October 16, 2025 • 51 mins
Today we complete our music video duology with a dive into the mellow pool of VH-1.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and this is Stuff you should know. The Adult Contemporary.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Edition Video Hits one.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, did you remember? That's what the VH did for.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, And I think that's I think they ran that
little thing. I just did. I think that was their
thing initially. I don't know, I seem to. I don't
know if I just made that up or not, but
I feel like that's something that's stuck in my brain
from the old days.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Well, yeah, from what this research show, that's exactly the
kind of thing they would have run for like the
first ten years.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah. Probably. And this is on VH one, of course,
And it's going to be a great warm up for
the long awaited Judas Priest show tonight that I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Well is that tonight awesome? Man? I hope you have
a bitch in time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
It should be some fun people watching and some good music.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Are you gonna smoke PCP in the parking lot like
that documentary?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Oh you know it, baby, I got my I ordered
some PCP online and it came in a box labeled
PCP okay, And I opened it up and it said
take two PCPs for best results.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
You go.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
So I think I'm good.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That sounds legit to me.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, I think I'm all set.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, I have a great time. That's cool. Did you
get in touch with Nita Strauss?
Speaker 1 (01:33):
No? No, she may not be stuff you should know
person anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, try waving to her from the audience.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
It's me.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Maybe when you're on PCP you'll just crawl on to stage.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yeah, maybe you never know. I'm gonna take the recommended too,
So who knows what's gonna happen.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
So we're talking about VH one, which is basically the
opposite of PCP. Yeah, as everyone knows. Who's ever seen
VA one actually if you were around, and it debuted
back in nineteen eighty five. It's just like the older, mellower,
more well again adult contemporary version of MTV, and it
(02:14):
bears a striking resemblance because it was launched by the
same company that launched MTV that hold Werner Brothers, Amex Weirdness. Yeah,
And the one of the big reasons they launched VH
one is because they really wanted to put one of
their competitors, Ted Turner's cable music channel in the ground permanently.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, and I guess this was before, you know, because
they eventually bought them out. If you remember from the
MTV episode. I do remember I was talking to dear listener.
But that's ok. Oh, I see when I address you,
I address you as your leader.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, so this was before they bought them out, clearly,
because they were essentially saying, hey, cable companies, if you
want another music video station, don't go by Turner's thing. Yeah,
just take VH one for free. If you're getting MTV,
we'll just throw it in.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah. Before Video Hits one, it was value ad Hits one. Well.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, And honestly, what got me about researching this was
they follow similar paths as far as music videos turned
into original programming. But I dare say that VH one
did a better job and stayed more relevant in the
long run.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Uh, yeah, for sure. I mean you can make a
case it's still quite relevant. It's definitely changed its mission dramatically,
but MTV changed its mission as well. And yeah, it's
VH one still relevant. There's no better word to put it.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, I think they ended up having much bigger shows
when they started doing their original shows and MTV had.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
For sure, and as we'll see every once while, MTV
likes to still poach them because even though VH one
is more relevant, I get the impression that MTV v
is still more powerful in that company.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, I'm curious with the dynamic there.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Let's find out anyone who works at MTV or VH
one let us know.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
But like you said, it started out just a few
years later and was you know they launched with Marvin
Gaye singing the National anthem and then Diana Ross and
the very mellower. Well, I guess you lost that love
and feeling was always mellow. But I feel like Daryl
holland John Oates even made it even sort of cornier.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Oh you wanted to hear corny?
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
I was listening to some beautiful music on YouTube this
morning as I was studying, Yeah, and I heard a
instrumental musaic version of Gordon Lightfoot Sundown, and I was like,
Chuck would love this one.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, I probably would have, because every.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Time I hear that song, I hear you doing your
impression of it where you're just like mumbling the words. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, boy, that's when Canada turned against me personally. Yeah,
and they forgave me. We made up.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
So yeah, it was actually a pretty solid lineup. The
fourth video that they showed was John Lennon's Nobody Told
Me So. That's not a bad way to kick off
a new video channel. And I was looking through the
rest of the I think first ten or twenty or whatever,
and it was just hit after hit and the VJs
that they had again, this is the older sibling or
(05:27):
maybe even like parent.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, like people in their thirties watched vach one. Yeah,
really old people.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Right, people that David Bowie clearly said you couldn't trust
any longer.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
That was who the VJs were. They were untrustworthy former
radio vet's like don Imus.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, Imus was air Frankie Crocker Bowser from Seannahah, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
The best VJ I think of all.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So. There was also a guy named Scott Shannon who
we can thank for creating the Morning Zoo radio show
show format.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Oh was he the guy?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
He was the guy?
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, I think his headstone, if he's still around, it
will eventually say sorry.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah. And it just has a fart machine that you
can press.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
That's not a bad idea, that's really not actually. So
one of the other things that differentiated VH one from
MTV is that, pretty much out of the gate, you
can tell from the first two videos, it was much
more willing to put black artists on its airwaves. Right,
Like we talked about MTV being like almost flat out
(06:36):
accused of racism by the head of CBS Records within
a couple of years of its launch, VH one was
not that. I don't know if they learned the lesson
or if they were just more into music made by
black artists than MTV. I'm not sure, but from the
outset they there was a place where you could see
more black artists for sure.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, and also a place for comedy. You know, m
TV we lauded some of the sort of sketch shows
and the remote control funny game show. But Rosie O'Donnell
actually got her start as a VJ on VH one
in nineteen eighty five, and a few years later the
pretty good stand up show Stand Up Spotlight was on.
And this was, you know, three or four years before
(07:18):
the Comedy Channel launch which would eventually become Comedy Central.
So there wasn't. You know, HBO was doing some stuff,
but there wasn't a lot of stand up on television
until VH one.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
No, but apparently there already was the half hour comedy
hour on MTV, which I had totally forgotten about. But
do you remember that?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oh yeah, that was a good hower comedy Hour.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And then I guess HBO already still had some stuff too,
but for the most part, there wasn't It wasn't crowded
at all. Rosie O'Donnell was an innovator in that sense
for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah. And then their first sort of big original show,
I mean stand up Spotlight did pretty well. But my generation,
I remember in nineteen eighty nine with Peter Noon of
Herman's Hermits hosting and it was, you know, it was
just him DJing and spinning records but also sort of
talking about trivia, kind of like a Turner classic movies
for boomers pretty much.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, and I was like Herman's Hermits. I know for
a fact, I know that band, but I can't remember
what their big hit was. So I was looking all
over YouTube. I found one of their greatest hits albums,
and I just had to skip through all the songs yeah, no,
that's not it. Never heard that one before. I don't
know who would like this one. And then it finally
got to something tells me I'm into something good.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, I know, I knew where your head is.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and I know that one from the Romantic montage
and Naked Gun, that's right, And that's my Herman's Hermit story.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
You know, these videos that they were playing on my generation,
a lot of them were just old sort of when
they did promotional videos before the true music video format
came out. But they also played new stuff. There was
plenty of Michael Bolton and crossover stuff. It also was
playing on MTV, the VH one. Would you know plenty
of Rod Stewart obviously, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Rod Stewart, turns out, was to music videos what Enya
is to crossword puzzles, right, like Perennial. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
She just popped up again this week in the crossword?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Did she really?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Oh? Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, that's it just keeps happening.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
That's pretty cool. Yeah, I love this ride for her.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
That was kind of a problem though, is because some
of these acts were already past their prime when they
were showing videos on VH one. They hadn't made videos.
They were they were Their prime came before that whole
marketing tool that we talked about in the MTV episode.
So they would have to piece together things like concert
footage or like you said, maybe even like TV appearances
(09:47):
or something like that, and just basically make like a
an edited version to make a music video for a
particular song. So they VH one was kind of hamstrung
in a lot of ways right out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, and that's all because Peter Noon demanded it right
the tyrant.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yes, he was quite a tyrant. Everyone knows that. You
don't even have to know the song. Something tells me
I'm into something good to know that Peter Noon was
a tyrant.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Mid nineties, they found themselves floundering a bit, though, because
they never really got an identity outside of being sort
of the you know, you know, if you were an
MTV kid, you thought VH one was kind of boring
and it was like the stuff your parents might be into,
kind of a little more square. And that's not an identity, no, well,
I know, but that's not an identity that you want
to claim. So they had like a mishmash of different
(10:37):
shows going on. They had a show called Archives that
was just kind of rebroadcasting old TV interviews that they
I guess had rights to m and so, you know,
they just lacked an identity aside from being square. And
they also had the same pressures that MTV had when
with competition coming in and so much so that cable
operators were like, I don't like, I don't want to
(11:00):
even though it's free, I don't want it anymore. Right,
So they were trying to get rid of VH one,
you know actively, I think the biggest cable operator in
the country at the time, Telecommunications Inc. They were like,
I don't even want this free thing.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, for free, that's pretty sad. That's that's not good. Actually,
it was a dude named John Sykes who essentially saved
VH one.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah. Also iHeart media executive, is he? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Okay, Well, congratulations John Sykes, because he definitely turned VH
one around. He was what you would call a good hire. Yeah,
because in nineteen ninety four they brought him on and
he so changed VH one for the better that in
nineteen ninety five their subscriber base was forty nine million households.
