I was a religious MTV watcher.

Growing up, I was a pop culture kid and loved MTV. I remember birthday parties, getting T-shirts with the MTV logo ironed on, the baseball jerky with the black sleeve and the white and that MTV and zebra print.

This is Tim Healey. In the '80s, like any teenager, he is glued to MTV.

It felt like My house was suddenly plugged into this thing that could attach me to a world that wasn't the one I was living in. And it just felt like this channel I can turn to and things would fly into my house and expose me to music and fashion and comedy and animation and all things that I didn't have access to in those pre-Internet days.

In the mid-1990s, MTV had a lock on the college-aged and young adult demographic. People were still naive enough to want to be on the real world. House of Style brought high fashion to the masses. At the exact same time Beavis and Butt Head were in cinemas, MTV News was becoming a respectable news operation. The network was on top of the world, but it still had some edge.

For me, it felt like the network had a lot of things that appealed to me in a lot of different genres. It felt dangerous still. It felt really un-PC. It felt unapologetically In the '80s, MTV had been an upstart.

In the '90s, it became an institution. In this episode, we'll see how the unapologetically young MTV grew up, and then how, just as unapologetically, it began to age in reverse. I'm Dave Holmes, and this is Who Killed the Video Star. A thing I've noticed as I've interviewed people about MTV is that there are a lot of definitions of the network's golden age. It's like Saturday Night Live or your hometown baseball team. Whether people worked there or just watched it, everyone has their favorite few seasons.

I think as a viewer, I think the golden ages were 1994, 1993 through 2002, 2005.

That's Sally Frittini-Hes, and she knows what she's talking about. When we last spoke With her, she had started at MTV in the '80s. And by the early '90s, she's running production at a network that is the place to reach the youth market.

Nothing else existed. We were it. We were the place where partnerships were formed. Companies that were unique and collective would knock on our door and say, We've got this incredible idea. How can we work together?

Thanks in part to MTV News becoming a credible news source, that formerly Loose Network is getting a little more buttoned up. Mtv TV news is starting to do political stories. And with an eye on getting young people to show up and vote in the 1992 presidential election, it begins to focus on the race in a series of segments on The Weekend Rock called Choose or Lose. Each segment went deep on each candidate and their specific platforms and policies. And that's something you can barely find anywhere now, even in news for grownups.

Choose or Lose was really impactful, getting younger people to vote. Those were the golden years where the viewers came to MTV for news for young people.

In the 1984 election, nearly 60% of voters under '29 voted for Ronald Reagan. In 1988, when George H. W. Bush was elected, That percentage went even higher. But in the run-up to the 1992 election, the incumbent Republican wasn't all that interested in trying to reach that young demographic. His campaign rejected interview requests from MTV News for months. But Democratic candidate Bill Clinton saw an opportunity. In June of '92, once he had become the nominee, Clinton sat down with an audience of 200 young voters for a live special called Choose or Lose: Facing the Future with Bill Clinton. Hi, I'm Tabitha Soren.

This is Facing the Future with Bill Clinton, MTV's first presidential forum. Hi, governor. My name is Dominique, and I'm an illustration student at ArtCenter. I would like to know, right now at this moment, I'm not sure if I'm going to vote for you, so I'd like to know why I should.

That is the question, isn't it? The kids asked tough questions about the environment and reproductive rights and whether he really didn't inhale, and if he would inhale, if he had it to live again. The show was scheduled to run for an hour and ended up going 90 minutes. And that summer, polls began show young voters favoring Clinton. In the last weeks of the election, Bush finally agreed to a 10-minute interview with MTV News' Tabitha Soren in the back of a train, but it was a little too testy, and it was much too late. In massive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning. In the 1992 election, 55% of younger voters went for Bill Clinton. The rightward slide of young voters had been reversed. And it's hard to know exactly how much MTV had to do with that, but the answer isn't nothing. And for Sally, a job that used to entail wrangling drunk college kids on spring break has now expanded to include planning an inaugural ball for the President of the United States.

