a much-favorited comment here about the problems Sears would have had in trying to implement this, but I don't have time to search for it.
posted by thelonius at 11:39 AM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Watching music videos on YouTube just isn't the same unless you have to sit through ZZ Top, Kenny Loggins, Cindy Lauper, Corey Hart, Lionel Richie, Van Halen, Billy Idol, Madonna, Tina Turner, and Elton John before you can finally see that Bananarama video again.
posted by straight at 11:40 AM on March 30, 2021 [26 favorites]

You know what they used to show on Bravo? Opera. Dance. Philharmonic shit.

They use to do Fellini retrospectives. I watched Fassbinder's "Querelle" on Bravo circa 1984.

Edgar Reitz' original film (or miniseries) "Heimat" was a big deal on Bravo back in the mid-1980s. I still have VHS tapes of it somewhere from copying it off of cable, with the Bravo intros; I wonder if they're even still playable.

On another cable channel, A&E used to be a combination of "highbrow" and accessible, such that people were worrying that it would make unwanted competition for local PBS stations. This, too, was in the mid-1980s.
posted by gimonca at 11:51 AM on March 30, 2021 [11 favorites]

I was trying to explain to somehow how MTV used to never show rap music and how weird that was...

Oh, c'mon:

How Yo! MTV Raps Changed Hip-Hop
posted by y2karl at 11:51 AM on March 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

You know what they used to show on Bravo? Opera. Dance. Philharmonic shit.

Didn't Bravo only broadcast for certain hours of the day? We never had cable growing up, but looking through the grids in the newspaper's weekly television supplement (remember those?) I always remember Bravo being a huge block of "OFF THE AIR' until noon?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:55 AM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

And single show marathons aren't really all that new to cable. Nickelodeon used to run Pinwheel in five hour blocks. The network's original name was even Pinwheel because that's all they showed initially.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:01 PM on March 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm not immune to the joys of people suffering non-serious injuries on video, but I hate hate haaaaate the tone of shows like this and its many competitors/imitators.
posted by The Card Cheat at 12:03 PM on March 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

Sometimes I feel like the only person who remembers the non-stop Pinwheel on Nickelodeon. Most people don't even remember the show. Today's Special was better, though.
posted by deadaluspark at 12:03 PM on March 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

How Yo! MTV Raps Changed Hip-Hop

Yes, in 1988 (in the US). Before then MTV had a problem. Did MTV Refuse to Air Black Musicians in the 80s?, also This is how David Bowie confronted MTV when it was still ignoring black artists. I admit I'm confounding "Black artists" and "rap" a little bit here, although the two topics are strongly intertwined. Apologies for creating a derail here, I won't post again on this topic myself.
posted by Nelson at 12:16 PM on March 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

I was trying to explain to someone how MTV used to never show rap music and how weird that was... Take Two

See also

From back in the day ...
posted by y2karl at 12:18 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

And when it became passe to ask "remember when MTV used to play music videos?"

As long as one human is alive that remembers, people will still be saying this.
posted by 41swans at 12:19 PM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

This answer to the question Why doesn't MTV play music videos anymore? has always seemed reasonable to me.
posted by Rash at 12:21 PM on March 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

If you want to watch Ridiculousness without a cable package, there's an over the air copycat in TBD. I work in Broadcast TV and the value of our programming has dropped to the point where we carry multiple streams of channels like this as sub-channels (thanks ATSC1) to pad out the numbers. Alongside our main network channel our sub-channels carry TBD as well as other knock-off channels like Dabl (HGTV clone), Comet (SyFy clone), Grit (Westerns). Others in the area carry many of the same ones as well as game show channels and other lifestyle products. Basically a vehicle to show bulk buy ads.

The networks are shoveling a ton of money into ATSC3 now, which will be the HD-Radio of TV. Something nobody will seek out to try and have. Engineering benefits aside, there will supposedly be the option of antennas in phones and a connection between the broadcast and web. I suspect neither of these things will materialize with the ROI they are dreaming up. Mobile networks aren't about to cut off the money hose that is charging for mobile data to let you watch media for free over the air, much like they neutered FM antennas in mobile phones.
posted by msbutah at 12:23 PM on March 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

A lot of this is driven by the fact that traditional programming like TV series is unionized but 'unscripted' reality TV shows are mostly non-union, with no union actors, writers or crew. And none of these people retain rights to residuals or ancillary benefits after the shows wrap. So cable stations make more money from these shows even if the audiences are smaller. I don't know what the residuals costs are for showing a video, but I suspect it's more than the production costs of this show, which is made from free youtube clips.
posted by overhauser at 12:25 PM on March 30, 2021 [10 favorites]

I was trying to explain to somehow how MTV used to never show rap music and how weird that was...