(11:50):
Three years later it was up to sixty two million households.
That's what they call the Sykes effect.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Yeah, yeah, and he'd walk out of the room and
say you got pyched. They started new original music programming,
and that was really part of the big rebranding effort
that was so successful. Top ten Countdown in ninety four.
Eventually Top twenty Countdown was sort of the big first one.
(12:20):
But in nineteen ninety six they really really hit it
big pop culturally with a little show called pop Up Video.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Yes I remember watching this and it was one of
the things about it. So pop up video if you've
never seen it. They would just show music videos, but
then there were these little kind of like cartoon word
bubbles would pop up with some random fact about the artist,
maybe a little trivia, something about music history or and
(12:51):
this is I think what captured everybody, some sort of
juicy little bit of gossip or random weirdness that had
to do with that specific video. And the two guys
who were behind it, Woody Thompson and Ted Lowe, Apparently
they got pushed back from the parent company because the
parent company also owned Blockbuster, and they knew from owning Blockbuster,
(13:14):
foreign films didn't go anywhere because people didn't like subtitles. Yeah,
so they were like, no one's gonna want to read anything.
But they were very wrong because in large part Thompson
and Lowe were good writers. So this kind of became
known for being a much smarter show than you would
guess it would be.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, it was very clever and a huge, huge hit.
Like I remember watching it. I don't remember like setting
my calendar to sit around and make sure I knew
and when it was on, but I definitely found myself
watching it quite a bit. It was a fun show.
Storytellers came out in nineteen ninety six, which was clearly
aimed at the kind of you know, younger boomer maybe
(13:54):
older gen X generation, because they just had classic rock
artists after classic rock artists in an intimate setting, singing songs,
telling stories about the writing of those songs. Very very
popular show.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yes, And anytime I think of Storytellers, I think of
the Saturday Night Live skit with Neil Diamond.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
I don't think I saw that.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Oh it was Will Ferrell as Neil Diamond, and he
is just off the rails. At one point he says
he's on some dynamite pills. Got his keyboard as Kenny
gave him, and he at one point he said, I
will smack you in the mouth. I'm Neil Diamond, And
it was just bizarre that he made this Neil Diamond character.
But the ironic part of is Neil Diamond was never
(14:37):
on storytellers.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
No, Well, maybe that's how they got away with it.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
It's worth going back and seeing. Man, it's an all
time great sketch.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Better than Robert Gulay. That's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, okay, one hundred times, maybe one hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Oh wow, you did the mask.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Legends was another big show that came out that same year,
in nineteen ninety six. This just straight up rock dock stuff,
pretty you know, straightforward, one hour documentary style. Again, you know,
artists like Bowie and Retha Franklin, and you know, the
clash was in there. I mean, you know, still aimed
at that audience. They knew what their bread and butter was,
(15:16):
but they started making kind of good shows to support it.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah. And one reason that John Sykes kind of brought
it back to music videos and then made all this
original music programming is the Boomers to start and then
eventually jen X followed in their footsteps. They kept buying
new music, like they kept listening to music into their
thirties and forties. Previous generations hadn't done that, Like, apparently
(15:40):
you were done with music when you turn thirty because
life sucked and it was serious, and you were in
black and white and if you were a woman, you
were an apron all day. If you were a man,
you just drank scotch all day. You just didn't listen
to music after a certain point and that changed. So
it made sense that you would kind of target those
generations because they also had the most pocket money or
(16:02):
spending money too.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean new music. That is like the
mad Men. Guys listened to the whatever Artie Shaw or
the whatever orchestra. But there were no guys in the
nineteen fifties in their thirties saying like, what's what's what's
new out there?
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Right?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
What can you turn me on to?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I remember one of the more disappointing moments I've ever
had in relation to my father was going through his
old record collection and the artist he had the most
forty fives of was Jackie Gleason.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Somehow, at least your dad had records My dad didn't
even listen to music hardly.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Your dad made his own music and his jeep on
a CB.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, that's true. It was weird, had a weird family.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
He had an old Convoy soundtrack going.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
That's true. He would get I think I mentioned he
would get obsessed with like a song and that's it,
and he'd say, hey, Scott, go record that like seventeen
times in a row on on a tape for me
in Scotty to listen to the seats.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Here's your tape of Hot Blooded seventeen times.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Ninety seven was when it really hit the big time
with behind the music. I think Olivia helped us out
with this went along with the MTV article and she
aptly calls it legends evil twin because these were one
hour documentaries, but they were. It got known very quickly
for being very melodramatic and very juicy with like the dirt,
(17:29):
the stories about what happened, you know, the real gossipy.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Stuff, lurid even I think in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, and it ran for a long time.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
It did ninety seven to I think twenty fourteen. Yeah,
one of the ones, one of the very famous episodes.
But they had a ton of episodes from bands from
Megadeth to Bette Midler to Notorious Big Yeah. One of
the ones that really kind of infiltrated pop culture though,
was Life Garrett.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
It was like a teen idol in the seventies and
he was reunited in his Behind the Music with a
friend who had become paralyzed from a car crash that
Leif Garrett caused when he was drunk back in the seventies.
And it was very melodramatic and very kind of drippy,
and it just kind of made it out as a meme. Eventually,
(18:21):
I saw Brian on Family Guy they started one of
the episodes. Really, he was just sitting there, I guess,
watching Behind the Music and mouthing along word for word
with the dialogue between Life Garrett and his friend.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Shall we take a break?
Speaker 2 (18:38):
I didn't expect that, but you know what, I love that.
You surprised me. So sure.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
All right, it's nineteen ninety seven. We'll be back to
jump back in time a bit and then go forward
in time a bit. All right, so we're back. We
(19:13):
promised to jump back in time, and we have to
because ninety seven was Behind the Music. But in ninety five,
VH one got into the fashion biz as well as
MTV had done with Cindy Crawford. And when they started,
they partnered up with Vogue magazine to start hosting the
annual Fashion Awards, and that is well, it's well known
because they did a pretty good job with that as
far as the ratings go. But that's also where Derek Zulander,
(19:36):
who we just mentioned. I think in the MTV episode
he appeared for the first time at the Fashion Awards.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah, it was like a pre taped little bit more
or two minute bit. But in the movie Zoolander, he
faces his greatest public humiliation at the VH one Fashion Awards.
So they showed up in the movie, which I just
watched right, I watched recently, and it holds up. Man,
it's pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah. I bet Ruby would like that.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
I bet too. I would. I would definitely show it
to her.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Is it just her kind of silly?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I think it is a very silly movie.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Ninety seven they launched Save the Music John Sykes. He
was principal for a day at a school in Brooklyn
that had no music program or couldn't get funding, and
that still exists. So that's sort of a feather in
their caps to Save the Music Foundation.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah, I read that they've donated two point eight million
recorders to schools across the country.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Now are you kidding? There's unreal? Are you mocking the recorder?
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yes? I am chuck.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh. Hey, if you're a recorder maestro out there, just
keep on doing it. Oh, don't listen to Josh.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
No, don't listen to me, and in fact, listen to
me for this part. If you would make us a
music bumper for our ad biaks, that would be awesome.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yeah. Well, if you can get it, well, it'll be
I wish we could put the call out before this
episode came out, because we could put it in this episode.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
I mean we can try.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah, maybe I'll do it on the Instagram page. See
what happened? Okay, all right, moving on to politics, right.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, apparently Bill Clinton was a big VH one viewer viewer.
He donated one of his old saxophones to the Save
the Music program. Yeah, and they also, I guess, in return,
made a documentary about him, Bill Clinton colon Rock and
Roll President. This was nineteen ninety seven, don't.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Forget that's right. And they also got into the live
Business with their very very successful series of Divas concerts.
The first one was in nineteen ninety eight. I remember
this being a very big deal.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
It is.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah, they got Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan,
Carol King, and.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Who else Celine Dion.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Oh yeah, you can't have a Divas concert in ninety
eight without Selene and pounding her chest.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
No, that's a murderer's row of divas.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Yeah. Absolutely so.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Even despite all of this reprogramming, very very successful and
popular programming, you could argue that if this wasn't the
golden era of VH one, it was certainly one of
the golden eras. Yeah, cable operators were still dropping VH one.