So last minute, it was like, Yeah, if Clinton wins, we're doing a ball. It was like, We're doing a ball? People plan these balls here. Oh, okay. All of a sudden, Sally, can you go to Washington? We have to find a venue because it looks like Clinton's going to win. I'm like, Okay.

The 1997s '83 Rock 'n' Roll Inaugural Ball aird live on MTV, featuring performances from Don Henley, En Vogue, Boys to Men, and 10,000 Maniacs. The dress code was Creative Black Tie. At the same time, MTV was also gaining new credibility on the music side. The main criticism of the network had always been that it prioritized style over substance, that it made the look more important than the sound. Starting in 1989, a new show stripped away all the artifice and the quick cuts and the flashy outfits, and focused on the songs and the performances. It was called Unplugged. Here again is writer Tracey Grandstaff.

I think that was at the heart of those sessions for Unplugged, is that it was get to know the artist, look at them raw. This is not anything you're ever going to see anywhere else. And it was just smart. It was just a smart way to see all your favorite artists in a way that you genuinely couldn't see any other way.

Unplugged was simple. An unadorned soundstage, acoustic instruments, the artist having an intimate moment with the fans. No frills on a network that up to this point had pretty much been all frills. The show started small. Season 1 featured Squiz, Michael Penn, and once again, 10,000 Maniacs. Then the legends caught on. Musicians who were a little older than the average MTV artist came on to win the kids over. Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton, they both released their Unplugged episodes as albums, and people bought Eric Clapton's is still the highest selling live album of all time. Mariah Carey released hers and got another number one single out of it with a cover of the Jackson 5's I'll Be There. Nervana released theirs as an album, so did Allison Chains, and here they are again, 10,000 Maniacs. In the early '90s, Tim Healey, who we met earlier, is in college. He's been watching MTV for years, and now he just wants in.

I applied for a summer internship, and because I wasn't a communications major, they wouldn't give me credit for the internship, so I couldn't take it. And a couple of weeks later, I got a call saying, You live on Long Island and you have a driver's license, and we're doing this thing called the MTV Beach house, this new idea we have. It's going to be in Quag, which is essentially the Hamptons. And would you like to be a van driver? And I said, Absolutely. So I drove a 15-passenger van wherever they told me to go.

And Tim didn't just have a driver's license and a van. He had the cutting-edge technology of the mid-1990s.

I had a Pager and a cell phone. I had a StarTec cell phone that folded out and it had the antenna that pulled up. If it was a light that needed to be fixed and delivered to some house in New Jersey, or if it was John Stewart that needed to be picked up at the airport, that's what I did. It was probably the best job I've ever had. It was great.

At the same time, Unplugged and Choose or Lose are happening on MTV, and Tim Healey's driving a van to and from the beach house. A future MTV executive named Brian Graydon is having a very unconventional but very eventful first few years in the business. His television career starts in the back of a police car.

During the summer years, when I was at Harvard Business School, I decided to come out and just work for free for whoever the smartest person I could find that would have me was. That was a guy named Stephen Chou, and he was starting working with this new thing called Reality Television, and a show called Cops. So I spent my summer riding in the back seat with cops, trying to get prisoners or future prisoners, to sign releases to appear on camera and sat in the edit while they created the first episode of this reality show, and that just captured my imagination that reality TV could be a real thing.

Cops was a low-cost, high-ratings show for the still pretty new Fox Network. Brian Grayton took a job there and went on to develop more low-cost high-rating shows for them, starting with a late-night dating show that was gone much too soon. Thanks very much. Welcome to Studs.

I'm Martin DeCarlo.

Glad to have you here. We got two Two guys over there.

Those two guys have been on blind dates with those three ladies.

So let's go talk to them close, shall we?