I haven't seen them in a quarter century, but I'm sure I could do a shot for shot remake of the Gin and Juice/It Was a Good Day/Regulate/Nothing But a G Thang videos.
posted by sideshow at 12:28 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

Through their online dial-up service (Prodigy) Sears provided the ability to order from their catalog all of the way back in the 80s.

I mean, Sears literally was the Amazon of the early 20th century. You could even order a kit to build a house (my friend owns one and it’s lovely) Try that on Amazon!
posted by sjswitzer at 12:35 PM on March 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

This answer to the question Why doesn't MTV play music videos anymore? yt has always seemed reasonable to me.

Yeah, but MTV stopped playing videos way before the internet, so its a fine answer now but doesn't answer why they stopped playing videos (they generally played short parts of videos back when Puff Daddy was popular or whole videos in really short blocks in between reality and comedy shows.)

MTV as a primarily music video playing entity lasted like 5-7 years..
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:51 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

It has to be better than the clipshow that exists on Tru TV where NSA "interns" are chilling on the couch spying on all our videos.

I know, this is an amazing premise for a clip show. The problem is the hosts just aren't that funny.
posted by subdee at 1:27 PM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

tl;dr:

I used to be with "it" but then they changed what "it" was. Now what I'm with isn't "it" anymore and what's "it" seems weird and scary.

It’ll happen to you.
posted by Mayor West at 1:30 PM on March 30, 2021 [12 favorites]

If you want to watch Ridiculousness without a cable package, there's an over the air copycat in TBD

I came in here to mention this. TBD is literally an OTA subchannel just showing YouTube clips all day long. It's....bizarre.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:31 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

I think there was once a much-favorited comment here about the problems Sears would have had in trying to implement this, but I don't have time to search for it.

I found the one about how Sears could've implemented it.

I believe this one might be the one about the problems.
posted by box at 1:39 PM on March 30, 2021 [11 favorites]

I'd heard the real reason MTV switched from radio-style "we have VJs and they play what they like & what's popular" to themed shows and eventually to "reality TV" was Nielsen ratings.

You can't get ratings for 4-minute videos. You can't get usable ratings for a 3-4 hour time block of a single host. They couldn't get ratings numbers so they couldn't pitch to advertisers, "THIS is the most popular time slot."

But once they switched to half-hour or hour-long shows, showing clips of most videos so they could fit some content around them... they had ratings. Sure, those ratings were much lower than the viewership of the open video play sessions, but they didn't have a way to confirm that other than "everyone says it sucks how MTV isn't showing whole videos anymore." And since MTV wasn't a subscription on its own but part of a cable package, they didn't have a way to show a drop in subscriber levels.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:56 PM on March 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

Every channel that starts off as something cool eventually devolves into the "whatever is cheap as hell" channel. Whether it's a science channel or an arts channel or whatever, it all ends the same way. There may be a lengthy stopover in lucrative reality show crud about idiots arguing in hot tubs or Alaskan rednecks hunting bigfoots, but eventually it's just about whatever will fill the hours with the very least effort and expense. Usually that means endless reruns of some 17 year old Will Smith movie that's simultaneously in heavy rotation on four or five other channels, so your TV dial goes fucking crazy with I, Robot or Hancock for a while.

Everybody loves music videos and it seems like it'd be pretty cheap programming to air, but channels that show music videos don't last. I never understood that until a few months ago when the AV Club ran an oral history of the MTV show Remote Control. Somebody involved with the show was saying that the network was enormously popular back then, but since videos were short viewers tended to tune in and out a lot throughout the day. Advertisers didn't like that, and longer shows were a direct result. Once you know that, the network's history makes a lot more sense. There were some fun transitional shows like 120 Minutes and Beavis and Butthead where they tried to package music videos as something you'd watch in a block, then that gave way to stupider package deals like TRL, then they just started making reality shows about pregnant teens. They've spent the last 30 years trying to get people to just keep watching through the ad breaks, and "marathons" of cheap, cruddy shows do that a lot better than music videos ever did. They lose plenty of viewers, but they still do gangbuster business with the real couch spuds.