I guess they hadn't gotten the news yet, right, So
VH one kind of organizes something similar to I Want
(22:28):
My MTV that MTV had used before it started getting
picked up by cable operators. And they actually staged a
protest in Denver because the I guess the cable operator
there had dropped VH one, And they got Don Henley
and John Mellencamp and Jewel to fly out there and protest,
(22:48):
and I guess en route. They were in the air,
and the cable operator got word of what was about
to happen, and they agreed to pick VH one back up.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
They're like Don Henley's coming. I want to mess with
the hen You definitely don't want to mess with Don Hinley. No,
they were pretty successful in getting, like you said, all
those viewers back in to the delight of ad salespeople
because they had that eighteen to forty nine year old
demographic that is so juicy and everyone knows those are
(23:18):
the people that have all the bucks, or at least
back then they did, and so they you know, they
were able to land some big ad dollars. As a
resultant were seemingly thriving.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, and it didn't hurt that there were plenty of
like new artists who were making the kind of music
that would make a little more sense on VH one
than say MTV, like Natalie Merchant. Celine Dion, as you mentioned,
was enormous at this time. Yeah, probably would not see
a Celenion video on MTV, but she was right at
home on VH one. Yeahlah Bolton, Michael Bolton, alanis probably
(23:52):
straddled the two says like the wallflowers or goo goo
dolls or something like that.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Ooh okay, and these.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Are real deal. I watched some VH one blocks to
come up with some examples, so all of those had
videos on VH one. Everybody, that's the kind of research
you can expect from stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, I think like before dad rock was a term
that was probably the angle what's dead?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
I've not heard that before, so what does it cover?
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Dad rock is kind of like, I know, Wilco gets
thrown in there a lot. It's like, you know, kind
of dudes my age that like used to go to
all the shows, but now just so I could get
out to Wilco like every year, and you know that
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I saw this meme on Instagram where it's this girl
sitting in a like a stadium seat and she has
a very unhappy look on her face and it says,
anyone over forty when the third opening band starts to
set up at nine pm. It's so true, man, It's fine,
it just starts too late.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, I'm with you. Shows are starting earlier though. I
feel like I read that like these legacy shows that
I'm seeing, all these olds, they're they're they're getting up
on stage at like, you know, opening band at seven,
regular band at eight, out out by nine thirty five.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Hey, we start at seven promptly. If we ever start,
try to Yeah, if we start later than seven, it's
the venue itself saying please let us hold because we're
making mad cash at the bar.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah. It's actually the audience's fault. Yeah, really, because they're
like they're not in yet, They're they're just getting here.
There's a lot of traffic. It's actually traffic's fault.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
And some towns are are worse for it than others.
Some some towns are just like, we know, you're not
going to start while we're getting licker. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, But like with MTV, they would you know, start
sort of changing things and rebranding. These are companies that
just seemingly change the channels, not literally, but change their
programming a lot, and like the names of the channel
change a lot. Yes, Like you know MTV at MTB
two and MTV Classic and VH one kind of did
the same. They had VH one Soul which is now
(25:59):
Bee tol Et Soul, VH one Smooth, which was more
like Kenny G kind of stuff. But then they're like
who wants that, Let's change that VH one Classic Rock
and then just VH one Classic and now it's MTV Classic.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
It is quite a ride for that channel. Yeah, yeah,
VH one smooth. I can't believe that ever made it
outside of the initial meeting.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah. True.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
So VH one, just like MTV, is like, Okay, if
we can't hold people's attention from video to video, we
got to come up with a different kind of show.
And so they stopped playing videos almost it dropped almost
by fifty percent from ninety nine to twenty twelve. Yeah,
and remember like it had been relaunched in ninety four
(26:43):
as like VH one Music first, and it just wasn't
sustainable at the turn of the millennium, right, So they
started getting into countdown shows. They figured out how they
could keep showing videos. They just needed to adjust it,
put them in a certain kind of package that would
hold your attention a little more. Nothing does that better
(27:04):
than a countdown. And they kicked it off in grand
style with the one hundred Greatest Artists of Rock and Roll,
hosted by none other than Kevin Bacon. Yeah, and this
kicked off their whole great the Greatest Countdowns format, which
started in ninety eight ninety nine, sorry and ran to
twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, which you know, I was kind of thinking about it.
They ended up the last episode was forty Greatest Pranks,
Part four, so and I was like, what a weird
kind of thing. But that was right in the middle
of the of the listical revolution. Sure that was going
on online, and this is kind of the same version
of that, because I was like, oh, man, I remember
(27:46):
when you and I were writers for How Stuff Works
back in the day. We were sort of fighting up
against that because it seems like that was what the
Internet became for a period of years, was just list
top ten list list list list list.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah. I mean, where do you think ten Dumb Criminals
episode came from?
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah? Yeah. And that's one reason why we don't do
a lot of those anymore is because people aren't writing
that kind of stuff anymore. I like to think we
changed with the time.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yeah. Plus also they can be kind of thin every
once in a while, though it's a good one. I
don't I can't think of any off the top of
my head, but we've done some good top tens that.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, I mean, they're pretty breezy which I think people
enjoy from time to time for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
So the luridity kind of really started to show itself
a little more with Where Are They Now nineteen ninety
nine show that basically said where are like one hit
wonders in former child stars? What are they doing now?
Let's just peek in on their sad lives and see
what's what?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah, they got into movies. One thing we didn't mention
was MTV Films, which had some pretty successful movies that
they were putting out. I think I remember the movie
Election from Alexander Payne, one of my favorite movies. I
think that was an MTV film. But the h one
didn't fare as well on the movie front. But they
did have one sort of noteworthy one called Two of Us,
(29:06):
which which was okay. It was in two thousand. It
was a fictionalized story about when Paul McCartney and John
Lennon were hanging out in nineteen seventy six, the night
that LORDE. Michael's on SNL on air said if the
Beatles come down here, I'll pay you. I can't remember
it was like a million bucks or something.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I saw three thousand dollars?
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Was that what it was?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
That's what I saw, which I was like, even in
nineteen seventy six, that wasn't that much money.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
I can't remember. I mean, you can watch the clip
on YouTube and see him say it with his own mouth.
I just didn't have a chance. Yeah, But at any rate,
it was a fictionalized version of them hanging out that night,
which is supposedly a true story, right, that they were
going to come down and play on SNL like you
was it that far from the Dakota what happened? Supposedly
they were two stoned, that's as the story goes at least.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
And by stone do you mean on Heroin?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Probably no, I think they each took two.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
PCPs as per the instructions. So by this time they
finally dropped pretense this would be VH one we're talking
about again, and they just stopped using the music first
tagline because it was just a boldfaced lie. At this point,
legends ended, pop up videos ended, and it was time
for a new shakeup because John Sykes had done his work,
(30:21):
and so MTV Networks hired a new guy named Brian Grayden,
and he said, we're going to shift more toward pop culture. Right,
We're not even going to show blocks of videos anymore
and countdowns. And he hired a guy named Jeff Old
who was new and he became executive vice president for
programming and production. And the thing that Old brought to
(30:43):
this whole thing following the marching orders to make more
pop culture relevant shows is for he gave his producers
free reign to just you got an idea, put it
on air, and if it works, awesome, if it doesn't whatever.
It's called the agile format of management, where you just
do a bunch of stuff, some of it fails and
you just keep.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Going, Yeah, I mean, not a bad idea, no.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
And the other thing about it, too, is that kind
of stuff like greenlighting a really easy show idea quickly
usually means you can make it very cheaply. And that
was what they did. They made very very inexpensive shows
that still were very very popular because the concepts were
so good.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yeah, and I Love the Eighties was the first big
big hit out of that camp that premiere in two
thousand and two. Not a show I watch much, but
it was one that was almost kind of hard to avoid. Somehow.
I feel like I remember just seeing Michael ian Black
on my screen a lot here and there. I think
he was one of the comedians.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
He was on like a million episodes of it.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
I think, yeah, he did great with that. But it
was comedians and celebrities just sort of you know, it
was like kind of quick clip stuff of them sitting
talking headstyle, well talking and reminiscing about whatever the decade was.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, it's funny. So it was a clip show of
talking heads, and it would frequently end up on Talk Soup,
which was a clip show of talking heads.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, so Talk Soup.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Would be covering another clip show, but it worked. Talk
Soup was great.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah, I enjoyed Talk Soup. I Love the Eighties was
based on a BB show that was definitely a little
more serious and sort of recounting the decade. But it
was a big hit again in the eighteen forty nine demographic,
and so they did the I Love the Seventies, I
Love the Nineties they did I Love the New Millennium,
which only covered through two thousand and seven, because it
debuted in two thousand and eight and I think in
(32:42):
twenty fourteen. I Loved the two Thousands was the last
one in the series that ran. Another great show was
called Best Week Ever, and then eventually Best Week Ever
with Paula Tompkins. Yeah, because friend of the show in
our pal Paul was the host where they recounted the
last week and this was a big launching pad for
a lot of great, great comedians.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, it was. It was a spinoff from I Love
the Eighties. I think p F. Tompkins was one of
the comedians, one of the frequently recurring comedians on that show.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yeah, you want me to list out some comedians who started.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
There, I would love that, Chuck, please please do.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
And I'm not saying that they were not doing anything,
but certainly we're not the household names there are now.
