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 sixties 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 cancelation 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 or 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. Well, 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, Cindy Lauper. Younger readers are picking Rolling Stone up, and the magazine is starting to get a second window.

It's like you couldn't get that pure slice of young people any other way. And, you know, like you'd 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 sensed 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 suite. The big broadcast networks, ABC, CB's, 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. If you have a cable package, you still dont get to choose which channels you get. Even if you have one of those slimmed down streaming packages, theres always a handful. You never watch, but they still get some of your monthly fee. MTV was making money both of those advertising and cable fees. Plus, unlike any other channel, its early programming was basically free. The record labels funded the videos, but even though it was cheap, that early programming was also inconsistent. People would tune in to see their favorite artists, but there was no guarantee that those artists would keep the videos coming. So what do you do when those artists, even the Mount Rushmore of music video, are all too busy touring or recording to keep giving you music videos? As Rob Tanenbaum, writer of the book I want my MTV, explains, that could happen, especially after a blockbuster 1970s album changed the cadence of the whole music industry.

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 rumors, six of them. So Warner Brothers was working that record for two years, and Fleetwood Mac was touring off of it for three or four years. If you were programming MTV in a year when Michael Jackson or Madonna or Van Halen had a new record out, you would have a really good quarter. But what do you do when those dates don't line up? And now you've got a year where your superstar acts, the ones you rely on, don't have anything to give you. That's why they started making their own shows.

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 Amok in America, a summer's worth of unscripted segments with original VJ Alan Hunter hitting the road and mixing with the people.

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, and 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. Went to Jamaica with Jon Bon Jovi in the band for a week and did silly stuff.

So for me to go on the.

Road for 30 days and mess with people and get drunk literally every day, and to have it be recorded and put on MTV, this was what the executives got huge ratings for. And they found that, oh, that's how we sell sponsorships.

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 twenties. 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, you know, the music video of it all. A lot of people thought it was a fad, and it kind of was. And we saw that. People were like, okay, I've seen it. I get it. It's the music video thing. And we noticed now that we're getting ratings, we noticed, like, giant fluctuations in our ratings, right? Because if you didn't like the Cindy Lauper video that came after the Duranderan video, maybe you changed the channel. And so Bob Pittman decided we needed to make half hour shows.

Why?

To keep people around longer, so that they had a reason to stay for a full half hour versus, you know, showing videos and maybe not liking everyone. And we didn't call it engagement back then, but that's what we were doing. We were trying to keep people engaged longer.

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 amok 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. We didn't have a lot of money. You know, you would think of an idea on a Monday, you would figure out how to get it on the air by Friday, you know, get a bunch of people. We went up to a hotel room, had a bunch of junk food in the middle of the floor, and we sat there for 5 hours and literally came up with remote control.

Kenny wasn't like the other kids.

Remote control tv mattered, nothing else.

Did you?

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 latch key kid. It was a television game show about television. And game shows wasn't exactly music focused, but it captured the spirit of the mid 1980s.

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, okay, well, any program we make has to be music related, right? Or then it's not MTD. But then we landed on this goofy phrase, if you like, go back and read old newspaper articles or magazine articles where we're interviewed. You'll hear us executives talk a lot about the. The MTV attitude. So we would say, it's a game show, but it's got the MTV attitude. And, you know, our idea was to do a sort of a game show in the spirit of David Letterman's late night show, which was at the time, the single coolest thing on television.

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 12:30 a.m. It was influential. The spirit of 1986 was irony. Everything kind of had air quotes around it. The hot show was ABC's moonlighting, where Bruce Willis and Cybill shepherd would solve crimes and then literally wink to the camera. Rolling Stone magazine's hot word for 1986 was swell, a popular word from the 1950s re appropriated for the eighties, meant to be said with a roll of the eyes. Here again is future comedy writer and podcaster Tom sharply.

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 kind of, it's starting to, like, 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. It was just saying, like, who cares who wins? We're funny. That's what matters. The prizes are a distant second to us having a good time.

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, you know, there was, like, a faction of people like, this is a mistake. We should not be doing this. This is not about music. And they believe that the M stood for music. And if it wasn't about music, it shouldn't be on MTV. And so it's controversial not only to the audience, but internally as well. But, you know, once it started to work, and started to work pretty quickly, people began to get over it for the most part, 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.

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In 1987, MTV is still mostly playing music videos. The pop of 1984 has slowly given way to pop metal, white snake, 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 its a great show, and not just because its speaking so directly to the tv damaged, ironic Latchkey kids of Generation X, but because it is, unlike spring break or even amuck in America, a show. Rob Tannenbaum explains why in the television and media universe of the eighties, that.

Makes such a big difference, 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. But MTV basically just did the same thing all day, every day. So there was nothing for TV Guide to guide its millions of subscribers to MTV.

In TV Guide, all it said was music videos 06:00 a.m. Music videos 08:00 a.m. Music videos 10:00 a.m. Music videos why would someone advertise at 08:00 a.m. 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. Think about remote control. How much did that set cost? $500. It looked like Fred Sanford's backyard. And these shows worked. They got ratings. People loved them. The other bonus was now we don't have to deal with the record companies. Now they're not going to be on our ass about how, you know, if we don't give you our product, you have nothing to play. Well, now we do. So they were less reliant on not only the record companies, they were less reliant on the release cycles of major artists.