I don't actually hate Ridiculousness. It's like Wasting Time on Youtube: The Show. But I don't know what MTV will do when the Dyrdek well runs dry. You can't try less hard than this. (They're just going to become the Ow My Balls! network, aren't they?)
posted by Ursula Hitler at 2:11 PM on March 30, 2021 [8 favorites]

I would like to find out if Dire Straits still wants their MTV.
posted by Splunge at 2:18 PM on March 30, 2021 [9 favorites]

They're a bunch of fucking idiots who refuse to look at the real situations in front of them because, you know, I don't really know why.

It's because they feel entitled. They worked for decades to move up the chain of an industry. They learned the ins and outs of how it operated. They understood their place in the machine, and everybody else's place. They understood the ladder they had to climb to get to the top.

And once they got there, they expected their problems to be related to the experience they had: which shows to greenlight, how to squeeze more ad money out of things. Stuff that the tv industry had been doing for ages. And they weren't technophobes, they wanted to use computers, computers could help them figure out how to better schedule against nielsen ratings or whatever for more eyeballs. Maybe the computer says more half-hour shows are better on thursdays, but stick to hour-long dramas on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, okay will do.

So they've spent their entire life getting good at this thing, and then they're told "no no, you don't understand. Everything you've ever learned? It's all wrong now. Now we need to put everything online. 3 minutes is a long video. Don't worry about copyright, just put your content out there, make it available for free. Don't make people sign in, just give it to them."

That's weird and scary and frankly if I was in my mid-50s and you told me I had to change everything in the next decade or you'd be dead, I'd look at my life and say "*I* won't be dead. The tv industry will be dead. But by that point, I can retire. So fuck this, I'm going to ride this out."

And now here we are.
posted by nushustu at 3:07 PM on March 30, 2021 [13 favorites]

When I worked there in the 2000s the network was already well past the tipping point and didn’t show blocks of music videos anymore. The comments above about ratings pressures being the reason are pretty much on the mark. Basically, MTV didn’t want to continue operating on a radio model because it was clear that original TV programming would mean a more stable and profitable future.

They did attempt to hold on to their music identity for a while, if for no other reason than the people who worked there genuinely loved music of all kinds. I remember huge excitement when Glenn Branca did a special employee-only show and anyone at the network who could play was invited to join in for the 100-guitar symphony. The first thing I ever worked on as a lowly researcher/PA was an ambitious documentary series about music history. A huge amount of money was spent on it over the course of almost a year, but it was scrapped after the pilot aired.

One event I’ve never seen discussed anywhere was a breakdown in the arrangement between record labels and the network that happened sometime around 2005 or so. I’m sure there were many dimensions to it but from my perspective, working in the News & Documentaries department, the biggest change was that we were no longer free to score our shows with any music we wanted. Instead, we now had to use generic shit licensed from music libraries. This seemed symbolic of something at the time.
posted by theory at 4:01 PM on March 30, 2021 [17 favorites]

box - thank you - I was coming back to follow up on that
posted by thelonius at 4:07 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Is this just a reflection of the idea that music videos are a dying genre ?

I do not regret to inform you that Lil Nas X's new video (released March 26) already has 49,047,653 views at this second.
posted by General Malaise at 5:18 PM on March 30, 2021 [6 favorites]

G4... I remember when it was ZDTV and was mostly shows on tech tips for computer hardware/software. Is Leo LaPorte still around?

[Extreme Abe Simpson voice] Bring back Computer Chronicles you cowards
posted by General Malaise at 5:20 PM on March 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

Up until the 90s, a lot of cable channels didn't show advertisements. And why would they? You were already paying extra for them! You know what they used to show on Bravo? Opera. Dance. Philharmonic shit. Man, you kids have no idea what it was like before you showed up on my lawn.

And Inside the Actors Studio!