The first show that I created with a guy named Scott St. John was Studs, which took off as a cheesy dating show and rivaled love connection. It was a hit, but it got canceled because Rupert Murdoch's wife at the time was Catholic, and she had grown tired of seeing studs in every article written about Rupert Murdoch, who had just recently come to California to take over from Barry Diller and actually run the studio himself. And so that's why it got canceled. It was still making probably 60, 70 million at the end of its run.

So yeah, you heard that correctly. Rupert Murdoch allegedly canceled a wildly profitable show because his very Catholic wife thought it was too tawdry. Rupert Murdoch is, above all things, a man of principle. It bears mentioning that Rupert Murdoch and his very Catholic wife would divorce in 1999 and would each go on to marry two more times. Oh, and by the way, as we were recording this, Rupert just got engaged for a sixth time. Congratulations. Anyway, Brian is starting to get a little frustrated with Fox. And at the same time, he's working with a couple of young writers and filmmakers just out of the University of Colorado. Their names are Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

I worked with them for about four years on different projects because we couldn't get anything off the ground. And then just trying to help them continue to pay rent, I commissioned a Christmas card based on one of the shorts Trey had done at school, which was a precursor to South Park, where they battled Frosty the Snowman. And so in my Christmas card, they battled Jesus versus Santa. And that Christmas card was supposed to go to 500 industry contacts. And when I saw it, it was so full of four-letter words and inappropriateness that I just sent it to 30 friends and didn't think too much about it again. We had tried to get South Park off the ground in an early form. It and no one had wanted it. And then within probably a few weeks, that Christmas card became a viral video back when you had to make your own VHS copy. And that's what got the industry's attention. But even then, we only got one offer from Comedy Central. Every other network thought it would be a one-note joke.

Fox has canceled Studs and failed to see the comedic potential of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. So Brian leaves to executive produce South Park. That show premiered on Comedy Central in 1996. I am recording this in 2024. South Park is still airing new episodes. Anyway, in 1997, with South Park well on its way, MTV brings Brian Graydon on to run their programming.

He was having an identity crisis. They had grown up as a music video channel. And when I first came to know MTV, I could watch music video for hours and be thoroughly entertained. But by around the mid '90s, the novelty had worn off, and they were subject to that radio quandry, which is, When you play a song I don't like, I'm probably going to tune out. They had done this experiment with, I think, Beavis and Bedhead or Real World, those two shows. When they went on air, they were getting literally 10 and 20 times the ratings of the music video hours. But they were also viewed as a bit cancerous because they weren't music videos, and people were worried they were undermining the music and music television, which was a fair brand concern. And so they were in the middle of that crisis when I arrived. And I think it was the crisis in ratings that forced them to try something new.

Just as Brian's getting his start, MTV's research Department does a survey that uncovers an interesting fact about its audience, one small data point that's going to bring on a whole new identity crisis. Here's Chris Connolly from MTV News.

So MTV in the mid '90s asked their audience, Does MTV play cool new music? And the answer is yes. The audience thinks that MTV plays cool new music. And then MTV asked their audience, Does MTV play music you like? And the answer is no. And so there was the bold and creative decision to play music the audience liked.

When we get back, we'll find out how that survey and the network's reaction to it took MTV from one golden age into its next.

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Something amazing happened. I got offered my dream job.

How am I supposed to bring this up to him without hurting his feelings?

What should I do?

I want to skip the pleasantries without being in a hole.

Careful. Money and friends, they don't mix, babes. They don't. And don't work with your friends. Make your friends at work.

All right, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but that was actually million-dollar advice.

Whether you need advice or just love to listen to other people's problems, this show is for you. Listen and follow Million Dollar Advice, an Odyssey podcast, available now for free on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcast.

By 1997, the network is going through some growing pains. As the new executive VP of programming, Brian Graydon's job is to create new shows that keep the Nielsen ratings up.