But Nick Krole, Paul Sheer, Doug Benson, Rob Hubel, a
little comedian named John Mulaney, the wonderful Jessica Saint Clair,
Michael Shay, Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswald, and I was
watching some of the Best Week Ever this morning and
(33:42):
Paul's wonderful wife. Have we've spoken about Janey had had
Tompkins was in one of the little bits, and I
had no idea Jane was ever on there. So I'm
I took a screenshot and I'm gonna text it to
her later nice.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
So if it was launched in two thousand and four,
those people's careers did start to take off around that
time or after that, so yeah, it must have been
a huge launching pad for them for sure. Yeah it
was a fun show, but it also goes to show
you all, like all of those names were pretty much
recognizable today. That also is a testament to just how
(34:14):
popular Best Week ever and I love the eighties was.
So v H one was doing a pretty good job
shifting away from music, right, but they still hadn't gotten
into what we would call reality yet. And it's about
here that you'll notice we stopped talking about music pretty
much altogether and get into the world of reality TV.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
All right, I guess that means a break, right, Yeah,
all right, we'll be right.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Back, So, Chuck, we talked about how VH one is
(35:10):
transitioning into reality shows and they didn't invent reality shows.
They were a really early contributor and they had a
lot of reality shows over the years, still do. But
they came up with the term celebri reality and I
did not know this, but so celebriality is usually minor
(35:31):
celebrities in a reality show, sometimes big celebrities, but the
whole thing that kicked it off. I didn't know this
was Ted Nugent's celebrity reality show, Surviving Nugent.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, I remember that being on. Didn't watch it, but
that was you know, Ted Nugent had people out to
do what Ted Nugent does, which is shoot guns and
shoot arrows and do things that the Nuge was into.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah, it was like a competition reality show, and he
would have it. He was the arbiter of who stayed
or went, and competitions would be like them carrying manure
with their bare hands or climbing under an electrified fence.
And it was real enough that at one point Ted
Nugent suffered a chainsaw cut to his leg self inflicted
(36:20):
that required forty stitches.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
It's a lot of stitches, it really is.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
But this was not so Again, this was kind of
contemporaneous to The Osborne's which beat Surviving Nugent by a year,
in the same time as The Simple Life, So this
was definitely it was in the air that people wanted
to see celebrities acting bizarrely in real life. And I
just made such air quotes that actually just jammed one
(36:47):
of my fingers, right.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
This real Life became a big hit for them after
they co opted it from the WB A couple of
years after it debuted, it was a much bigger hit
on VH one, and that eventually led to maybe. I mean,
I don't know. I was about to say unlikely, but
maybe not because Flavor. Flav has so much charisma and personality.
I was always so into Public Enemy from like high
(37:13):
school on. They were probably my favorite hip hop group
of all time, and so it was a little weird
for me all of a sudden to see Flave like
doing his thing on a reality show. But The Flavor
of Love was a tremendous hit. It was only around
for a few years, but it was like it invaded
the zeitgeist in a big way.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, and so he became a reality TV star thanks
to The Surreal Life. I think he was in season three,
and one of the other shows he was on was
Strange Love, which followed his relationship with Brigitte Nielsen, who
is a good two feet taller than him, striking blonde
(37:54):
who they fell in love when they met on The
Surreal Life and they shoed orders with Charro, Dave Coolier,
Jordan Knight from New Kids on the Block, and so
that spawned Strange Love and Flavor of Love, and then
Flavor of Love spawned I Love New York, starring Tiffany
(38:15):
New York Pollard, who is one of the contestants on
Flavor of Love. Flavor of Love also inspired Rock of Love,
which featured Brett Michaels from Poison replacing the Flavor flav
as the bachelor. Right.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Yeah, the still the only show like that I've ever watched.
I did watch Rock of Love. Yeah. I don't know
why I started, but I started and I couldn't stop.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
That's the sign of a VH one reality show, right there, buddy.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, for sure. So whoever was pulling the strings, you know,
you know, after the Surreal Life was on and flav
was on, there there was some There was some guy,
some kind of square in the office that was like,
who's this guy with a clock? He's fantastic, right, we
got to get him his own show.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, I know it's nuts, but it worked, for sure.
There were two other big offshoots from the Cereal Life.
I mean there were a cavalcade of them, but there
were some other big shows that came from it. One
was My Fair Brady, which followed Christopher Knight and Adrian Curry.
Christopher Knight was Peter Brady and Adrian Curry and their
(39:22):
unlikely relationship. They met on cereal Life as well.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
And then the site who is She?
Speaker 2 (39:27):
She was a playboy model?
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Ah?
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Okay, And then Salt and Pepper had their own show
because I guess they were on the Cereal Life. I
didn't know that, but they had. They were reuniting or
thinking about reuniting. I guess Pepa was trying to talk
Salt into it, but Salt had had a religious conversion
and was hesitant to take up the hip hop life again.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Oh interesting, Well, it sort of filled a void. As
Livia sort of aptly pointed out that, you know, there
there was a big boom for sitcom about black families
in the nineties and even in the early two thousands,
but then there was sort of a dearth of those
for a little while. So this kind of, you know,
filled that void, and VH one took notice and started
(40:12):
sort of delivering content to Black America and still.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Do yes, and they can take some guff for it sometimes.
In part I saw it best explained on the Route
by Danielle C. Belton and She basically says, they broadcast
for Black Americans, but they're not at all beholden the
Black Americans, so they can do basically whatever they want,
and they very frequently feature stereotypes of black women. It's
(40:37):
like angry and violent and prone to yelling and stuff
like that. So it's like a mixed bag. Yeah, but
however you approach it. As of back in twenty fourteen,
I didn't see any more recent statistics, but in twenty fourteen,
VH one was the number one network in African American households,
followed by BET and the Oprah Winfree Network. We were
(41:00):
definitely doing something that Black America liked.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
They beat Oprah out. Yeah that's that says a lot.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yes it does, and yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Another show that got them a lot of flack eventually
was Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew Pinsky that premier in
two thousand and eight. There's a critic that Olivia found
named Kayleie Donaldson called it perhaps the most evil reality
TV series of all time. You probably know doctor Drew
from Loveline with Adam Carolla early on, and he doctor
Drew is it wasn't his. I guess a real you know,
(41:32):
therapist and trained at treating addiction, so he wasn't just
some some you know, pretty face that they put on TV.
And he claimed that he wanted to make it like
a real, like meaningful show where it was like an
antidote to the cruel, tabloid depictions of these people that
were suffering through addiction. But he, you know, he also
(41:54):
had to deliver an entertaining show, and those two things
could be at odds, and it got a lot of
flat because, like people started dying for their addictions.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, by twenty twenty four to twelve, of by my count,
about forty five rehab patients on the show had died,
a lot of them from like overdosing or direct complications
from their addictions, like brain aneurysms, which is about more
it's a little more than a quarter, which apparently is
(42:23):
actually in line with the success rate of traditional rehab.
It's just much much, much more visible. But it was
also again the l word lurid to just show people's
you know, low points and rock bottom after rock bottom
on TV for money for ad money, you.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Know, yeah for sure, And speaking of lurid, we're loath
to mention Diddy, but there was a show called I
Want to Work for Diddy in two thousand and eight,
and a silver lining of that is that it launched
the career of Laverne Cox and also just launched the
sort of normalization of trans people on TV. A couple
(43:03):
of years after that show, Laverne Cox and fellow trans
women Jamie Clayton and Nina Poon got their own VH
one show called Transform Me. It was kind of a
queer eye for the straight guy kind of thing, but
for CIS women. And it was one of the first
shows with trans stars.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yes, like period and you put all this together and
VH one had its highest Nielsen ratings ever in this
era the late two thousands, the aught as we who
Lived Through It column and then tragedy struck and the
publicity was so searingly bad that VH one essentially through
(43:43):
the company that had been cranking out hit after hit
for them under the bus. And it centered around the
murder by a man named Ryan Jenkins, who had been
a contestant on not one or had been featured on
not one, but two VH one reality shows. He murdered
(44:03):
his wife, Jasmine Fiore.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah, he was a real estate developer. He was a.
