Executive Decision: Programming chief Brian Graden, at right, meets with production-management director Eugene Caldwell.   (Photo: Alex Tehrani)

By the time Graden came aboard, the network was willing to try anything to get the viewers back. MTV needed a jolt, if not a defibrillator, and Graden brought with him impeccable fuck-the-Establishment credentials.

Graden had never really wanted to play the corporate game. In order to satisfy some sense he had of what a grown-up should do, he entered Harvard Business School in 1987 and earned an M.B.A. But he really couldn’t sustain the act. “At Harvard, they take the recruiting process very seriously. They tell you how you’re supposed to dress, how you’re supposed to act. One day, I ended up at Drexel, Burnham, Lambert. It was like my twentieth interview in a row, and this power player in a suit across the desk says to me, with clenched teeth, ‘Why is it you want to take my job away from me someday?’ I just had one of those weird epiphany moments. I looked at him and said, ‘I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than being you.’ It just popped out of my mouth.”

Already about $100,000 in debt, Graden figured it couldn’t get much worse, so he abandoned a future in banking to try an assistant job at Fox Television. Fortunately, the boss he was fetching coffee for also happened to be cable’s maverick-genius-of-the- moment, Stephen Chao, who was pioneering reality TV with Cops and America's Most Wanted, shows that both repelled and fascinated. As those programs took off, Graden was right there, learning firsthand that a little risk can go a very long way.

In 1993, he created an experimental production arm of Fox called Foxlab. While there, he met two guys from the University of Colorado who were trying to con some TV dupe into financing a feature-length film called Cannibal: The Musical. Graden couldn’t do anything with Cannibal, but he was interested in Matt Stone and Trey Parker, spending a year trying to develop projects and finally handing them a $2,000 check with no strings attached to make a video Christmas card featuring a cast of crudely animated cutouts from a small Colorado town. The Spirit of Christmas, featuring a battle between Santa and Jesus, was soon the talk of Hollywood, and everyone wanted Stone and Parker, including Fox and MTV.

Comedy Central finally roped in the duo with a $1.5 million offer, and Graden followed, serving as executive producer on South Park. “One of my formative experiences was when I did the focus group for South Park,” Graden says. “I got a 11⁄2 out of 10 with females. Three of them cried. Matt and Trey and I were sitting there going, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to move on to something else.’ But Comedy Central put the show on television anyway, simply because it was so not-what-they-had-seen-before.” Having missed out on Stone and Parker, MTV wasn’t going to miss out on Graden. They offered him a chance to reinvigorate the most-recognized brand among television’s most-sought-after demographic. Besides, Toffler and McGrath made it clear that MTV was Graden’s kind of place. They didn’t mind a flop, so long as it made a loud enough thud.

“I’m so blessed at MTV, because we can put anything we want to on television,” Graden says. “I’ve never even shown a pilot to anyone higher up, other than for fun. Unlike the networks, we refuse to impose any time lines. We’ve had shows here that we’ve done in three months, and then there’s Jackass, where we chased Johnny Knoxville for three years, just because he couldn’t give a shit about being a TV star.”

Now even the mentor, chao himself, who recently left his post as president of USA Cable, sounds envious of Graden’s freedom at MTV. “It’s like with Jackass,” Chao says. “Spike [Jonze] and P.J. [Knoxville] are friends of mine, and they came to me when I was at USA. They walked into my office carrying this cattle prod, and they were zapping me with it, then they put on this tape of Johnny shooting himself and all that. Like everyone else, I laughed out loud. But on the other hand, it simply wasn’t something that I was ever going to be able to put on a general-entertainment network.”

In Graden’s first six months, ratings skyrocketed. An early Graden salvo was Celebrity Deathmatch, a Claymation short based on a gross-out animated short film submitted by an unknown NYU graduate and aspiring filmmaker named Eric Fogel. MTV not only decided to give Fogel a shot but gave him that shot going head-to-head against the Super Bowl’s halftime show. You can’t fail much bigger than that, but the next day, just about anyone under 30—that is, anyone who mattered—was as likely to be talking about RuPaul–vs.–Pamela Anderson as Elway-vs.-Favre.

These days, Graden seems to have the golden touch. Of the twenty shows launched this summer, he’s had a 100 percent success rate. In the third quarter of 2002, prime-time ratings were up 26 percent among the core 12–34 demographic. Through October, this year has been the highest rated in network history.

Raised in rural illinois, Brian Graden can still, when it’s useful, tap into a towheaded eagerness, like a farmboy out of a Mickey Rooney teen movie. And growing up, he showed more than a little of that hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-show excitement. In his late teens, Graden traveled throughout the Midwest by van, cranking out Loverboy covers on keyboards for a band called the Ozones. “I had such a limited worldview because I grew up in a small town, so to me, we were quite successful,” he says proudly. “We could pay for our PA equipment and beer. At that stage in life, that’s all you really care about.”

Graden tries to stay in touch with the gee-whiz guy he once was, in part by getting away from Media Bigs he hobnobs with and out of the office every day by 4 p.m. “Any shows that I watch, I watch almost exclusively at home, on my own television, with all the distractions I would have in real life. I need to do that in order to leave one head and enter another.”

This open, middle-American side of him might help explain shows like this summer’s smash Sorority, which despite its titillating title is all about the very real concerns of young pledges who are anything but nubile. In September, MTV launched FM Nation, an updated, reality riff on American Graffiti, where restless kids out in Springsteenville cruise the strip on Saturday nights and unload about their frustrations.

With Graden, ideas download at FireWire speed, sometimes too quickly even for him. “Sometimes I’ll call my voice mail in the middle of the day to leave myself a message,” he says, laughing, “and by the time I get home and play it, I have no idea what I’m saying.”

“I’m a voracious consumer of culture, to the extent I drive my boyfriend nuts,” he adds. “There will be a stack of ten new CDs on my table, and then I have to TiVo everything, and I read at least 30 magazines cover to cover every month. I just can’t stop.” He pauses to consider. “But I don’t read a single book anymore, because it would require more than 30 seconds of my time.

“When I was growing up, we were music lovers, and we would rush home after school and watch MTV for like nine hours a day,” he says, smiling over the exaggeration. “I really want MTV to belong to this generation the way it belonged to mine.”

Under van toffler, the network has taken up that goal quite l iterally.