.
posted by General Malaise at 5:22 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

This show is bizarrely charming and I love that you can flip on the TV in any hotel you're staying in and there it randomly is. Chanel West Coast has the best laugh in show business.
posted by escabeche at 5:39 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ridiculousness to me is the ow-my-balls analogue of House Hunters - both shows have made a billion episodes, the episodes have a timelessness and comforting formula - is this episode from today or 5 years ago? You can't tell. And both shows are just effortless consumption - they're the TV equivalent of a bag of chips or a bowl of popcorn. There's never a wrong time. It's appealing to everyone to some extent.
posted by GuyZero at 6:06 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

Of course you need ten minutes of Chanel West Coast laughing.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 7:00 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

First it lost the M. Then it lost the TV.
posted by BiggerJ at 8:52 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

If there were a channel showing three- to five-minute short films all day long I would watch the crap out of it, music videos or otherwise.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 9:37 PM on March 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

20 seasons - 628 episodes

I've seen most of the episodes a dozen times

628 x 12 x 0.5 hours = 3768 hours

Watch Ridiculousness or be the a third of the way towards becoming an expert in the skill of your choice. You decide!

[spoiler]I chose Ridiculousness too.[spoiler]
posted by fairmettle at 10:49 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I do not regret to inform you that Lil Nas X's new video (released March 26) already has 49,047,653 views at this second.

In 1993-1996, a dozen videos of the equivalent popularity would debut every week.
posted by sideshow at 11:59 PM on March 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

A bit of history: Michael Nesmith, after the Monkees, created a show called PopClips that featured music videos. Warner Brothers, with Michael Nesmith's help, turned the concept into MTV. He was asked to be the executive producer, but turned them down to pursue other interests.
posted by eye of newt at 12:27 AM on March 31, 2021 [3 favorites]

MTV should start showing a Brit show called "Naked Attraction". That'll bring back viewers. Or not. It's so bad it hard to watch, but has it moments.
posted by james33 at 5:58 AM on March 31, 2021

Hell, I'm old enough to remember when American Movie Classics (AMC) actually showed classic American movies.

No, seriously. When they started out, they ran two movies a day - mostly from the old RKO catalog because they weren't tied up in someone else's vault like MGM or other major studios. And of course those were cheap. They would run the first one, then the second one, then the first one again, all day long. If you came in in the middle and something looked interesting, you could just wait for it to come around again.

Their audience was old people. And me apparently. (I wasn't old then.) Their first attempt at original programming was called "Remember WENN" and it was a nostalgic sitcom set in a radio station in the 30s. It didn't go very far. Then they started expanding "classic" to include much more recent, but still cheap, movies. And they gradually grew into the original content behemoth they are today. I don't think that's such a bad thing. They've brought us Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Walking Dead (okay, maybe a bit too much of Walking Dead.) But I do miss the old format. I saw a lot of really cool old stuff that I don't think you can find anymore - certainly not without a lot of work and without knowing about it to look for it.

The issue with all these channels is that they have kind of a finite life cycle. They establish a foothold by narrowing in on a specific niche and serving it well. The problem is that they can't grow from there. There are only so many people who want to watch old RKO movies or fine arts programming (Bravo) or country music videos (CMT). The list goes on and on. So they start to go more general to attract larger audiences and they lose what made them special and interesting (and in MTV's case actually culturally significant) in the first place. Many don't make the transition nearly as well as AMC. They end up kind of indistinguishable from each other, with genericized names that perhaps vaguely suggest what they used to be if you're in the know, but mean nothing to their current audience. At that point, they just kind of fade into the background.
posted by Naberius at 6:06 AM on March 31, 2021 [6 favorites]

The issue with all these channels is that they have kind of a finite life cycle. They establish a foothold by narrowing in on a specific niche and serving it well. The problem is that they can't grow from there

And this is why the Independent Film Channel is showing Groundhog Day, followed by Back to School, followed by 14 episodes of Scrubs and 10 episodes of Two and a Half Men today.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:29 AM on March 31, 2021 [2 favorites]

While Country Music Television is currently playing music, they'll follow that up with four hours of Roseanne reruns followed by three hours of The King of Queens.

Meanwhile, on BET, we're in the middle of a two-hour block of The Parkers, which will be followed by three hours of Martin and three and a half of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
posted by box at 6:39 AM on March 31, 2021

Naberius: “Their first attempt at original programming was called "Remember WENN" and it was a nostalgic sitcom set in a radio station in the 30s.”