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. So that's what I did. Then I went back to the offices on Broadway, and the guys looked at me and they said, well, we watched it from here, and would you like the gig? It was like that. And I remember calling my dad and just going, dad, they want me to move to New York to do this tv show here. And he was just like, go for it. I think he was happy to get me out of the house, actually, a.

Little bit after Julie Brown joined the fold, a young man happened upon an open call for VJ's on his college campus. His name was Kevin Seale, 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 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, make the world my plaything.

The second of Doug Herzog's three assignments from Bob Pitman 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 and b charts for you to dance to it. It crossed into rock as well, which was. Was so much fun.

Club MTV and downtown Julie Brown were pure enthusiasm. Kevin Seale 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. Most of the music that we played was not quite to my taste. And I felt that the mission of the company was to make young people conform their taste to what large companies wanted to make available. And so I felt that a certain amount of resistance was not required, but.

Could be welcome for the second wave of MTV. VJ's 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. 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 04:00 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. Yes, some of us would definitely be in last night's clothes when we went to work.

Kevin Seal, 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 CB's studios where they did the evening news. And every now and then I'd see Dan rather walking down the street. And I never had the urge to shout, hey, CB's at Dan Rather. The relationship that people have with the people they see on tv, I think their feelings are based in the way that they can freely stare at you and you're looking back the whole time. And I think it just feels like an intimate relationship when you do this.

So the new generation of VJ's are mostly having fun. But because the new generation of MTV shows are starting to move the network away from being a 24 hours 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. In 1986, the MTV brand is expanding in all directions. Remote control is a hit. Club MTV is a hit. The purists, the fans of the strictly music video MTV of the first few years, are complaining. But the ratings are stronger than ever. And the new shows are attracting slightly different sub demographics of the young tv audience. Like on Sunday nights, starting in 1986, the network starts reaching out to the alternative music. Kid, you're entering a top 40 free zone with your visual visa to the state of the art. And some of the 120 minutes wasn't quite sure what it wanted to be at the start. Early episodes featured fine young cannibals, erasure, and a young singer who, like her superstar big brother MTV, was initially reluctant to support Janet Jackson.

But within a few months, the show began to find its voice. It featured artists who were big on what the industry was still calling the college music charts. Rem, Depeche Mode, husker do, the Smiths. 120 minutes also cycled through a few new hosts, including Kevin Seale.

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 sharply.

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 to find a moment in what we would soon be calling alternative music, a genre of music that would blow up and disrupt 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. They knew what they were going to do on Saturday night. And I think that was good. That was good. Certainly it was good monetarily for MTV.

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 Tannenbaum 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 and 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. No, Ted, that's not our format. Hip hop show, hip hop show. They say, all right, fine, shut up already. Here's, you know, I don't know what. They gave them $50,000. It was a small amount of money. Put together a pilot episode of this stupid show that isn't going to work. When they got the show, they put it on at two in the morning. They were burying the show. You're debuting a show, you don't put it on at two in the morning. And it's the Michael Jackson story again. Ratings went through the roof. The audience had proved them wrong. For the second time, MTV was saying, our viewers don't want to see Michael Jackson. Our viewers don't want to see run DMC. And the viewers said, no, we absolutely do. Come on, give us more.

I'm Dz.

Jazzy Jeff. Hey, yo, I'm the prince and I'm ready. Roxy. Hold up. Bust this. We want to let everybody, 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 05:00 p.m. Time slot, after school, before dinner. It was a daily ritual for me my freshman year of college. We would all pack into my friend Marty's dorm room. Cause he had pirated cable from the dorm lounge. Yo. MTV raps went a little deeper than just run DMC and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh princess. It brought De La Soul and cool Modi and MC lite to the MTV audience. It helped bring hip hop into the mainstream. In 1989, when the Grammys announced that there would be a best rap performance award. And that that award would not be given out in the main televised broadcast. The nominees boycotted the ceremony. And instead they went to yo. MTV raps. Welcome to Yo. MTV raps. This is Fab five Freddy with Grammy nominees Salt and Pepper. Tell everybody why you are here partying with us and not at the Grammys.

Well, really, just because we paid our dues and got our nomination just like everybody else. 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. And on a Sunday night, just before 120 minutes. The network tried out a british comedy show that was filthy and surrealistic and would just stop in the middle of an episode and have a musical guest playing on the set. The young ones. Once in every lifetime like this. Here's comedian Tom Sharply.

I loved it.

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 to the station music.

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 twelve 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, 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. According to host Rob Dyrdek, that series order is for 23 52 new episodes.

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. It was exciting to watch. But it would come later, sort of the criticism that you'd hear it more and more. I'm speaking now as a guy who, when MTV came out with a book, like right around 2000, I interviewed the m in MTV. It was just like, how you doing? It's like, well, sometimes it's tough. I don't know. Sometimes I feel a little neglected, you know? You should talk to the E in ESPN. He's having a rough time, too.

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. Who killed the video star? The story of MTV is written and narrated by me, Dave Holmes. Executive produced by Jenna Weiss Berman, Dave Holmes, Jim Weber, and Chris Cowan. Our story editor is Matty Sprung Kaiser. Produced by Lloyd Lockridge, Ian Mont and Terrence Malango. Edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support by Javier Cruces. Special thanks to JD Crowley, Maura Curran, Leah Reese, Dennis Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Allison Jeffrey, and Hilary Schuff. Who killed the video star? The story of MTV is an odyssey original.

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