MTV Killed the Video Star

I am no longer a part of MTV’s continually shrinking target audience. I am neither 15-and a-half years old, nor am I a brain damaged monkey. Thus, I do not enjoy their programming.

When people talk about things they used to like or used to be a part of, they are prone to remember things fondly, even if it wasn’t always rainbows and kittens; likewise, I seem to remember MTV providing me with the entertainment I wanted in the six scant months between late puberty and my driver’s license. Before that I was too young to understand it, and after that I was too old to care about it.

And now, as I observe from the sideline, occasionally flipping past the channel, or stopping and yelling, “Damn! Who’s this hottie?” I’ve noticed that MTV has gone completely down the crapper.

But it’s not just my old age that has changed the quality of the channel. The powers that be have taken every opportunity to poop on the music that was once their backbone and bury it in the dirt of MTV original programming.

I could rant all day about the mind blowing idiocy of all their shows, but I’ll just drop one example for now:

I was flipping through channels the other day and I stopped on MTV; not because I wanted to, but because I dropped the remote. As I scurried out of my chair and reached into the dusty darkness beneath, into which the remote had bounced, I was subjected to a show called, “Next.” In “Next,” beautiful women who were emotionally hollow inside (essentially, blank human billboards for name brand clothing and cell phones), gathered together and began a competition to win the affection of one man, let’s call him, “Mr. Douchebag.” Mr. Douchebag himself was just as emotionally hollow as the women who followed him around, he wore unbuttoned designer clothes, construction-grade hair gel, and so much cologne that I could smell it through the television. To make matters worse, Mr. Douchebag was given the ability to decide that he wasn’t having fun trying to get into the pants of one girl, dismiss her, and replace her almost instantly with another girl who may not have buckled her belt so tightly.

In the time it took me to find the remote, dust it off, shove the batteries back in, and change the channel, he had dismissed one woman because of her choice in seafood, and one woman before they even spoke to each other.

This man, who was burning through the women like rolling paper, did not strike me as a man who had trouble finding a date. He did, however, strike me as a man who had trouble avoiding sexually transmitted diseases. I had no sympathy for him, or the breast-zombies following behind him.

Watching as much of the show as I did made me angry and nauseous. Unfortunately, that is the most favorable thing I can say about a show I’ve seen on MTV in the past six years.