As I just found out from an Adam Reader interview with him, a show created by Rupert "If You Like Piña Coladas" Holmes. It won an Emmy!
posted by ob1quixote at 6:43 AM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

And once they got there, they expected their problems to be related to the experience they had: which shows to greenlight, how to squeeze more ad money out of things. Stuff that the tv industry had been doing for ages

I have a hard time believing that the TV industry is about to die. Even a giant like Netflix publishes minutes to viewing of their most popular shows because their ratings are not great. Amazon, Disney+, etc, barely even register. These are all serious money losing businesses (except Netflix).

TV as an industry has a very basic model that will be profitable forever. Maybe that's not good enough for capitalism today, but that's different that it being a good idea to shift everything online. I'd be more scared that my kids don't watch tv in any form (though my oldest is starting to).
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:36 AM on March 31, 2021

Related, I think: This American Life from 2003. First segment's about a man who tried to start something new, on cable: the Puppy Channel.
posted by Rash at 8:31 AM on March 31, 2021 [3 favorites]

You will all be happy to know that the Gorilla Channel is still nothing but 24/7/365 gorilla warfare.
posted by delfin at 8:35 AM on March 31, 2021

Michael Nesmith, after the Monkees, created a show called PopClips that featured music videos. Warner Brothers, with Michael Nesmith's help, turned the concept into MTV. He was asked to be the executive producer, but turned them down to pursue other interests.

Obligatory c.1981 Mike Nesmith video Cruisin'
posted by Thorzdad at 8:50 AM on March 31, 2021 [5 favorites]

Obligatory c.1981 Mike Nesmith video Cruisin'

Well, that was a memory I didn't know I had.
posted by hanov3r at 10:06 AM on March 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

For Europeans on a nostalgia kick, here is Viva 2's last transmission.
posted by tigrrrlily at 4:20 PM on March 31, 2021

The issue with all these channels is that they have kind of a finite life cycle.

The first year of FX was amazing. Just found those links in a quick google, but everything broadcast from that "apartment" felt new and different and weird and fun, especially to this then-middle schooler living a few thousand miles away who probably wasn't their target demographic.
posted by msbrauer at 6:24 AM on April 1, 2021

Well, that was a memory I didn't know I had.

Watching Elephant Parts on analog LaserDisc was peak 1980s for me. I remember it distinctly.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:54 AM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

TV as an industry has a very basic model that will be profitable forever

Uhm, I think we already discussed how all the television networks lost their major ad-buys to the Internet way upthread. Also, I thought this was pretty well-known?

Seriously, local television stations are hemorrhaging money and have been for twenty damn years.

Three of the stations I used to work at no longer functionally exist (two are completely gone, one moved to a strip mall and employ ONE reporter and ONE production assistant, and they do cut-ins for the "main" news show). Now they do "local news" out of a station literally over 200 miles away, and we get lucky if we get one story a day that's actually "local" and comes out of our "satellite station" in a fucking strip mall. Local news isn't profitable. If NBC (owned by Comcast) and ABC (owned by Disney) manage to stay alive in the modern era, it's literally only because they are owned by companies that have profit coming out of their ears so it doesn't matter if they're not as profitable. (ViacomCBS, owned by National Amusements, could easily fail in the next 10-20 years, in my personal opinion.)

Have you even been inside a TV station? You realize that metric fuckton of broadcasting equipment and lights aren't cheap, right? And that engineers who are trained specifically in broadcasting are in short supply and becoming more and more expensive to hire (and are all getting older, since not many getting degrees specifically for TV broadcast engineering)

But yeah, somehow, when no one is fucking watching, and no one is buying ads they will still be profitable.

As someone who has worked in television, this is flat out the most insane shit I've ever heard, "a basic model that will be profitable forever."
posted by deadaluspark at 10:28 AM on April 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I guess it would be, if TV was still a box you could just plug in and watch (via broadcasting) but IME a modern television's so goddam complicated and everybody's watching cable anyway. Or in reality, everybody's watching YouTube or something on their phone - and whatever it is, it isn't ABC, CBS, NBC or PBS, and certainly not delivered via a local station.
posted by Rash at 12:18 PM on April 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

By the time high speed broadband finally becomes ubiquitous across the US, even in rural areas (and maybe even a little bit before) I fully believe broadcast television will cease to exist and the bandwidth will be chopped up and auctioned off for additional wireless services.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:55 PM on April 1, 2021 [3 favorites]