MIKE ON TV: As MTV Turns 40, It’s Time to Embrace the Generation That Grew Up With It

Well, this was a fun one to kick up a bit of a stir. People, especially those in my generation, still have strong MTV feelings. And to see what the linear channel has become — mostly 24 hours of "Ridiculousness" repeats, and that's not an exaggeration -- makes all of us pretty sad. In honor of MTV's 40th anniversary on August 1, I wrote this column about what I think could be done to bring back some relevancy to the linear channel -- by embracing the demo that would still watch an MTV linear channel:

MTV turns 40 on Sunday, and it hardly looks its age. Well, that’s because it hardly looks like, well, anything anymore. At least that’s the depressing state of the linear MTV channel, which in recent years has become 95% reruns of “Ridiculousness,” along with a handful of runs of 20-year-old movies (“Joe Dirt”) and limited first-run airings of legacy shows like “Teen Mom” and “Catfish: The TV Series.”

It’s been a cliché for years to complain about what happened to the music on MTV. (For the record, the cable network programs a grand total of one hour and 10 minutes of music programming a week — the 10-minute “Fresh Out Live” on Fridays, and the one-hour “Fresh Out Playlist” on Saturday mornings.) But the music question has been moot since the mid-2000s, when videos moved to YouTube and Vevo. The larger issue is, what happened to the programming, period, on MTV? It’s become a zombie channel, and for those of us still rooting for the brand, it’s a sad sight to see.

MTV isn’t the only neglected cable channel out there; as my colleague Kate Aurthur and I detailed in a Variety cover story last year. As the major conglomerates shift their attention to their streaming services, the legacy basic cable networks have become secondary priorities. In many cases, they now serve more as incubators for programming that will eventually find a broader audience on a streamer.

But because MTV meant so much to so many of us growing up, especially those of us in our 40s, the de-evolution of the channel stings extra hard. As recently as 10 years ago, MTV still felt like it had the pulse on pop culture, and that was long after it had moved on to embraced a younger millennial audience, leaving us Gen X-ers in the dust. (No hard feelings, MTV, we get it.)

Interestingly, MTV is a brand that ViacomCBS continues to embrace, even recently renaming its portfolio of cable brands — MTV, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, Pop TV, CMT, VH1, TV Land and Logo — to MTV Entertainment Group. But again, it’s now less about those channels, and more about what MTV Entertainment Studios is producing as a whole, and especially for Paramount Plus.

MTV is alive and well — but not on MTV. MTV’s “The Real World Homecoming: New York” didn’t air on MTV, but rather on Paramount Plus. Under Sheila Nevins, MTV Documentary Films is continuing to grow into a top-notch label for docs, recently earning an Emmy nom for “76 Days” — but that film ran on Pluto TV, and later Paramount Plus, not on MTV. MTV Entertainment Studios landed four Emmy nominations, but not for MTV fare — it was via two for “Emily in Paris,” on Netflix, and two for “Reno 911,” on the late Quibi.

I can’t fault the idea behind this. ViacomCBS and the MTV Entertainment Group are moving the brand to where the audiences are. And in reviving classic MTV and VH1 titles like “MTV Unplugged” and “Behind the Music,” there’s logic in capitalizing on nostalgia to sell audiences on a Paramount Plus subscription. It worked with “The Real World Homecoming,” which I devoured on the streaming service (after it frustratingly never appeared on MTV itself).

But that brings us back to linear MTV. What to do with a legacy linear brand on autopilot? For its 40th anniversary, I say: Give MTV back to the 40-year-olds.

Read the rest here. And watch the video above here.