I'll say something very impopular, which is that the Nielsen ratings are eerily accurate because there were patterns, and if you really studied them every day, The patterns were not arbitrary. You could see the growth, you could see exactly where it was growing. The ratings aren't particularly erratic, meaning they don't change a lot from week to week. The patterns don't, so that also told me that they're pretty real. And even if they weren't, you have to take them as real because that's the metric around which all the ad dollars change hands. What they do is they take a few hundred people, they put a box in their house, and they literally will have the people write down what they're watching as well as measure how many minutes, et cetera, with this box. And those few hundred people determine for the entire country what is a success and failure. And statistically, it is a large enough sample to extrapolate from. And whenever a show has bad ratings, at least once a year, some network exec challenges Nielsen. But there's a reason they've never won any of those challenges. They're pretty darn accurate.

As MTV has learned by now, shows with a beginning, a middle, and an end tended to rate better. The challenge was developing shows that had that arc but still had a connection to music.

I remember the first corporate meetings that I was invited to when I started, a lot of ideas would be surfaced, and then they would all be shot down because everybody was trying to be the coolest in school. The way you could be cool was by shooting other people's ideas down. I watched all of these inspirations or seeds just die in these rooms. And so culturally, one of the things I set out to do was to turn it into a culture of experimentation, where you just tried things and you didn't get too hung up on whether it failed or whether it was right for the brand long term, because anything that connects with the audience would ultimately be right for the brand.

While all of this is happening, a college football player from Cincinnati, Ohio named Jeff Timmins, has formed a vocal group in the style of Boys to Men. They're called 98 Degrees. Jeff drops out of school in his senior year to record their debut album. That album was released in 1997 by Motown. The first single from it is called Invisible Man. I wish you look at me that way.

I think out of all of the songs, that was the first song we ever recorded after we got signed. Boys to Men and All For One had passed on that song. And we were like, Okay, how fast can we get in the studio to record it?

Invisible Man has some success on the charts, even though 98 Degrees are themselves invisible.

Motown wanted people to perceive us as a black group, as an urban group. So they didn't put our pictures or our music video out or anything on any of the materials they were sending to the press. What they wanted to do is give us this cred, that we were this real R&B B-based group, which we were heavily influenced in all of those things, but they wanted people to think we were a black group.

In 1997, MTV is getting ready to face its audience. They're settling into new headquarters at 1515 Broadway, between 44th and 45th Street, in the heart of Manhattan's Theater district. 1515's mezzanine floor, one story up from the street, had been vacant for years. Plans to turn it into a restaurant never really panned out. But the space sat above a revitalized cleaned up, significantly less porny Times Square. So the network had an idea. Why not turn that mezzanine level into a studio? And why not take that front wall, the one that faced Times Square, and bust it out, replace it with floor to ceiling windows? As that renovation was happening, a banner hanging from the scaffolding outside said, Coming soon, Timesquare's last peep show. The first show out of the new Timesquare studios was a daily 90-minute live show called MTV Live. Celebrity interviews News, a music video here and there, the occasional call in from a viewer. It was hosted by a VJ from MTV UK named Tobi Amis, Ananda Lewis, the former host of BT's Teen Summit, and a handsome young guy fresh off of K-Rock in Los Angeles, Carson Daily. In the summer of 1998, at the MTV Beach house, which that summer was in Seeside Heights, New Jersey, the network debued a daily countdown show called Total Request.

Which was just a half hour of five videos that the audience was calling in the night before on the phone and registering which ones they'd like to see. It had Carson as host initially, but it was all just in one studio with just Carson. It had just enough of a life that we thought we should take a gamble in trying to make that something bigger, make that into our Today show, if you will.

Mtv Live and Total Request merged into one show. And on September 13, 1998, that show premiered, Total Request Live. By this time, Tim Healey had passed on the keys to the van and moved up in the MTV world.

