MTV has been all over those "reality" shows and candidate shows since at least the late 90s though.
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MTV invented the reality format. The first few seasons of The Real World were innovative and novel. Then the execs realized how much cheaper reality was to produce and flooded the market with garbage until it was all we had left.
MTV’s downfall started when they got rid of all the Music freaks in the C suite that liked music and hired TV producers. Then we got Remote Control. We didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the downfall of MTV. Once those TV execs realized they could make non-music content, we got The Real World. It was OVER.
Remote Control was probably the first program not about music (I remember LL Cool J quipping that they didn’t have questions about the radio) but I think it was still in the spirit of the youth culture and edginess of early MTV. But, yeah, it likely marks the time at which the execs decided they had to “innovate” new programming that strayed from the format that made people watch MTV in the first place.
That said, I don’t think they knew the monster they were unleashing when they created The Real World.
Yep. Although it still did music videos for at least a few hours a day until the 2000s. VH1 was a holdout for a longer time. Does that Canadian MuchMusic channel even exist anymore? We got that when I used to have DirecTV. It had a fun early low budget MTV feel to it which I knew was not destined to last.
It was a fun channel. My favorite memory is having the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies come in and play foosball with the VJ. They said he could request any video he wanted, so he requested Mr. T’s Commandments, which is an (I think unintentionally) hilarious video where Mr. T does a Christian rap about honoring your parents while beating people up.
All the people watch commercials, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a correlation between the kind of person that can watch stupid reality shows for hours on end and the kind of person who watches those ads and it actually translates into them spending money on the things in the ads.
Probably so. I don’t know if home shopping channels are still on the air, but there were people who watched those religiously. I remember when TV switched over to digital broadcast, there was a big to-do in the town I lived in because a bunch of people watched a low-power broadcast station that broadcast a home shopping channel 24/7 and they wouldn’t be able to watch it anymore since it couldn’t afford the upgrade.
All their good content is moved to the streaming services. why make less money being bundled on cable when you can charge people whatever for the content and make way more? At least that’s why I think the content on cable is trash at the moment
Also, A&E (Which stands for Arts & Entertainment) used to show opera, ballet and classical music concerts. Maybe it wasn’t hugely popular, but my family would watch.
Myth busters was one of the shows that signaled the end honestly.
It was a good show but it was a signal that pure educational television no longer worked. Myth Busters was a quasi intellectual show but it rarely followed any scientific method other than “we tried it this way and will extrapolate all results from that”
Great show, lots of entertainment but it was definitely part of the “we need to be flashier and shinier and louder”
Plus all the filler. I love the Streamlined Mythbusters project, but it’s absurd how short some episodes get when cut down. Iirc there was one that was cut down to 11 minutes of actual content.
cable is still the cash cow for companies that own content, have networks, and streaming services (comcast, disney, etc), who cannot apparently make a profit off their streaming services. imagine that, selling your content on the open market made more money than locking it all behind your own paywall.
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