"The Hills": Audrina, Heidi, Whitney and Lauren

By Timothy McNulty
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Turn on MTV tomorrow, its 25th anniversary, and you not only will have a tough time finding music videos, you also won't hear much about how old the channel is, either.

The silence speaks volumes.

More than ever, MTV is a youth-oriented business that thrives on celebrity and status-driven reality television. Focusing on actual reality -- that a generation has passed since the network debuted Aug. 1, 1981, and children raised on the network are having children of their own -- is not what the target audience wants to hear.

Related story: VH1 Classic to show MTV's first day on air On the network's 25th anniversary, MTV President Christine Norman talks about the present and future of MTV. The technology-driven future of MTV "MTV's programming isn't all one note" Jacob McMurray, senior curator of the Experience Music Project in Seattle, on MTV's impact on pop music and culture today.

"Our audience was not even born" back in 1981, the network's president, Christina Norman says. "They want to know we're going with them, where we are taking them, not so much where we've been."

Five years ago, the Music Television network celebrated its 20th with a day-long extravaganza capped with a three-hour concert from New York's Hammerstein Ballroom. It released a 288-page coffee-table book called "MTV Uncensored" with looks back at the channel's history and memorable events over the years, including on-air meltdowns at the Video Music Awards and hotel-room drinking bouts with Nirvana.

On this birthday, there will only be one hourlong video-clip show in the morning, with video snippets from 1981 through 2006. The theme is anything but the hair-metal bands and Michael Jackson videos that made the channel a pop culture phenomenon: The message is how young the channel is, as if 25 years ago it had been programmed by diaper-wearing babies.

"This summer MTV is turning 25," the show's host says. "That means we're as young as Justin Timberlake, Mike Jones, Paris Hilton and Beyonce."

In a sense, MTV is as young as it feels. Check out the way it has reinvented itself the past five years.

MTV's official history from 2001 doesn't mention the term "reality TV" a single time. The network helped spur the reality genre with the launch of "Real World" in 1992, but even five years ago there was no indication of how much the network was about to change.

Music at the channel -- for years the highest-watched cable network for viewers 12 to 24 -- is a small part of the programming now.

Spurred by the success of 2002's "The Osbournes" and 2003's "Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica," most of the lineup is reality shows about rich and pretty teens ("Laguna Beach," "The Hills," "My Super Sweet Sixteen"), outrageous makeover shows ("Pimp My Ride") and comedy-reality hybrids ("Yo Mamma" and "Punk'd").

"Total Request Live": VJ Vanessa Minnillo and singer Nick Lachey Click photo for larger image.

The shows can be wildly materialistic and celebrity-obsessed -- a long look into a shallow, narcissistic cesspool. (Says one guy upon the remake of his car: "Today is the best day of my life. Now that I've got a pimped-out limo, I feel like a celebrity.")

There is also something brilliant about them. In MTV's most popular show, "Laguna Beach," real teens act out scripted scenarios in what the network calls "reality drama." The network takes privileged, good-looking kids, scripts their lives and turns them into pseudo-celebrities who get on real-life magazine covers and into Internet gossip columns.

It's hard to tell the difference between the ads and the programs, the stars from the audience. MTV these days is so postmodern it would make Andy Warhol's wig spin.

MTV reality shows allow the network "to display their target audience to their target audience, in a logical extension of the channel's 'lifestyle branding,'" wrote Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen in "Shooting People," their 2003 reality TV book.

The network seems to get off on critics lambasting the shows -- nothing is better for a youth channel than a bunch of old fogeys saying how bad it is.

	"Pimp My Ride" Click photo for larger image.

Ads for season three of "Laguna" serve up perfect quotes for critics trying to make fun of the show: "The only thing I'm worried about is losing my morals -- and my shoes," a female character says.

Norman, the network's president, says the programming is more varied than just the celebrity fluff. Some makeover shows help teens' self-esteem. MTV News has broadcast specials on Iraq, AIDS and politics.

"For us, it's about creating and presenting a complete experience for the audience, because they live complete lives.

"Sometimes you just want to chill out and just sort of want to escape into something, and other times you want to be challenged. Sometimes you want to cry, sometimes you're angry and you want to take action. That's all part of the experience of being young, and that's what we celebrate," she says.

There are chinks in the MTV armor. Stock for Viacom (owner of MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon) has fallen 20 percent this year, largely over worries that cable is losing advertising to the Internet. That's especially bad news to a network targeting a computer-savvy generation.

"Newlyweds": Jessica Simpson Click photo for larger image.

The leading youth portal to the Web is not MTV.com but MySpace. That MySpace is also a music-driven site -- it was founded to promote bands and still does -- is an extra sting for the 25-year-old music network.

MTV is battling back with special Web content, often through its "Overdrive" site, which has Web-only programming and extras. Viewers are constantly reminded to visit MTV.com sites and to upload their own Web content sites (as they can on MySpace and YouTube).

During the Video Music Awards Aug. 31, viewers will be able to see extra backstage content online, while the broadcast is showing live. It's part of the network's plan to get kids to watch the channel on as many screens -- TVs, computers, cell phones and digital media players -- as they can.

It also fits into MTV's peculiar mix of music, celebrity and reality TV: Viewers will be able to see the "real" emotions of the stars backstage.

"Are they anxious, do they pray, do they laugh, do they tell jokes? ... What we know from our audience is they really want that complete 360 experience of the music and the artists that they love," Norman says.

"That's what I think we're able to give them with putting all this content on all these screens."

A generation ago, MTV started changing the music business by making video images as important as the tunes. Now it affects cultural images in another way.

"Before MTV, music was largely an audio sort of experience. It wasn't as important ... the fashion of the artist, what cars or jewelry they had," says Jacob McMurray, the senior curator of the Experience Music Project in Seattle.

"Certainly now that's a huge part of it. I don't know if that's for better or worse. MTV is still affecting music but in a radically different way than it was."

---

For vintage MTV video clips, go to www.mtv.com/overdrive and click on "A.D.D. Videos."