I've always been pretty good at writing. If a VJ had to host an hour or two hours of videos, you were writing just specific copy in and out of the videos. You could work in a joke here and there and be witty. And I was good at that. So they put me on this new show, TRL, and they said, We really want to evolve the show a little bit, where we want to be able to create content and concepts for the celebrity guests to do when they come on the show. We don't want to just have a straight to interview with them. We want to try to engage with them a little more and come up with things to fill the hour that isn't just music videos. So I started to work on TRL, and they gave me the title a head writer, and I started to basically be the keeper of editorial.

As TRL launches in September 1998, the pop charts are as chaotic as they've been since 1981. Faith Hills, This Kiss, right next to Too Close by Next, which you had to listen to a few times before you caught on that was about boners. Ray of Light era Madonna, Sarah McLachlin already sounding like she's trying to get you to donate to the ASPCA. The number one song is I Don't Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith, which fine. But does a teenager want to scream at that song? Probably not. Throughout that billboard chart, though, some names stand out. Names like Five, Backstreet Boys, Brandy & Monica, pop music made for young people by young people. And when those artists were on the TRL countdown, Ratings got a bump. Fans began to show up at 15:15 just to get a look at a Backstreet Boy or a member of their newer competition, InSync, through the window. And just as they had done with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1963 and Duran Duran on MTV in 1982, in 1998, the young girls screamed.

We were just shut down Timesquare with screaming fans. Girls like boys, boys like boys. It It just became a mecca and incredible to watch.

That is Sally Fertini-Hess again. She started her career at MTV, wrangling drunk '80s college kids on spring break. Before too long, she was organizing an actual inaugural ball. But at the end of the 1990s, she's come back around to wrangling kids. But instead of a beach, this wrangling was in the middle of New York City, and these kids were hopped up on hormones.

The NYPD would say to us, Kindly, and then sometimes not so kindly. They'd be You cannot have those artists go to the window. They cannot wave. The cops had restrictions on us, and you'd say to the artist, I'm really sorry, you can't go over the window. And of course, they went over the window. And then everybody would come running across the street. And thank God, nobody got killed during those days. And by the way, this was before social media. I don't even know how people found out, to be honest with you. I mean, that goes to show people were really watching TRL because when you said, Hey, on Friday, Backstreet Boy is going to be here, they showed up.

We want everybody in Times Square to know that the New York Police Department is not allowing us to go to the windows and wave at everybody because they're afraid somebody is going to get hurt. So we don't want everybody out there to be angry with us, but we want to come to the window, but we can't. As this teen pop moment is starting to really cook, the people at 98 Degrees record label decide to revise their policy on showing the band's faces and arms and shoulders. Here again is Jeff Timmins.

After that, Backstreet Boys had taken off and InSync followed, and they were like, We have our own version of those. We need to put these guys' photographs and their images on the stuff we're promoting. It was a novel idea. Then after that, TRL was on fire. In all of those vehicles, as you know, MTV was huge for us. Once we did that, it was like an overnight success. One day we're driving around and putting our posters up in music stores, and then the next day, we couldn't get out of our tour bus all of a sudden. So it was really crazy.

98 Degrees who had been hidden from the public are suddenly everywhere in tank tops, if they're wearing shirts at all. And a group that had been marketed to an adult demographic starts to see a change in their audience.

Well, it suddenly got younger, right? Because we were doing clubs. You'd go do a radio promotion with the Magic Attic in Myrtle Beach, right? And we'd go do that. And there's the 200, 300 people in the audience because they were burning the song. So we're like, Wow, all these people are coming to see us. And then all of a sudden, you're doing amphitheaters and you're on radio with JLo and Ricky Martin and Backstreet Boys and Christina and Brittany and all that stuff and doing fairs and festivals where there's tens of thousands of people in a blink of an eye.

Just like 98 Degrees, MTV suddenly finds itself with an audience that's younger than it used to be. Every day, a few dozen to a few thousand members of that audience shows up to 1515 Broadway to be a part of the action or just to yell at it and run toward it.