You know, they got rich guys to be contestants on
a dating show called Megan Wants to Be I'm sorry,
Megan Wants a Millionaire and fifty one Minds was the
name of this company that was like churning out these shows.
After the show ended, he married Jasmine Fiore and he
(44:28):
got on I Love Money three, another VH one show,
and they said, fifty one months is like, hey, in retrospect,
I remember this storyline we had. It was going to
revolve around him calling his new wife a lot and
seemingly obsessive and jealous and very suspicious, and he ended
up murdering her in August of two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, it got even worse than that. He tried to
prevent her from being identified, so he removed her fingers
and her teeth. He put her, folded her up in
a suitcase, and dump the suitcase in a dumpster. And
I read that it almost worked, but they identified her.
They had to identify her through the serial numbers on
her breast implants. And so all this comes out, and
(45:12):
it's very clear that Ryan Jenkins was to blame. He
hung himself in a motel room, and in his note
even he blames Jasmine Fiori for him killing himself. It
doesn't take any responsibility whatsoever for killing her.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
I remember that now. That's I wasn't familiar, But as
soon as he said that, I kind of remember that storyline.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yes, and all of this happens in one month in
two thousand and nine. And if you were pumping out
lured reality show after lured reality show, your viewership is
going to be highly interested in this story. Yeah, and
it's going to get out, and it's gonna get out
to the rest of America. Who's going to make a
bunch of noise about how terrible these reality shows are.
And here's evidence of it. Because also that Ryan Jenkins guy,
(45:57):
it turned out that he had been convicted in Canada
of assaulting his girlfriend and it didn't show up on
a or he had been arrested, I'm sorry of assaulting
his girlfriend in Canada. Hadn't shown up on a background check.
So people were like, this stuff is terrible, And VH
one said, you know what, we agree. It's all that
company that sent us these shows. We didn't even want them,
(46:20):
We didn't even ask for them. This company fifty one minds,
they just made us run these shows, and they really
threw them under the bus and made it look like
they were turning their back on the whole concept, and
they did largely. There was a huge shift, but there
were still shows like Dating Naked that was on from
(46:40):
twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen, and a lot of their
existing reality shows continued on past this scandal, but they
did shift a little more to reality TV that was
made by black creators. They kind of moved away from
the more lurid stuff to a little more and growth
seeing black created shows.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, RuPaul's Drag Race has been a big hit, sort
of a niche hit, but very very popular show. It's
you know it's RuPaul, so it's campy. It's a parody
of reality competition that launched in two thousand and nine
on Logo but then moved to VH one in twenty
seventeen and then eventually MTV in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
That's a long run.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah. Love and Hip Hop has been a very big
show created by Mona Scott Young. That was It started
out with kind of being about Jim Jones, the rapper,
and then eventually shifted over to his girlfriend Chrissy Lampkin.
And just the hip hop scene in New York in
their world.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Say with Basketball Wives by Shaquille O'Neil's ex wife Shawnee Henderson. Yeah,
Big I just had its twelfth season. And then Nick
Cannon presents wild Nout, which is an improv competition show,
and they're still making new episodes. It started out on
MTV and the move to VH one when in twenty nineteen,
and very much like Ridiculousness, reruns of Wilding Out are
(48:06):
carrying VH one right now, apparently with Fresh Prince of
bel Air and My Wife and Kids reruns.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
I never saw Dating Naked. What was that about?
Speaker 2 (48:15):
It was exactly what it sounds like. Oh okay, exactly.
There's no it needs no explanation whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Okay I was kidding, oh.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Me, and you got me, buddy. I think we're even
for all time now. Okay, good well, Chuck said, okay, good,
And we don't have anything more to say about VH
one except go watch some VH one and that means
it's time for listener meal.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
That's right, by the way, I was not bagging on Wilco.
I hope it didn't come across that way. They are
sort of thrown in that Dad Rock category. But I
always love Wilco. I read all of Jeff Tweety's books,
was big into Uncle Tupelo, so I'm not bagging on Wilco.
I like Wolco.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Jeff Tweety's The Spymaster and The Teen Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Well, yeah, of course, and The Tinker or two is
really good. Hey, Chuck, Josh and Jerry have been listening
for a few years and used to do the sandwich
method for listening to the episodes, but recently decided to
work all my way through and catch up to the present.
I find this is a better method personally, since listener
mail on references for past shows don't really make sense
when listening to newer episodes before listening to the episodes
(49:23):
that came before. AnyWho, this is not why I'm writing it.
I'm not sure if you're aware. But Chuck Stradamus struck
again the episode April twenty six, twenty eighteen. Does pyromania
actually exist? Josh brings up John Leonard or convicted serial arsonist,
mass murdered former firefighter, arsenist investigator, and Chuck around thirty
(49:43):
four to thirty nine says that's a movie waiting to
happen well, my friends. Seven years later, Apple TV releases Smoke,
a TV show based on John Leonard or Wow, yeah,
haven't watched the show, I definitely recommend watching, even though
I've spoiled the plot. Keep up the good work, guys. Ps.
Is Chuck's ability a gift or crazy coincidence? That is
Brenda s from Dallas, Texas and Brenda, I love that
(50:08):
you're getting my back? Is Chuckstra Damas because my past
predictions of Hugh Jackman playing p T. Barnum and most
notably that I thought Jared from Subway was a creep
long before his truth came out.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
Don't forget predicting Sharknado.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
Oh and Sharknado. That's true. That might be the feather
in the cap. But in this case, I don't know
if you can really claim Chucks Stra Dama's territory. If
it's just like, hey, that would make a good movie
and it became a movie.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
I feel like you really just burst Brenda's bubble.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
No, I'm bursting my own bubble. What do you think?
Can I get a ruling from you, dear leader?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I will allow it as one of Chuckstra Dramas's predictions
that came true.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
All right, it's canon, Okay, not Nick Cannon.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
No, we're not wilding out here or not. If you
want to get in touch with us like Brenda and
try your luck at having us burst your bubble and
have a lot of alliteration as we do, you can
send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and this is Stuff you should know. The Adult Contemporary.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Edition Video Hits one.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Yeah, did you remember? That's what the VH did for.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Yeah, And I think that's I think they ran that
little thing. I just did. I think that was their
thing initially. I don't know, I seem to. I don't
know if I just made that up or not, but
I feel like that's something that's stuck in my brain
from the old days.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Well, yeah, from what this research show, that's exactly the
kind of thing they would have run for like the
first ten years.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Yeah. Probably. And this is on VH one, of course,
And it's going to be a great warm up for
the long awaited Judas Priest show tonight that I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Well is that tonight awesome? Man? I hope you have
a bitch in time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
It should be some fun people watching and some good music.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Are you gonna smoke PCP in the parking lot like
that documentary?
Speaker 1 (01:07):
Oh you know it, baby, I got my I ordered
some PCP online and it came in a box labeled
PCP okay, And I opened it up and it said
take two PCPs for best results.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
You go.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
So I think I'm good.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
That sounds legit to me.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, I think I'm all set.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Well, I have a great time. That's cool. Did you
get in touch with Nita Strauss?
Speaker 1 (01:33):
No? No, she may not be stuff you should know
person anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, try waving to her from the audience.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
It's me.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Maybe when you're on PCP you'll just crawl on to stage.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Yeah, maybe you never know. I'm gonna take the recommended too,
So who knows what's gonna happen.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
So we're talking about VH one, which is basically the
opposite of PCP. Yeah, as everyone knows. Who's ever seen
VA one actually if you were around, and it debuted
back in nineteen eighty five. It's just like the older, mellower,
more well again adult contemporary version of MTV, and it
(02:14):
bears a striking resemblance because it was launched by the
same company that launched MTV that hold Werner Brothers, Amex Weirdness. Yeah,
And the one of the big reasons they launched VH
one is because they really wanted to put one of
their competitors, Ted Turner's cable music channel in the ground permanently.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah, and I guess this was before, you know, because
they eventually bought them out. If you remember from the
MTV episode. I do remember I was talking to dear listener.
