Television

MTV's Real World

In the Pink: The MTV offices look anything but corporate.

Toffler himself doesn’t feel all that removed from the demographic, even at 43.

“Even though I make bad TV and bad movies now, I still need to be around music. There’s nothing like it,” he explains. “I get more free CDs now than I’ve ever gotten in my life, and I still buy more than I ever have, because I don’t get a lot of the stuff on the independent labels, or the imports. At the rehearsals of our shows, I’ll be in the front row. It’s just cool. As jaded and twisted as I am as ‘an executive’ now, to be able to do that stuff, well, that definitely beats looking at budgets.”

W hich brings up a thorny old question. Digital cable may allow for MTV2, for MTVS in Spanish, for an MTV specifically for college kids, for MTV synched with wireless telephones. But everyone’s still going to ask: “Who took the M out of MTV?”

Tom Calderone has grown weary of the question. “The thing I always hear from MTV viewers my age is, ‘Where’s 120 Minutes?’ ” says the 38-year-old Calderone, whose 27-member division develops all the music- and talent-related programming under Graden. “You know what? We could have done it, a new 120—just two hours of videos. You would be happy, I would be happy, but no one would have watched it.”

In place of videos, Graden has encouraged more long-form programming. This fall, MTV debuted artist-LAUNCH, a show that follows an act like Limp Bizkit or Justin Timberlake through the entire process of putting out an album, from the tuning-up in the recording studio to the first peek at the SoundScan numbers.

“So Making the Video becomes the new video franchise, TRL the place for pop videos, and shows like Cribs and FANatic get at the traditional celebrity interview in different ways,” Graden says. “Once that’s established, you can throw a Tom Green in the mix and it’s just fine, because it doesn’t overshadow your identity.”

G raden seems strangely energized, even though the chat is turning rather gloomy.

& "It's an utter anomaly that our ratings at MTV kept going up,” he snorts. “That’s going to end at some point, because fragmentation means that there are going to be 400 channels, not 50. On top of that, I can safely say there were no real competitors for our audience five years ago. Now the list is probably ten strong, people like the WB, people who have a material piece of our audience. If you just look at the pie, the slices will have to get smaller, even if you’re successful. At some point, it’s mathematically impossible to remain where we are.”

And the only defense against the inevitable? Disposability. It’s all disposable—the stars, the shows, and especially the viewers. It has to be. If everything doesn’t turn over continually, colorfully, even violently, there might not be any MTV. And there are no exceptions.

“I could be contrarian and say The Osbournes might be done already,” Graden says flatly. “I hope it’s a big hit. But their life has changed so dramatically since last year. Kelly’s launching a music career, Ozzy’s off on tour, and Mom, of course, is fighting cancer. That’s a different television show—and it already burned so bright in the spring.”

There’s no point in swearing allegiance to The Osbournes, in other words. They won’t be around tomorrow.

Neither will you.