Total Control: TRL's Quddus and pop-star-of-the-moment Justin Timberlake go over the script for the day's show.   (Photo: Alex Tehrani)

“As I was moving up through the ranks here, I started to notice that we were lacking a lot of great ideas,” Toffler says, poking at an egg-white omelette one rainy morning at the Paramount Hotel in Times Square. “My challenge was to figure out a way to marshal our resources, to take what our audience was telling us and to translate that into television. They were rejecting these glossy, expensive videos. What the audience was loudly saying was that they wanted to be empowered. They wanted to see themselves on MTV.”

In response, MTV served up the hit Taildaters, where two regular-kid strangers go on a blind date and have their seduction moves graded by their friends, who are watching via remote video. This summer, the network aired Crashing, where real stars camped out overnight, Almost Famous–like, at the home of regular-kid fans. “If it’s not terribly expensive, you can do enough shows where ultimately, something will stick and will succeed,” Toffler says.

Unlike Graden, or just about any other male in a management capacity at MTV, Toffler doesn’t invite the term boyish. Instead, he falls somewhere in a slightly older range—guyish, dudish?

It fits Toffler’s management style, which is rather unusual, at least for a network chief. He wrings the best out of people because they’re absolutely desperate for him to like them. In manner, Toffler’s like the cool older brother who’ll run interference for you when Dad is really pissed.

“I was on the way back from New Orleans last winter. It was my first gig for MTV, Mardi Gras,” says Quddus (pronounced koo-doos, the name means “man of peace” in Persian). Quddus is MTV’s Canadian-born V.J.-of-the-moment, thanks to his dreamy spoken-word delivery and his front-man looks—imagine a young Lenny Kravitz who’s overdosed on Keats. “I find my seat on the plane, and the guy next to me, it turns out, works for MTV, too. I don’t know anyone at this point, but this guy was so down-to-earth, so chill. We talked for three straight hours. I’m like, ‘I don’t know what he does, but he’s all right.’ After we land, I’m walking to get my bags and I’m telling our station manager how I was talking to this guy ‘Van’ who apparently works at MTV, too. Joey’s like, ‘That’s our boss, man. He’s the guy who signs our checks.’ ”

“Van is always saying, ‘Give me something that makes me go, ‘What the fuck?’ ” says Kevin Mackall, the head producer of MTV’s famous promotional spots, who today wears an orange surfer T and a Korn-roadie-like death mullet whose tail dangles halfway down his broad back. “And the scary thing is, I know exactly what he means.”

In Toffler’s mind, MTV can survive only as a laboratory for talent, not as a pantheon. “Anything can come in the door,” Toffler says. “It doesn’t have to come from a given person or division. Ultimately, if enough of us believe in it, we’ll just give them the money and let them do it, and put no real filter between the idea, the creator, and the execution.

& #8220;Don’t get me wrong: We fail miserably, too,” he continues. “Right now, The Osbournes is working, so there’s a halo effect around the show. Everyone’s saying, ‘Gee, aren’t you kids really smart!’ even though part of it’s just dumb luck. But we’ve also had shows like The Brothers Grunt and Aeon Flux. These are shows that, uh, didn’t really ‘resonate’ the way we’d have liked.” Toffler shrugs. “Sometimes our creators are a little too weird to connect to a human being.

“We’re so accustomed to reinventing ourselves every couple of years,” Toffler adds. “For us, it’s like, okay, we know The Osbournes isn’t going to last forever. It’s not going to be like Seinfeld to NBC on Thursday nights, I’ve got a lock for eight years. We have a lock for eighteen months. So it’s like, what else can we do that’s different from everything else on television? Our audience is fickle. They want the next thing. Here, it burns bright, it burns fast. We never get old with our audience.”

Toffler, 43, was born in Manhattan and grew up in Long Beach, Long Island, where his father owned a small women’s-clothing-manufacturing business. “I was a music-head. I just had to be around it,” Toffler says. He decided he wanted a life in music, so he took piano lessons. Then guitar lessons. “I just sucked,” he says with a shrug. “I mean, I could play. But I sucked.”

Toffler was 22 when MTV debuted. “When I first saw MTV, I said, ‘This is terrible!’ ” He recalls with a laugh. “For me, music was really about the emotional connection, how you connect to the lyrics. Putting visuals to it just ruined the experience for me. Still, I was obsessed with it. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

Toffler earned a law degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1983, then found a job in the vague proximity of music as an associate at the Park Avenue law firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays, and Handler, where he worked on deals involving Michael Jackson and the Elvis Presley estate. “But you know what I said about how I played music?” he says. “I was a worse lawyer.”

For three years, he plotted his escape, sending off pleading letters to every record label. He finally got a shot at MTV Networks, where he made himself useful as a cool head and, more important, an open mind. If MTV needed help hammering out a global-distribution deal, he’d do that. If Nickelodeon needed an actor to appear in a promo for Mr. Wizard, he’d do that.

Eventually, Toffler proved invaluable by extending the brand at the very moment that ratings were starting to dip. It was Toffler who turned popular on-air Unplugged! performances by Eric Clapton and Nirvana into top-selling CDs. By the late nineties, he had been elevated to the general-manager post, where he effectively ran the network’s day-to-day operations while McGrath focused on the big-picture matters. Toffler officially became president in 2000, after Viacom merged with CBS. He also runs MTV Films, which, stunningly for Hollywood, has turned a profit on all fourteen movies it has made—Jackass did $22.7 million on its opening weekend in October. McGrath, the network’s mother superior, still keeps the vast corner office on the twenty-fifth floor, but Toffler’s office, next door, is only slightly less vast.

As a practical matter, however, the Viacom corporate ladder seems as distant from the spirit of MTV as the days of vinyl. MTV’s internal structure is not so much a hierarchy as a loose confederation of independent creative teams, like the music team run by Tom Calderone or the news team run by Dave Sirulnick. Ideas are supposed to bubble up from below. As you wander the club-dark corridors of the twenty-third floor, it’s obvious: MTV is the teenager in the Viacom family, and its room is a mess. The individual offices are cluttered with two decades of record-industry freebies. Like installations at the Whitney Biennial, many offices will be organized around a theme, if a haphazard one. On one side, you’ll see a Madonna shrine done up in purple satin. Across the way, a Def Jam palace crammed with more hip-hop marketing paraphernalia than the inside of Russell Simmons’s brain.

Along with the overt displays of freedom from cubicle culture, one senses a familiar smugness—it’s that self-conscious, anything’s-possible brashness that supposedly vanished from the corporate landscape with the dot-coms. Everyone’s a little too young. They’re cranking the Hives on their office boom boxes a little too loud. It’s that rare corporate culture where the college interns seem to set the tone. Then again, what if they didn’t?