But that's ok. Oh, I see when I address you,
I address you as your leader.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, so this was before they bought them out, clearly,
because they were essentially saying, hey, cable companies, if you
want another music video station, don't go by Turner's thing. Yeah,
just take VH one for free. If you're getting MTV,
we'll just throw it in.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
Yeah. Before Video Hits one, it was value ad Hits one. Well.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
Yeah, And honestly, what got me about researching this was
they follow similar paths as far as music videos turned
into original programming. But I dare say that VH one
did a better job and stayed more relevant in the
long run.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Uh, yeah, for sure. I mean you can make a
case it's still quite relevant. It's definitely changed its mission dramatically,
but MTV changed its mission as well. And yeah, it's
VH one still relevant. There's no better word to put it.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Yeah, I think they ended up having much bigger shows
when they started doing their original shows and MTV had.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
For sure, and as we'll see every once while, MTV
likes to still poach them because even though VH one
is more relevant, I get the impression that MTV v
is still more powerful in that company.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
Yeah, I'm curious with the dynamic there.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Let's find out anyone who works at MTV or VH
one let us know.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
But like you said, it started out just a few
years later and was you know they launched with Marvin
Gaye singing the National anthem and then Diana Ross and
the very mellower. Well, I guess you lost that love
and feeling was always mellow. But I feel like Daryl
holland John Oates even made it even sort of cornier.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Oh you wanted to hear corny?
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
I was listening to some beautiful music on YouTube this
morning as I was studying, Yeah, and I heard a
instrumental musaic version of Gordon Lightfoot Sundown, and I was like,
Chuck would love this one.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, I probably would have, because every.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Time I hear that song, I hear you doing your
impression of it where you're just like mumbling the words. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Yeah, boy, that's when Canada turned against me personally. Yeah,
and they forgave me. We made up.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
So yeah, it was actually a pretty solid lineup. The
fourth video that they showed was John Lennon's Nobody Told
Me So. That's not a bad way to kick off
a new video channel. And I was looking through the
rest of the I think first ten or twenty or whatever,
and it was just hit after hit and the VJs
that they had again, this is the older sibling or
(05:27):
maybe even like parent.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, like people in their thirties watched vach one. Yeah,
really old people.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Right, people that David Bowie clearly said you couldn't trust
any longer.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
That was who the VJs were. They were untrustworthy former
radio vet's like don Imus.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yeah, Imus was air Frankie Crocker Bowser from Seannahah, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
The best VJ I think of all.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Yeah. Maybe.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
So. There was also a guy named Scott Shannon who
we can thank for creating the Morning Zoo radio show
show format.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
Oh was he the guy?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
He was the guy?
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Yeah, I think his headstone, if he's still around, it
will eventually say sorry.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
Yeah. And it just has a fart machine that you
can press.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
That's not a bad idea, that's really not actually. So
one of the other things that differentiated VH one from
MTV is that, pretty much out of the gate, you
can tell from the first two videos, it was much
more willing to put black artists on its airwaves. Right,
Like we talked about MTV being like almost flat out
(06:36):
accused of racism by the head of CBS Records within
a couple of years of its launch, VH one was
not that. I don't know if they learned the lesson
or if they were just more into music made by
black artists than MTV. I'm not sure, but from the
outset they there was a place where you could see
more black artists for sure.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah, and also a place for comedy. You know, m
TV we lauded some of the sort of sketch shows
and the remote control funny game show. But Rosie O'Donnell
actually got her start as a VJ on VH one
in nineteen eighty five, and a few years later the
pretty good stand up show Stand Up Spotlight was on.
And this was, you know, three or four years before
(07:18):
the Comedy Channel launch which would eventually become Comedy Central.
So there wasn't. You know, HBO was doing some stuff,
but there wasn't a lot of stand up on television
until VH one.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
No, but apparently there already was the half hour comedy
hour on MTV, which I had totally forgotten about. But
do you remember that?
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oh yeah, that was a good hower comedy Hour.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
And then I guess HBO already still had some stuff too,
but for the most part, there wasn't It wasn't crowded
at all. Rosie O'Donnell was an innovator in that sense
for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah. And then their first sort of big original show,
I mean stand up Spotlight did pretty well. But my generation,
I remember in nineteen eighty nine with Peter Noon of
Herman's Hermits hosting and it was, you know, it was
just him DJing and spinning records but also sort of
talking about trivia, kind of like a Turner classic movies
for boomers pretty much.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Yeah, and I was like Herman's Hermits. I know for
a fact, I know that band, but I can't remember
what their big hit was. So I was looking all
over YouTube. I found one of their greatest hits albums,
and I just had to skip through all the songs yeah, no,
that's not it. Never heard that one before. I don't
know who would like this one. And then it finally
got to something tells me I'm into something good.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
Yeah, I know, I knew where your head is.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Yeah, and I know that one from the Romantic montage
and Naked Gun, that's right, And that's my Herman's Hermit story.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
You know, these videos that they were playing on my generation,
a lot of them were just old sort of when
they did promotional videos before the true music video format
came out. But they also played new stuff. There was
plenty of Michael Bolton and crossover stuff. It also was
playing on MTV, the VH one. Would you know plenty
of Rod Stewart obviously, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Rod Stewart, turns out, was to music videos what Enya
is to crossword puzzles, right, like Perennial. Right.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
She just popped up again this week in the crossword?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Did she really?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Oh? Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, that's it just keeps happening.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
That's pretty cool. Yeah, I love this ride for her.
Speaker 1 (09:22):
Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
That was kind of a problem though, is because some
of these acts were already past their prime when they
were showing videos on VH one. They hadn't made videos.
They were they were Their prime came before that whole
marketing tool that we talked about in the MTV episode.
So they would have to piece together things like concert
footage or like you said, maybe even like TV appearances
(09:47):
or something like that, and just basically make like a
an edited version to make a music video for a
particular song. So they VH one was kind of hamstrung
in a lot of ways right out of the gate.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah, and that's all because Peter Noon demanded it right
the tyrant.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Yes, he was quite a tyrant. Everyone knows that. You
don't even have to know the song. Something tells me
I'm into something good to know that Peter Noon was
a tyrant.
Speaker 1 (10:15):
Mid nineties, they found themselves floundering a bit, though, because
they never really got an identity outside of being sort
of the you know, you know, if you were an
MTV kid, you thought VH one was kind of boring
and it was like the stuff your parents might be into,
kind of a little more square. And that's not an identity, no, well,
I know, but that's not an identity that you want
to claim. So they had like a mishmash of different
(10:37):
shows going on. They had a show called Archives that
was just kind of rebroadcasting old TV interviews that they
I guess had rights to m and so, you know,
they just lacked an identity aside from being square. And
they also had the same pressures that MTV had when
with competition coming in and so much so that cable
operators were like, I don't like, I don't want to
(11:00):
even though it's free, I don't want it anymore. Right,
So they were trying to get rid of VH one,
you know actively, I think the biggest cable operator in
the country at the time, Telecommunications Inc. They were like,
I don't even want this free thing.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Yeah, for free, that's pretty sad. That's that's not good. Actually,
it was a dude named John Sykes who essentially saved
VH one.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Yeah. Also iHeart media executive, is he? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Okay, Well, congratulations John Sykes, because he definitely turned VH
one around. He was what you would call a good hire. Yeah,
because in nineteen ninety four they brought him on and
he so changed VH one for the better that in
nineteen ninety five their subscriber base was forty nine million households.
(11:50):
Three years later it was up to sixty two million households.
That's what they call the Sykes effect.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
Yeah, yeah, and he'd walk out of the room and
say you got pyched. They started new original music programming,
and that was really part of the big rebranding effort
that was so successful. Top ten Countdown in ninety four.
Eventually Top twenty Countdown was sort of the big first one.
(12:20):
But in nineteen ninety six they really really hit it
big pop culturally with a little show called pop Up Video.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Yes I remember watching this and it was one of
the things about it. So pop up video if you've
never seen it. They would just show music videos, but
then there were these little kind of like cartoon word
bubbles would pop up with some random fact about the artist,
maybe a little trivia, something about music history or and
(12:51):
this is I think what captured everybody, some sort of
juicy little bit of gossip or random weirdness that had
to do with that specific video. And the two guys
who were behind it, Woody Thompson and Ted Lowe, Apparently
they got pushed back from the parent company because the
parent company also owned Blockbuster, and they knew from owning Blockbuster,
(13:14):
foreign films didn't go anywhere because people didn't like subtitles. Yeah,
so they were like, no one's gonna want to read anything.
But they were very wrong because in large part Thompson
and Lowe were good writers. So this kind of became
known for being a much smarter show than you would
guess it would be.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
Yeah, it was very clever and a huge, huge hit.
Like I remember watching it. I don't remember like setting
my calendar to sit around and make sure I knew
and when it was on, but I definitely found myself
watching it quite a bit. It was a fun show.
Storytellers came out in nineteen ninety six, which was clearly
aimed at the kind of you know, younger boomer maybe
(13:54):
older gen X generation, because they just had classic rock
artists after classic rock artists in an intimate setting, singing songs,
telling stories about the writing of those songs. Very very
popular show.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Yes, And anytime I think of Storytellers, I think of
the Saturday Night Live skit with Neil Diamond.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
I don't think I saw that.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Oh it was Will Ferrell as Neil Diamond, and he
is just off the rails. At one point he says
he's on some dynamite pills. Got his keyboard as Kenny
gave him, and he at one point he said, I
will smack you in the mouth. I'm Neil Diamond, And
it was just bizarre that he made this Neil Diamond character.
