MTV has been all over those “reality” shows and candidate shows since at least the late 90s though.
Hey, I’m Bam Magera and this is Jackass Roomraiders where Xibit builds flat screens into your entire house for no reason after we had a hot girl go through all your embarrassing shit while you waited in a car of some kind outside watching together with your adversaries who go absolutely apeshit about anything that happens, also UV sperm detection light.
NEXTYep. 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.
I vaguely remember MuchMusic becoming Fuse at some point
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.
Watching headbanger’s ball when I got out of work in 06/07 is a fond memory.
I used to record Heabangers Ball and 120 Minutes and edit together my own vhs mix tapes. About 15 years earlier )-;
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.
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Young people don’t tend to have cable.
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imagine the scandal of playing Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”
Is it because she kisses a black guy? It seems like a very non problematic music video, I don’t get the scandal.
Enshittification IRL
Enshitification is just a symptom of capitalism. It’s been happening in real life forever.
The only thing new about it is the name.
Isn’t the weather channel just mostly ads now?
Yeah I remember when the cable tv folks pitched cable like there wouldn’t be ads, vs. public airways that had to be ad-supported because there wasn’t any subscription for it. When they turned cable into ad wasteland I felt that like the fucking betrayal it was
Trash reality shows that feature clouds.
Always has been.
Youtube in has done a remarkably good job carrying the torch of high quality documentaries and educational content beyond the realm of traditional media. Science, art, technology, history. It’s all there, and much of it meets or exceeds the quality of anything the old guard of cable TV channels ever managed to produce.
I’m actually only now realizing that some of the most established channels have been reaching a wide audience with consistent and high quality content for the better part of a decade, and yet I can’t think of any who have successfully broken into more “traditional” media such as television or or even streaming services. That seems exceptionally strange to me. I mean, last month there were headlines about Netflix giving $55 million to an unproven director who proceeded to blow it all on expensive cars instead of filming the show he was hired to make. Who decides to hire that guy over any number of youtube creators who have spent the last ten years cranking out a short video a week along with occasional longer form projects, all with a small crew on a shoestring budget. I can imagine three possible reasons for this. No idea which one(s) could be the real reason, or if there’s something else entirely going on.
- Hollywood1 is so insular that they don’t even realize these people exist.
- Hollywood is so stuck in its ways that they refuse to believe these people could be successful running a larger production.
- Offers have been made, but those offers have been so restrictive that any number of youtubers have turned them down despite, one would assume, a large amount of money being on the table if they go along with it.
That last one in particular seems unlikely, but I do recall that the popular Primitive Technology channel went quiet for a year or more before abruptly coming back to life. Rumors swirled that he had been hired to turn the concept into a TV show, but the production company kept trying to change things and he eventually gave up and went back to doing it his way on youtube.
1 used here as shorthand for the more corporate and structured entertainment industry at large.
I vote for the insular, navel gazing/ narcissistic reason.
Nickelodeon gave Fred their own TV show+movie and YouTube bankrolled some popular creators to make a few YouTube red originals, that’s about as far as I can think of
David Zaslav is the common denominator across all these examples, and now he’s in charge of Warner Bros…
Tuning to G4 and there’s a 90% chance it’s either COPS or Cheaters
Weather channel has trash shows about surviving weather events
Yeah I get that the weather channel is the punch line here but let’s not act like it hasn’t also gone to shit
Apparently, folks don’t realize that even The Weather Channel has already dabbled in trash reality TV.
Some famous enough to have their own Wiki pages:
Big list (pay attention to the ones marked “long form”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programs_broadcast_by_The_Weather_Channel
I certainly wasn’t. I guess the enshittification is complete.
Nope, you neglected the worst offender… SciFi, that they renamed to SyFy (and I pronounce “siffy” or “siffylis” now) that used to have good science fiction but decided WWE and ghost hunting was the way to go.
I still haven’t forgiven them for cancelling MST3K after only 3 seasons.
They went steaming: https://www.twitch.tv/mst3k?sr=a
I know, but the rest of the history of the show is kind of bleak. They had two Netflix seasons before Netflix shitcanned them, then crowdfunded a successful (and terrific IMO) 13th season. This year, they had another crowdfunder, but they did it outside of Kickstarter and put minimal effort in, so it failed. I have no idea if the show will continue at this point. There is Rifftrax and The Mads, but they aren’t really the same. I need my puppets at the bottom of the screen!
Or Dark Matter!
The full list of good shows they cancelled or cut off early is long and painful to read.
How is there possibly this much market for this shit?
It happened during the 08 writers strike. Reality Tv is cheap to produce and requires minimal writing.
Most people don’t have standards.
I have a feeling it has more to do with low production cost than anything else sadly :/
milleNNialS Are kiLLiNg cAblE
No doubt that’s the main thing but how are there enough people to watch all these channels of garbage?
It’s so cheap to produce that it doesn’t need as many people watching it to be deemed profitable. And many people watching it probably just let it run in the background because it doesn’t need any close attention. Basically like soaps, but soaps need writers so are more expensive.
Yeah, that’s my brother. Every time I visit, he seems to have some new reality show he watches. Somehow he’s always surprised I’ve never heard of I t and am not interested in it.
It’s always on in the background and no one pays attention unless the ice starts cracking under the truck, or the survivalist misses his airdrop, or some manufactured drama hit the fishing boat or whatever. He’s a pretty active guy, so I’ll bet most of the time these reality shows are going, there’s no one even in the room
Maybe no one is actually watching, the TV ratings system is crooked somehow, and TV advertisers are getting screwed?
The Gold Diggers and Gold-Diggers caught me off guard, that’s funny.
The weather is pretty trash, but it’s not the weather channel’s fault :/
And when they’re not showing weather reports, they’re showing off dope tornadoes and hurricanes and shit.
So disappointed to hear about what happened to Discovery channel. Though their Youtube channel is still amazing!
✨️enshitification✨️
This is the best use of this emoji, ever.
Gen alpha: What are “TV channels?”