Every month, ESPN Research sends out an e-mail to producer types that summarizes the month in ratings on the ESPN Networks and gives a glimpse at what has rated well on cable as a whole. (Pretty boring way to start the column, I know — stay with me.) I don’t normally pay much attention to the finer details of this missive, but something jumped out at me this week when I looked at the top 10 shows on ad-supported cable in March … WHOA, PEOPLE LOVE THEM SOME WEIRDO HISTORY CHANNEL REALITY TV:
1. Pawn Stars
2. Jersey Shore
3. Pawn Stars
4. American Pickers
5. Jersey Shore
6. Jersey Shore
7. Pawn Stars
8. Swamp People
9. Swamp People
10. Pawn Stars
Jersey Shore I get, but Pawn Stars? American Pickers? Fucking Swamp People?
On the heels of a grueling finale on MTV’s The Challenge, it felt like time to put the Johnny Bananas bat signal up for a podcast. Always a fantastic guest, here are some takeaways from my half-hour with Bananas:
The final challenge is harder than you think it is;
Filming the show is more boring than you think it is;
Robin is crazier than you think she is;
He parties just as much as you think he does.
As if that weren’t enough, at the end of the pod he passed the mic to fellow Challenge legend CT. Enjoy.
In my college years I was a frequent viewer of MTV. Oh, I knew it was stupid, but it was harmless. I could easily get sucked into their youthful programming. I watched Real World like it was my job when I was in college — I loved that shit so much I actually made a VHS tape and sent in with the hopes of being a cast member on one of their seasons. I never got a callback, more than likely because Real World producers weren't looking to cast a back-lit 20-year-old white girl from Texas whose strongest quality was avoiding confrontations. I indulged in TRL (the Carson Daly years). I watched Road Rules. Spring Break crap. Cribs. Pimp My Ride. MTV was my guilty pleasure. As I got older, I backed off of MTV shows and began watching more sophisticated programming like To Catch a Predator and Family Guy. But my youthfulness will occasional stop by to say "hi" to MTV from time to time while flipping through the channels.
Reality TV is in trouble. The Situation is in rehab, America’s alcoholism mascot Snooki is pregnant, and there are only two shows left on the air worthy of inclusion in the GRTFL. With this in mind, I’ve decided to change it up this week and take you with me on my deep dive into the creepy/scary triple-digit section of your channel guide in search of new shows to celebrate in future columns. I spent the whole week sifting through endless hours of hoarding, cooking, rehabbing, building, destroying, partying, arguing, driving, swamping, dancing, parenting, storing, eating, puking, and RuPauling in an attempt at finding a digital nugget of reality TV gold. To be honest, I enjoyed the shit out of it. It was so exhilarating/depressing, I decided that every week I will go in on at least one new show and share with you my thoughts on it.
(Okay, fine, I probably won’t do this every week because I’m lazy and will forget that I even wrote this. I apologize in advance.)
Even if it goes on forever and is never any damn good again, it will be the Zippo flame with which I burn my palm, G. Gordon Liddy-style, to prove my devotion to the medium of reality television. I’m even going to watch the reunion show that airs on MTV tonight, even though, if past reunions are anything to go by, this one will yo-yo tonally between mildly contentious and gun-to-the-head stilted and suck away an hour of my life without teaching me anything. I don’t care. I’ll watch it, and I’ll be back for Season 6, which begins filming in Seaside this summer, despite abundant evidence that there’s not enough Ron-Ron Juice left in the tank to get this vehicle around the block one more time. I have made a commitment. I want to see what happens to these people, even if what happens to them is nothing. Which I guess means I just like looking at them on a screen, and that there is no objective difference between me and Pauly D’s stalker, except physical distance and the fact that I don’t carry a sparkly bag.
Buckle up, GRTFLers, next week we are adding The Challenge: Battle of the Exes to the fray. What does that mean? That means that you should write a few of your dumbest friends, make a wager, and hold yourself a draft. What was that? No chance? I guess that’s cool, too. Next Wednesday, in anticipation of the premiere, we will be revealing The Challenge-specific rules, our draft results, and a little extra something-something that methinks will make The Challenge fans happy. Or confuse them. Most likely both. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: There was plenty of weird this week on Jersey Shore and The Bachelor to tide us over until next week when The Challenge’s alchopsychoholics come marching in:
Welcome to Season 2 of the Grantland Reality Television Fantasy League. Seems like just yesterday I called Grantland Editor Lane Brown before the site launched and explained to him what a terrible idea the GRTFL was and begged him not to run it. He ran it. He is no longer with Grantland. Those may or may not be mutually exclusive events.
My first memory of reality television dates back to the early 90's when MTV first brought us The Real World. The true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work together and have their lives taped, to find out what happens, when people stop being polite and start getting real.
Most people around my age (I'm 33) watched at least one season of The Real World. It was totally intriguing. There were drunken fights, sex between roommates, people of different upbringings and sexual orientations all thrown together in some incredibly nice house that they would eventually fuck up beyond recognition. It got to the point where I couldn't wait to see how bad these sloppy kids would jack these tricked out houses up. Dishes piled in the sink, dirty sheets, and filthy bathrooms. It was a train wreck and I couldn't get enough.