But the ironic part of is Neil Diamond was never
(14:37):
on storytellers.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
No, Well, maybe that's how they got away with it.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
It's worth going back and seeing. Man, it's an all
time great sketch.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Better than Robert Gulay. That's pretty good.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, okay, one hundred times, maybe one hundred and twenty five.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Oh wow, you did the mask.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
Legends was another big show that came out that same year,
in nineteen ninety six. This just straight up rock dock stuff,
pretty you know, straightforward, one hour documentary style. Again, you know,
artists like Bowie and Retha Franklin, and you know, the
clash was in there. I mean, you know, still aimed
at that audience. They knew what their bread and butter was,
(15:16):
but they started making kind of good shows to support it.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah. And one reason that John Sykes kind of brought
it back to music videos and then made all this
original music programming is the Boomers to start and then
eventually jen X followed in their footsteps. They kept buying
new music, like they kept listening to music into their
thirties and forties. Previous generations hadn't done that, Like, apparently
(15:40):
you were done with music when you turn thirty because
life sucked and it was serious, and you were in
black and white and if you were a woman, you
were an apron all day. If you were a man,
you just drank scotch all day. You just didn't listen
to music after a certain point and that changed. So
it made sense that you would kind of target those
generations because they also had the most pocket money or
(16:02):
spending money too.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, yeah, I mean new music. That is like the
mad Men. Guys listened to the whatever Artie Shaw or
the whatever orchestra. But there were no guys in the
nineteen fifties in their thirties saying like, what's what's what's
new out there?
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Right?
Speaker 1 (16:18):
What can you turn me on to?
Speaker 2 (16:20):
I remember one of the more disappointing moments I've ever
had in relation to my father was going through his
old record collection and the artist he had the most
forty fives of was Jackie Gleason.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Somehow, at least your dad had records My dad didn't
even listen to music hardly.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Your dad made his own music and his jeep on
a CB.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Yeah, that's true. It was weird, had a weird family.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
He had an old Convoy soundtrack going.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
That's true. He would get I think I mentioned he
would get obsessed with like a song and that's it,
and he'd say, hey, Scott, go record that like seventeen
times in a row on on a tape for me
in Scotty to listen to the seats.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Here's your tape of Hot Blooded seventeen times.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Ninety seven was when it really hit the big time
with behind the music. I think Olivia helped us out
with this went along with the MTV article and she
aptly calls it legends evil twin because these were one
hour documentaries, but they were. It got known very quickly
for being very melodramatic and very juicy with like the dirt,
(17:29):
the stories about what happened, you know, the real gossipy.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Stuff, lurid even I think in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Yeah, and it ran for a long time.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
It did ninety seven to I think twenty fourteen. Yeah,
one of the ones, one of the very famous episodes.
But they had a ton of episodes from bands from
Megadeth to Bette Midler to Notorious Big Yeah. One of
the ones that really kind of infiltrated pop culture though,
was Life Garrett.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
It was like a teen idol in the seventies and
he was reunited in his Behind the Music with a
friend who had become paralyzed from a car crash that
Leif Garrett caused when he was drunk back in the seventies.
And it was very melodramatic and very kind of drippy,
and it just kind of made it out as a meme. Eventually,
(18:21):
I saw Brian on Family Guy they started one of
the episodes. Really, he was just sitting there, I guess,
watching Behind the Music and mouthing along word for word
with the dialogue between Life Garrett and his friend.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Shall we take a break?
Speaker 2 (18:38):
I didn't expect that, but you know what, I love that.
You surprised me. So sure.
Speaker 1 (18:42):
All right, it's nineteen ninety seven. We'll be back to
jump back in time a bit and then go forward
in time a bit. All right, so we're back. We
(19:13):
promised to jump back in time, and we have to
because ninety seven was Behind the Music. But in ninety five,
VH one got into the fashion biz as well as
MTV had done with Cindy Crawford. And when they started,
they partnered up with Vogue magazine to start hosting the
annual Fashion Awards, and that is well, it's well known
because they did a pretty good job with that as
far as the ratings go. But that's also where Derek Zulander,
(19:36):
who we just mentioned. I think in the MTV episode
he appeared for the first time at the Fashion Awards.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Yeah, it was like a pre taped little bit more
or two minute bit. But in the movie Zoolander, he
faces his greatest public humiliation at the VH one Fashion Awards.
So they showed up in the movie, which I just
watched right, I watched recently, and it holds up. Man,
it's pretty funny.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
Yeah. I bet Ruby would like that.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
I bet too. I would. I would definitely show it
to her.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Is it just her kind of silly?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
I think it is a very silly movie.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Ninety seven they launched Save the Music John Sykes. He
was principal for a day at a school in Brooklyn
that had no music program or couldn't get funding, and
that still exists. So that's sort of a feather in
their caps to Save the Music Foundation.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Yeah, I read that they've donated two point eight million
recorders to schools across the country.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Now are you kidding? There's unreal? Are you mocking the recorder?
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Yes? I am chuck.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
Oh. Hey, if you're a recorder maestro out there, just
keep on doing it. Oh, don't listen to Josh.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
No, don't listen to me, and in fact, listen to
me for this part. If you would make us a
music bumper for our ad biaks, that would be awesome.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yeah. Well, if you can get it, well, it'll be
I wish we could put the call out before this
episode came out, because we could put it in this episode.
Speaker 2 (21:07):
I mean we can try.
Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah, maybe I'll do it on the Instagram page. See
what happened? Okay, all right, moving on to politics, right.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
Yeah, apparently Bill Clinton was a big VH one viewer viewer.
He donated one of his old saxophones to the Save
the Music program. Yeah, and they also, I guess, in return,
made a documentary about him, Bill Clinton colon Rock and
Roll President. This was nineteen ninety seven, don't.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Forget that's right. And they also got into the live
Business with their very very successful series of Divas concerts.
The first one was in nineteen ninety eight. I remember
this being a very big deal.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
It is.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yeah, they got Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan,
Carol King, and.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Who else Celine Dion.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
Oh yeah, you can't have a Divas concert in ninety
eight without Selene and pounding her chest.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
No, that's a murderer's row of divas.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Yeah. Absolutely so.
Speaker 2 (22:05):
Even despite all of this reprogramming, very very successful and
popular programming, you could argue that if this wasn't the
golden era of VH one, it was certainly one of
the golden eras. Yeah, cable operators were still dropping VH one.
I guess they hadn't gotten the news yet, right, So
VH one kind of organizes something similar to I Want
(22:28):
My MTV that MTV had used before it started getting
picked up by cable operators. And they actually staged a
protest in Denver because the I guess the cable operator
there had dropped VH one, And they got Don Henley
and John Mellencamp and Jewel to fly out there and protest,
(22:48):
and I guess en route. They were in the air,
and the cable operator got word of what was about
to happen, and they agreed to pick VH one back up.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
They're like Don Henley's coming. I want to mess with
the hen You definitely don't want to mess with Don Hinley. No,
they were pretty successful in getting, like you said, all
those viewers back in to the delight of ad salespeople
because they had that eighteen to forty nine year old
demographic that is so juicy and everyone knows those are
(23:18):
the people that have all the bucks, or at least
back then they did, and so they you know, they
were able to land some big ad dollars. As a
resultant were seemingly thriving.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Yeah, and it didn't hurt that there were plenty of
like new artists who were making the kind of music
that would make a little more sense on VH one
than say MTV, like Natalie Merchant. Celine Dion, as you mentioned,
was enormous at this time. Yeah, probably would not see
a Celenion video on MTV, but she was right at
home on VH one. Yeahlah Bolton, Michael Bolton, alanis probably
(23:52):
straddled the two says like the wallflowers or goo goo
dolls or something like that.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Ooh okay, and these.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Are real deal. I watched some VH one blocks to
come up with some examples, so all of those had
videos on VH one. Everybody, that's the kind of research
you can expect from stuff you should know.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, I think like before dad rock was a term
that was probably the angle what's dead?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
I've not heard that before, so what does it cover?