The on-air talent, you're trying to do a live show, and you're like, Oh, shit, we have a situation outside. And then I was the one who had to negotiate. I was like, Can we just bring the camera out? Can we just bring in sync out with one camera for just one segment? It's only going to be five minutes. And they were like, No. And then you keep pushing, and finally they say, Okay, and we sneak them out. And within seconds, it was like, and the cops would be like, All right, that's it. I'm like, Okay, we got the shot. I feel like.

Now, this is really my golden age of MTV because it's when I started working there. It's a whole story. I've told it plenty of times before. It's not important right now, but this is what I need to tell you. There was no easier, no more reliable way to get a good hit of I mean than by standing at that massive window overlooking Times Square. Even when nothing was happening in the studio, I'd be looking out over the flashiest and most crowded part of the greatest city in the world. But at around 3:00 PM on any weekday, when TRL would be getting ready to start and the kids would start to gather, I'd just go up to the window and wave, and they would scream. And I knew they weren't screaming at me. They were just screaming at the general idea of MTV and TRL and whatever might be about to go down in there. They were screaming because this was their golden age happening in real-time right in front of them. And what was even cooler was what was actually going down in there. On the other side of the window, people who had grown up watching MTV just like me and we're now making it.

Creative, hard-working, funny, smart people running around with clickboards and headsets. People who had a love of music and music video and pop culture that was so strong and so committed that it made them weird everywhere else in the world. But there, inside that studio. It made them useful. It made them part of the team. And then what was also going down that we all forgot about a lot was that there were a whole bunch of other businesses at 15:15 Broadway. So at about 3:00 PM every weekday, a whole bunch of lawyers and insurance adjusters and whatever suddenly had to listen to an hour's worth of screams outside their window. And I know that this is way too late, but I just want to say we're very sorry. When we come back, a closer look at the peak years of the last pop music show of the Monoculture. Total Request Live.

It just seems so cool, and it seemed like the place to be, and that's what I'd love to get there someday, and I bet it's wild and crazy.

That is Damian Fahey, and he does get to MTV someday. In 2003, as Carson Daily steps back to start his own late night talk show, Last Call on NBC, Damian is a radio DJ in Boston. He gets a call to come in and audition to replace Carson. He gets the gig, and it is wild and crazy, especially internally.

I remember just being completely overwhelmed. I remember walking up to the building and it just looked like this towering pop culture mecca. And for some reason, I was walking into it and just going through the spinning doors up the escalator. And you see Kurt Loder, you see John Norris, or someone who you grew up with and these legendary figures. It was just like someone teaching you how to swim by just throwing you in the deep end of the pool. It was overwhelming and literally felt like life for death. And I remember waking up in the morning and vomiting from anxiety almost every day and feeling like, I need to go in there and quit. This is too much. It took me such a long time to feel like I even deserved or belonged there.

Trl was the place to be, not just for boy bands, and Brittany and Christina, and Mandy, and Jessica, and all of them. Everyone who wanted to reach the teenage demographic came to Times Square. Here's TRL head writer, Tim Healey.

We had a palette every day that we had to paint on, and we had to fill time. And as the show got more and more popular, we had a lot more creative license to come up with really crazy shit for some A-level celebrities to do. And they would come on and they would do them because the show was so popular and they wanted to appeal to teens, and they wanted to be, quote, unquote, cool.

I'm not a sports fan at all, but I get excited for the Super Bowl because there's something almost comforting about everyone right now is on the same page in watching this, and we're all taking part in this communal thing, and there's something comforting about that. And that, in my was what TRL was to a certain extent. There was a comfort in knowing that once the red light goes on, you're talking to all these kids who rushed home from school and got in front of their televisions to watch. In There was like a ceremony to it, almost in a way. If I actually let myself fully realize and feel the hugeness of what the hell was happening, I probably would have thrown up on national television. I think I would a breakdown.

