Want your MTV? Too bad ... it's never coming back

BYH Classic still airs 120 Minutes reaaaaally late at night...usually for four hours beginning at 2 am Monday morning and for two hours at 4 am Thursday and Sunday morning (i.e. real late night Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays). The variety sucks, as it does on all the remaining Classic music video shows, but if you're fixing for some old-school alternative videos, it's better than nothing.

 

Lone Justice. Nice get.

 

That's where the producers make the show seem fake.

I read an interview with some cast members years ago where they said what appeared on the show usually wasn't what it seemed like (shocking, I know). The show would be taping for days on end to get a 22-minute show.

The cast members said usually, they were just sitting around watching TV or just hanging out.

 

In the early/mid-90s, I was working at a small daily, and we got word the "Road Rules" was going to be shooting in a nearby farm town. Our publisher (who had some teenage kids) demanded we charge right out there and give them blanket coverage -- mainbar, sidebars, photo page, etc etc. -- because "all the kids are crazy about it, it's the future of television. Real life right in your face, etc etc."

We arrived to find the cast and producers ensconced in several motorhomes at some kind of pig farm (I forget exactly at the moment -- I think the storyline involved several cast members falling into a pile of manure). The cast and camera crews emerged and producers were handing out script pages to all the characters. Several roadie-types emerged from the trailers and immediately barked we were not to take pictures of any cast members with scripts in their hands, or quote them without a producer present.

When we hedged slightly, more big-burly bouncer-types charged out of the trailers with legal waivers/releases in their hands for us to sign, basically giving MTV complete editorial clearance over any coverage of the appearance. When we hedged on THAT, within about 5 minutes the sheriff's department arrived, insisting we either had to agree to the terms or be subject to arrest for trespassing.

No cell phones in those days (well none of us had one anyway). Asked the farm owner if we could use the phone. "MTV says no."

We drove back to the office and reported to Mr. Publisher. He said, "well the show is a smash hit on MTV, our young readers will love it, plus we don't want to get the sheriff's department pissed at us, so go ahead and sign the releases and do what they say."

At that point, I begged off: "We have a lot of local sports events to cover tonight."

It was all high school baseball/softball or some such shit, so I wrapped up the sports pages at about 11:30, about an hour before deadline. Just as I was leaving to go home, in walks this "Road Rules" producer dude with a couple of the burly bouncer types, and he walks into composing where the pages were being pasted up. Somebody handed him a blue pen. "This photo is no good, I don't think I like this quote," etc etc etc.

I said "fuck it" and walked out the door.

 

Starman, I hope that publisher is banished to some sort of hell where re-runs of Survivor and The Real World are shown to him for eternity.

And the blue pens would melt away there!

 

Technically, Starman, you were on private property (the farm), so they could have told you guys to leave, and you would have had to.

But yeah, your publisher was an idiot. I would have just had you go around and interview some of the kids around town, asking them if they had seen the cast, or anything like that, if they were going to dictate your coverage.

 

This numbnut couldn't bend over far enough for Empty Vee. See, his kids watched it, so he just assumed "all the kids watch it all the time," so this was the way to turn our borderline semi-rural paper into an avant-garde, cutting-edge, EXTREEME publication the Younger Generation would just gobble up.

So the idea of us doing any sort of story critical or even remotely skeptical of MTV was a non-starter.

I frequently opined quite loudly, never within his earshot, in the newsroom, that MTV had gone to complete shit within the previous two or three years, and nobody with half a brain, or who was any hipper than Urkel (meaning me) ever watched it anymore. That was just about the time frame when I cut my MTV viewing (largely passive, but I often left it running in the living room as background noise) from 3-4 hours a day to 3-4 hours a week, to my current 3-4 minutes a year.

 

Had a prof as an undergrad who taught a special topics in media class, the semester I took it the topic was TV criticism. Anyway, he told us that he had someone who worked on The Real World: Las Vegas in class and she told him the whole thing is scripted. All the people on the show are actors looking for a break.

 

But at least back in the early days of The Real World the scripts were better than now*!

* - I'm guessing, because the New Orleans season was the last one I watched.

 

So they murdered Pedro from San Francisco and made it look like AIDS! Brilliant!

 

Let's hope so. Too bad they couldn't have done the rest of all the casts, too.

 

I am getting some serious Deja Vu reading this thread.

Starman, you ever type that story before?