I Want My MTV
+Review Books | 204 days ago

I Want My MTV: Drugs and Money and Cows in Boardrooms

By Jessica Winter

This oral history is compulsively entertaining, though it wraps up before the real golden age of the music video.

Tuned In
Tuned In+Tuned In | 300 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Are These MTV's 30 Best Videos?

By James Poniewozik

This Dead Tree Alert is a bit of a cheat; there is no new issue of TIME magazine this week. But MTV turns 30 years old on Monday, and in the issue currently on newsstands, there’s a photo spread on 30 highlights from MTV’s 30 years on the air. And, for a bit more fun, [...]

+Music | 301 days ago

The 30 All-TIME Best Music Videos

By TIME Staff
top30_music_tout

Thirty years ago, MTV began to beam a budding art form — the music video — into homes across the U.S. TIME takes a look back at the most memorable clips from three decades’ worth of music television

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 356 days ago

TV Weekend: Teen Wolf

By James Poniewozik

Say what you will about what MTV: it is a channel that has always known what it is, even if “what it is” changes every three years or so. In its early years, there was a distinct idea of what an MTV video looked like. There was, with Beavis and Butt-Head and Daria and experiments [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 476 days ago

The Dream of the '90s Is Alive: Beavis and Butt-Head Returning to MTV

By James Poniewozik

Kids, you’re probably too young to remember it, but there was a time when it was considered somewhat outrageous to say that something “sucked” on TV and when mocking a channel’s content on that channel itself was unusual, rather than the default mode of 90% of cable. That time was the ’90s, and the prime [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 490 days ago

Is MTV's Skins Child Pornography?

By James Poniewozik

In a fascinating front-page New York Times story this morning, Brian Stelter reports that some executives at MTV were worried that some scenes in the new teen drama just might be, and are ordering producers to edit some Skins episodes accordingly: It is unclear when MTV first realized that the show may be vulnerable to [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+496 days ago

Dead Tree Alert: Peeking at MTV's Skins

By James Poniewozik

In the new issue of TIME, I review MTV’s American remake of raunchy teen dramedy Skins, which debuts Monday. Like the British series it adapts—too directly at first, its biggest flaw—it’s bluntly risqué and showily amoral when it comes to sex and drugs; it will keep the Parents Television Council good and busy for a [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 717 days ago

The Morning After: Sold With a Kiss

By James Poniewozik

I may not be entirely qualified to comment on last night’s MTV Movie Awards, seeing as how I am old—old enough never to even have fantasized making out with a vampire. Also, between a choppy cable connection and the constant (yet inconsistently applied) language beeps, the event was often more like watching a slideshow than [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 820 days ago

MTV: I Am Too Old & Cynical to Like Jersey Shore

By James Poniewozik

Several months ago, I wrote a post about how MTV claimed it was changing its programming to reflect the idealism and optimism of a new generation and of the Obama era. A few months later, I wrote about how that might not exactly square with the fact that its biggest new hit was about drunken [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 850 days ago

TV Tonight: Their So-Called Lives

By James Poniewozik

If you have both BBC America and a taste for raunchy, smart, good-hearted teen comedy, do not miss the debut of The Inbetweeners tonight (9 p.m. E.T.). Several reviews out already have made the obvious comparison to the movies of Judd Apatow, or said that the show is sort of like an R-rated version of [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Uncategorized | 899 days ago

MTV Embraces a New Era's Optimism, Underwear

By James Poniewozik

“After years of celebrating wealth, celebrity and the vapid excesses of youth, MTV is trying to gloss its escapist entertainment with a veneer of positive social messages.” –The New York Times, 4/19/09 “There’s a palpable generational shift in attitudes that’s informing a new point of view as we develop content and the brand…. Millennials have [...]

Tuned In
Tuned In+Remembrance | 953 days ago

Wrestler, MTV Fixture Captain Lou Albano Dies

By James Poniewozik

Professional wrestler and sometime actor Captain Lou Albano died this morning at age 76. I never followed his career inside the ring, but like any kid who watched too much MTV in the ’80s, I was plenty familiar with his work as the father figure in Cyndi Lauper’s videos. Beyond those claims to fame, Albano’s [...]