Word: vh1
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...VH1 is still nominally a music channel. But in the era of J. Lo and American Idol, The Osbournes and the Michael Jackson circus, being a music channel does not mean being about only music. Says MTV Networks Group president Judy McGrath: "Music culture is now a place where you'll find Liza Minnelli and OutKast and the Queer Eye guys on the same stage." So a popular VH1 subgenre is shows about current celebrity culture only tangentially related to music--Fabulous Life of ..., 100 Hottest Hotties and so on. "I was in Puerto Rico at our sales meeting," says...
...channel's success is in capturing the tone of Gen X nostalgia, at once snide and affectionate. Executive vice president Michael Hirschorn calls VH1's focus not "nostalgic" but "retro," which he defines as less "sentimental and teary." (Although one could reasonably define it as "I am so not old enough to be nostalgic.") "The channel had been in a baby-boomer mode, which was very serious about music," he says. "We turned that into 'Let's have fun with pop culture...
...arguably, as important to VH1's identity as the musicians are people like comic Mo Rocca (The Daily Show). He has appeared on enough clip shows--70s, 80s and the new Best Week Ever--that one might believe VH1 has him chained in a basement studio. "I consider myself the David McCullough of '70s and '80s pop culture," says Rocca, who notes that the affection for that culture is not limited to people old enough to remember those decades. "I speak at colleges, and the kids are nuts over these series," he says. "They don't know anything about...
...Dept. of Retro" warned that because of Gen X hipsters' fixation on nostalgic kitsch, "we may run entirely out of past." Recycled culture is becoming a staple of other networks like Trio and E!, and sources of retro are becoming more recent and repetitive. On a recent afternoon, VH1 had talking heads snarkily dissecting Enrique Iglesias and t.A.T.u. videos on All Access: Most Awesome Makeouts. Four hours later, talking heads on VH1's All Access: Awesomely Bad Videos were snarkily dissecting the same two videos...
Those who remember the past, it seems, are doomed to repeat themselves. VH1 risks becoming a parody of itself--video clip, talking head, movie clip, talking head, all day long. It slyly acknowledges that danger with a new series that is literally a parody of itself. Best Week Ever (Fridays, 11 p.m. E.T.) applies the I Love the ... format to the events of the previous seven days--celeb gossip, trends, music news, real news--as if the nostalgia cycle is so accelerated that it has almost caught up to us. Can All Access: Most Esoteric VH1 Countdowns be far behind...