Trl gave its teenage viewers a chance to see their idols in the barely controlled chaos of live television. It worked for the kids because they could call in and ask a question, and in that way, the show was interactive. It worked for the artists because it gave them a new way to cultivate their persona just by being themselves on TV. There hadn't been anything like it on television before. Since the show came right after the moment of Unplugged, which had skewed a little older, and right after the post-Nervana alternative Rock Years, which had skewed a little more male, TRL felt like it made MTV's audience a little younger and a little more female. Anecdotally, I can say this. I started there when I was 27, and for my first few months at the network, if I got recognized on the street by a viewer, that viewer would be around my age. A year later, once TRL was at its peak, when I got recognized, it would usually be by a 13-year-old girl. When I would visit my hometown of St. Louis, all of a sudden my mother really wanted to go to the mall with me.

Let's go to the mall, she'd say. And it took me a while to realize, Mom's trying to make a scene. Mtv was doing what the audience research suggested it ought to do, playing the music that young viewers liked. But at least at the peak viewing hours, that came at the expense of the cool new music the network used to be known for playing. And again, in the late 1990s, that cool new music was mostly alternative post-grunge rock music. And the people who tuned in for that music were older boys. So within TRL, there was always a tension between the boy bands and the lip biscuit kid rock axis. The older boys got angry. They felt like the culture was leaving them behind. And that is because it was. Here again is Chris Connolly.

Here's the thing that interests me, though. At that time when we were there, that was maybe the fourth or fifth most popular music in America. Not the first, not the second. The fourth or fifth. Orlando pop, number one. Hip hop, number two. Lilith Fair, the rise of all those wonderful singer-songwriters and stuff. Number three. And so maybe four or five, you get the angry young men. So it's not like they'd just been overtaken for the top spot. They were well down the road. It's not just that the cultural mandarins have disenfranchized them. The culture has changed.

For a few years, pop was king. And like the last time pop was on top, the Duran Duran Michael Jackson Madonna moment of 1984, MTV was driving it. Look at the Video Music Awards from 2003, five years after the premiere of TRL. Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny's Child is now just Beyoncé of Beyoncé. She wins Best Female Video for Crazy in Love and begins an unbroken run of greatness that is very much still going on. Justin Timberlake has left InSync. He wins best male video for Cry Me A River, a song about the end of his very TRL friendly relationship with Brittany Spears, who, not for nothing, makes out with Madonna in their show opening version of Like a Virgin. The kids are growing up. Again, the culture always changes. That year saw the dawn of two major trends that were about to transform popular culture. In our next episode, we'll see how one of those trends made MTV bigger than ever, just as the other one, little by little, was making the network obsolete. That's next time on Who Killed the Video Star. Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV is written and narrated by me, Dave Holmes.

Executive Creative, produced by Jenna Weis-Burman, Dave Holmes, Jim Webber, and Chris Callen. Our Story Editor is Maddie Sprung-Kaiser. Produced by Lloyd Lockeridge, Ian Mott, and Terence Malungo. Edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Baisal. Production support by Javier Cruises. Special thanks to JD Crowley, Maura Curran, Leah Reece Dennis, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Allison Jeffrey, and Hilary Shuff. Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV is an odyssey original. I'm Bobby Finger. And I'm Lindsay Webber. And I want to tell you about a podcast I think you're going to love. Who Weekly is a podcast about everything you need to know about the celebrities you don't. Does celebrity news stress you out? Are there too many people you've literally never heard of? Check out Who Weekly, a podcast hosted by Lindsay Webber and me, Bobby Finger. Each episode goes deep into the biggest Who Leopardy stories of the moment. And if you're still confused, we even have a weekly call an episode where we'll answer the most burning listener queries. Who Weekly airs twice weekly with brand new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays. Listen and follow Who Weekly on the Odyssey app or wherever else you get your podcasts.