Demi Moore has joined the biopic Lovelace as Gloria Steinem, whose involvement in the story came through a profile she wrote of Linda Lovelace for Ms. describing how the porn actress was forced into shooting the infamous Deep Throat. Also newly onboard are Adam Brody, as Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems, and Eric Roberts, as lie-detector expert Nat Laurendi. Wait, hold up, sorry: Seth Cohen is playing a porn star? Probably should have led with that information. Grade: B [HR]
For a generation, he was the iconic anchor of MTV News; now the incomparable rock and roll journalist and critic Kurt Loder reviews movies. In our conversation, Kurt shares candid tales of his encounters with Axl Rose, Madonna, Kurt Cobain, the Ramones, and more of rock’s hardest-living legends while looking back at the years we shared as colleagues on MTV and before that, at Rolling Stone. When the talk turns to film, Kurt discusses his kickass new book of reviews, The Good, the Bad and the God-Awful and reveals his horror-flick-enriched childhood, his fascination with the work of Nicolas Cage, and the one movie that — can it be? — still makes him cry.
Ya know, I gotta say — and I don't want to sound petty here at all — but it's really nice to see how some people can keep up their looks after all these years. With these '90s nostalgia reunion things you usually take what you can get: The guys are balding or they're trying to cover up their guts, or they want to rock but they really just suck. It's depressing. But Beavis and Butt-Head, man, they don't seem to have aged a second since 1997 — same skin, same socks, same couch, same everything (I thought they'd auctioned off the couch at Sotheby's, but guess not). Anyway, whatever you're doing, boys, bottle it. And pass a swig over my way; I'm looking a little Chandler Bing circa 2022 these days.
In stores this week is I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum's excellent new oral history on the golden age of Music Television. In the book, Billy Squier's career-killing "Rock Me Tonite" clip is cited as the worst video of all time. Below, Tannenbaum explains why, and the Grantland staff remembers 10 other videos that were almost as bad.
Billy Squier, "Rock Me Tonite"
Rob Tannenbaum: “I Want My MTV includes interviews with more than 400 people, and no two agreed on the best music video of all time. The options are too disparate: Do you prefer the physical comedy of “Hot For Teacher,” the unknowable symbolism of “Let’s Dance,” the dynamic grace of “Beat It,” or the demented junior-year-abroad absurdity of ”Total Eclipse of the Heart”? But when we asked about the worst music video, there was one unanimous answer: Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonite.”
Squier’s 1984 video gets an entire chapter in I Want My MTV because it’s an MBA case study in How To Make A Bad Artistic Decision. When Squier’s manager saw the video, he told us, “I was speechless.” When Squier’s label saw it, an executive said, “The immediate consensus was that Billy’s performance was disturbingly effeminate.” Squier, who sat in my living room for three hours to recount the event in detail, said, “When I saw the video, my jaw dropped. It was diabolical.” Squier also said the video snuffed out his career, after two huge-selling albums. “How can a four-minute video do that? OK, it sucked. So?”
Jersey Shore needs to evolve or it will die. Sure, ratings are the highest they've ever been, and MTV and the cast are printing money, but to turn this short con into a long con, adjustments must be made. Ask Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, or UGG boots — when the flashbulbs are firing the brightest, the praise is the loudest, and the money is coming in the money-coming-iniest, you're in the most danger. You get complacent and believe in your own inflated value so much that you don’t anticipate the inevitable cultural recoil that will soon send you into irrelevancy, bankruptcy, or worse, Celebrity Apprentice. But don’t get bummed out, MTV Suits, Jersey Shore fans, or Snooki and the rest of the guido gang. We have six suggestions that will extend your stay in the zeitgeist and all the way at the bottom and in the bottom-right quadrant of the New York magazine Approval Matrix. OK, maybe the bottom-left quadrant. But New York readers aren’t paying your bills anyway. The people paying your bills aren’t exactly “readers.”
On the occasion of tonight's Season 4 finale, here are our six suggestions for how to fix the show, listed in order from “OK, I could see that” to “man, they must do a lot of peyote at the Grantland office.”
Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks have their oral history I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution coming later this month — and since the entire Grantland staff is obsessed with the book, we asked Chuck Klosterman to visit with them to talk about the history of the music video giant. As a bonus, Craig agreed to answer a few idiotic questions from us below.
1. What's the most important video that MTV ever aired?
You could make the case for either of two Michael Jackson videos: "Billie Jean" or "Thriller," both from 1983. From its launch, MTV staunchly followed the programming strictures of a rock (read: white) radio station. They'd aired a few videos by black artists before "Billie Jean," but only barely — outlier rock artists such as Musical Youth, Eddy Grant and the Bus Boys. Michael was the first "urban" artist MTV ever played, and, according to execs at his label, CBS Records, MTV did so only under severe duress. Of course, "Billie Jean" was a runaway hit, followed by an ever bigger hit — "Beat It" — followed by the biggest video hit of all time, "Thriller," which MTV literally played every hour on the hour and changed the course of the network's history and the history of music video.
With Tyler the Creator on his best, most grateful behavior at Sunday’s VMAs, the lane was wide open for someone to step in and wreak havoc. Nathan Williams and Steve Pope, of sunny San Diego punk act Wavves, were game. The two kept a running Twitter log of their drug-fueled mischief (example: “I guess I’m takin this acid #staytuned #vmasmeltdown”), which ended with Pope getting the boot from the Nokia Theatre. So how, exactly, do you get kicked out of the VMAs?
