The offender: The MTV Movie Awards
The setup: Remember that episode of The Simpsons where the suits behind Itchy & Scratchy decide the cartoon needs a third character? Imagine if they designed an entire movie-awards show: "We at the network want an awards show with attitude. It's edgy, it's in your face. You've heard the expression 'Let's get busy'? Well, this is a show that gets biz-zay! Consistently and thoroughly."
The con: Categories include: Best Villain, Best Kiss, Best Fight, and an award for movies that haven't even opened, Best Summer Movie You Haven't Seen Yet. (Transformers won a month before it hit theaters.)
MTV hates you: By creating yet another unnecessary awards show, then making it unbearably obnoxious.
The offender: Real World/Road Rules Challenge
The setup: Former Real World contestants, former Road Rules contestants, and (in recent seasons) viewers who apply on the Internet are flown to a foreign country to bicker, hook up, fight, and engage in contests overseen by a mouth-breathing host.
The con: In true MTV fashion, the "reality" of the show couldn't be more manipulated, in this case by the network and the entrants, most of whom are professional Real World/Road Rules Challenge contestants. MTV sells the show like a glimpse into a corral full of wild horses, but, in truth, the horses they've rounded up are highly trained show-ponies, more than happy to perform as the network sees fit.
MTV hates you: By creating its very own substrata of human being: the professional, perpetual reality-TV star.
The offender: Non-reality reality programming
The setup: Sure, COPS has been around longer, but MTV really started reality TV with The Real World in 1992. The story of seven strangers picked to live together in New York while being filmed caused a chain reaction that continues producing terrible ideas 15 years later. (See Tila Tequila's new show, above.)
The con: From the get-go, MTV tinkered with reality. When the original New York cast got boring, they received an anonymous package with plane tickets to Jamaica. Serendipity!
MTV hates you: The 20th season of The Real World premières next May.
The offender: The Hills
The setup: Laguna Beach alum Lauren Conrad moves to L.A. The Laguna Beach cameras, and the pretty, pretty way they film "reality," follow.
The con: Lauren Conrad and her friends are vapid characters, and The Hills is a vapid show—one of the main storylines this season involves Heidi and Spencer's clashing ideas about what to paint on their living-room wall)—but vapidity has never looked so good, and that's why The Hills is kind of sinister. The way it's shot and edited gives the show a look of weightiness, a sheen of importance—but it's like polished air.
MTV hates you: Aside from the usual MTV reality-show tinkering—including multiple takes of "reality," and the fact that, even though the whole Hills cast has become tabloid fodder, anything that has to do with tabloids or paparazzi is edited out—The Hills makes nothing look like something. Case in point: Brody Jenner.
The offender: Endless ringtone/joke of the day/text dating ads
The setup: Hey, kids! You like texting? Well then text HOT to #4411 to get the hottest ringtones, the funniest jokes (as indicated by this laughing frog), and the sexiest women, now! ($10 per text, and standard messaging rate applies.)
The con: MTV airs these commercials constantly, certainly more than it airs Next. It's basically never not airing a commercial about texting, ringtones, hot singles, or jokes of the day.
MTV hates you: By exposing you to this kind of sensory and stupidity bombardment on a nearly minute-by-minute basis.
The offender: The rise of Nick Cannon
The setup: A one-time cast member on the Nickelodeon all-kids sketch comedy show All That, Nick Cannon currently has two shows on MTV: Nick Cannon Presents: Wild 'N Out (a kind of hip-hop Whose Line Is It Anyway?, with all the horror that description implies) and Nick Cannon Presents: Short Circuitz (a lazy sketch-comedy show featuring lazy video parodies and lazy wackiness).
The con: Nick Cannon is essentially the face of comedy at MTV: They even made him into his own brand. Problem is, Nick Cannon almost certainly has no idea what comedy is. Judging by his shows, he evidently thinks that comedy is appealing to the lowest common denominator, and that it requires no thought. Watching half an hour of Wild 'N Out is way more disconcerting than funny, and Short Circuitz is on par with a college sketch-comedy group that no one at the college has ever heard of. You know, the kind that would think having President Bush rap a response to Kanye West's Katrina comments two years after the fact is a hilarious premise.
MTV hates you: Nick Cannon is basically mediocre comedy in human form, but MTV's only response to mediocrity is to re-air it, or make it into a franchise. (See also: Real World/Road Rules Challenge.)
The offender: Shower Power Music Hour
The setup: According to MTV casting: "MTV's Shower Power Music Hour would like to give you the chance to show us what you can do! Film a performance in your own home shower, singing along to one of these songs: 'Glamorous' by Fergie, 'Ridin' by Chamillionaire, 'Girlfriend' by Avril Lavigne, 'This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race' by Fall Out Boy… The best and most creative videos will have the chance to be featured on an episode of Shower Power Music Hour. And YOU may be selected to appear on the show IN PERSON to compete in a shower singing competition in front of a live studio audience!!!"
The con: See above.
MTV hates you: By turning to you, or at least to its dumbest, most exhibitionist viewers, to provide its content. Granted, everything listed in the casting section of MTV.com reads like "Hey, want to be exploited?!" but this takes it to a new, terrible, unwatchable level.
The offenders: Jessica Simpson, Nick Lachey, Bam Margera, Sharon Osbourne, Carson Daly, Carmen Electra, Jenny McCarthy, Shanna Moakler, and other people MTV made into celebrities.
The setup: MTV gives people with marginal, though thankfully fading, fame (Simpson, Lachey, Margera), or people who are married to someone marginally famous (Osbourne, Moakler) reality shows about their life. Increased fame ensues.
The con: High on their MTV notoriety, these people seek to increase their fame by releasing albums (A Public Affair, What's Left Of Me), or getting talk shows (Last Call With Carson Daly, The Sharon Osbourne Show), or hosting things (Electra, McCarthy), and in general providing insidious, plentiful litter on the pop-cultural landscape.
MTV hates you: By continuing to manufacture "stars" that think they can be stars.
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