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Dad rock is kind of like, I know, Wilco gets
thrown in there a lot. It's like, you know, kind
of dudes my age that like used to go to
all the shows, but now just so I could get
out to Wilco like every year, and you know that
kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
I saw this meme on Instagram where it's this girl
sitting in a like a stadium seat and she has
a very unhappy look on her face and it says,
anyone over forty when the third opening band starts to
set up at nine pm. It's so true, man, It's fine,
it just starts too late.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
Yeah, I'm with you. Shows are starting earlier though. I
feel like I read that like these legacy shows that
I'm seeing, all these olds, they're they're they're getting up
on stage at like, you know, opening band at seven,
regular band at eight, out out by nine thirty five.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
Hey, we start at seven promptly. If we ever start,
try to Yeah, if we start later than seven, it's
the venue itself saying please let us hold because we're
making mad cash at the bar.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yeah. It's actually the audience's fault. Yeah, really, because they're
like they're not in yet, They're they're just getting here.
There's a lot of traffic. It's actually traffic's fault.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
And some towns are are worse for it than others.
Some some towns are just like, we know, you're not
going to start while we're getting licker. Sorry.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Yeah, But like with MTV, they would you know, start
sort of changing things and rebranding. These are companies that
just seemingly change the channels, not literally, but change their
programming a lot, and like the names of the channel
change a lot. Yes, Like you know MTV at MTB
two and MTV Classic and VH one kind of did
the same. They had VH one Soul which is now
(25:59):
Bee tol Et Soul, VH one Smooth, which was more
like Kenny G kind of stuff. But then they're like
who wants that, Let's change that VH one Classic Rock
and then just VH one Classic and now it's MTV Classic.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
It is quite a ride for that channel. Yeah, yeah,
VH one smooth. I can't believe that ever made it
outside of the initial meeting.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
Yeah. True.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
So VH one, just like MTV, is like, Okay, if
we can't hold people's attention from video to video, we
got to come up with a different kind of show.
And so they stopped playing videos almost it dropped almost
by fifty percent from ninety nine to twenty twelve. Yeah,
and remember like it had been relaunched in ninety four
(26:43):
as like VH one Music first, and it just wasn't
sustainable at the turn of the millennium, right, So they
started getting into countdown shows. They figured out how they
could keep showing videos. They just needed to adjust it,
put them in a certain kind of package that would
hold your attention a little more. Nothing does that better
(27:04):
than a countdown. And they kicked it off in grand
style with the one hundred Greatest Artists of Rock and Roll,
hosted by none other than Kevin Bacon. Yeah, and this
kicked off their whole great the Greatest Countdowns format, which
started in ninety eight ninety nine, sorry and ran to
twenty twelve.
Speaker 1 (27:25):
Yeah, which you know, I was kind of thinking about it.
They ended up the last episode was forty Greatest Pranks,
Part four, so and I was like, what a weird
kind of thing. But that was right in the middle
of the of the listical revolution. Sure that was going
on online, and this is kind of the same version
of that, because I was like, oh, man, I remember
(27:46):
when you and I were writers for How Stuff Works
back in the day. We were sort of fighting up
against that because it seems like that was what the
Internet became for a period of years, was just list
top ten list list list list list.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
Yeah. I mean, where do you think ten Dumb Criminals
episode came from?
Speaker 1 (28:02):
Yeah? Yeah. And that's one reason why we don't do
a lot of those anymore is because people aren't writing
that kind of stuff anymore. I like to think we
changed with the time.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Yeah. Plus also they can be kind of thin every
once in a while, though it's a good one. I
don't I can't think of any off the top of
my head, but we've done some good top tens that.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Yeah, I mean, they're pretty breezy which I think people
enjoy from time to time for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
So the luridity kind of really started to show itself
a little more with Where Are They Now nineteen ninety
nine show that basically said where are like one hit
wonders in former child stars? What are they doing now?
Let's just peek in on their sad lives and see
what's what?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Yeah, they got into movies. One thing we didn't mention
was MTV Films, which had some pretty successful movies that
they were putting out. I think I remember the movie
Election from Alexander Payne, one of my favorite movies. I
think that was an MTV film. But the h one
didn't fare as well on the movie front. But they
did have one sort of noteworthy one called Two of Us,
(29:06):
which which was okay. It was in two thousand. It
was a fictionalized story about when Paul McCartney and John
Lennon were hanging out in nineteen seventy six, the night
that LORDE. Michael's on SNL on air said if the
Beatles come down here, I'll pay you. I can't remember
it was like a million bucks or something.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
I saw three thousand dollars?
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Was that what it was?
Speaker 2 (29:26):
That's what I saw, which I was like, even in
nineteen seventy six, that wasn't that much money.
Speaker 1 (29:30):
I can't remember. I mean, you can watch the clip
on YouTube and see him say it with his own mouth.
I just didn't have a chance. Yeah, But at any rate,
it was a fictionalized version of them hanging out that night,
which is supposedly a true story, right, that they were
going to come down and play on SNL like you
was it that far from the Dakota what happened? Supposedly
they were two stoned, that's as the story goes at least.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
And by stone do you mean on Heroin?
Speaker 1 (29:56):
Probably no, I think they each took two.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
PCPs as per the instructions. So by this time they
finally dropped pretense this would be VH one we're talking
about again, and they just stopped using the music first
tagline because it was just a boldfaced lie. At this point,
legends ended, pop up videos ended, and it was time
for a new shakeup because John Sykes had done his work,
(30:21):
and so MTV Networks hired a new guy named Brian Grayden,
and he said, we're going to shift more toward pop culture. Right,
We're not even going to show blocks of videos anymore
and countdowns. And he hired a guy named Jeff Old
who was new and he became executive vice president for
programming and production. And the thing that Old brought to
(30:43):
this whole thing following the marching orders to make more
pop culture relevant shows is for he gave his producers
free reign to just you got an idea, put it
on air, and if it works, awesome, if it doesn't whatever.
It's called the agile format of management, where you just
do a bunch of stuff, some of it fails and
you just keep.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
Going, Yeah, I mean, not a bad idea, no.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
And the other thing about it, too, is that kind
of stuff like greenlighting a really easy show idea quickly
usually means you can make it very cheaply. And that
was what they did. They made very very inexpensive shows
that still were very very popular because the concepts were
so good.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
Yeah, and I Love the Eighties was the first big
big hit out of that camp that premiere in two
thousand and two. Not a show I watch much, but
it was one that was almost kind of hard to avoid. Somehow.
I feel like I remember just seeing Michael ian Black
on my screen a lot here and there. I think
he was one of the comedians.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
He was on like a million episodes of it.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
I think, yeah, he did great with that. But it
was comedians and celebrities just sort of you know, it
was like kind of quick clip stuff of them sitting
talking headstyle, well talking and reminiscing about whatever the decade was.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, it's funny. So it was a clip show of
talking heads, and it would frequently end up on Talk Soup,
which was a clip show of talking heads.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, so Talk Soup.
Speaker 2 (32:15):
Would be covering another clip show, but it worked. Talk
Soup was great.
Speaker 1 (32:20):
Yeah, I enjoyed Talk Soup. I Love the Eighties was
based on a BB show that was definitely a little
more serious and sort of recounting the decade. But it
was a big hit again in the eighteen forty nine demographic,
and so they did the I Love the Seventies, I
Love the Nineties they did I Love the New Millennium,
which only covered through two thousand and seven, because it
debuted in two thousand and eight and I think in
(32:42):
twenty fourteen. I Loved the two Thousands was the last
one in the series that ran. Another great show was
called Best Week Ever, and then eventually Best Week Ever
with Paula Tompkins. Yeah, because friend of the show in
our pal Paul was the host where they recounted the
last week and this was a big launching pad for
a lot of great, great comedians.
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Yeah, it was. It was a spinoff from I Love
the Eighties. I think p F. Tompkins was one of
the comedians, one of the frequently recurring comedians on that show.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
Yeah, you want me to list out some comedians who started.
Speaker 2 (33:16):
There, I would love that, Chuck, please please do.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
And I'm not saying that they were not doing anything,
but certainly we're not the household names there are now.
But Nick Krole, Paul Sheer, Doug Benson, Rob Hubel, a
little comedian named John Mulaney, the wonderful Jessica Saint Clair,
Michael Shay, Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswald, and I was
watching some of the Best Week Ever this morning and
(33:42):
Paul's wonderful wife. Have we've spoken about Janey had had
Tompkins was in one of the little bits, and I
had no idea Jane was ever on there. So I'm
I took a screenshot and I'm gonna text it to
her later nice.
Speaker 2 (33:53):
So if it was launched in two thousand and four,
those people's careers did start to take off around that
time or after that, so yeah, it must have been
a huge launching pad for them for sure. Yeah it
was a fun show, but it also goes to show
you all, like all of those names were pretty much
recognizable today. That also is a testament to just how
(34:14):
popular Best Week ever and I love the eighties was.
So v H one was doing a pretty good job
shifting away from music, right, but they still hadn't gotten
into what we would call reality yet. And it's about
here that you'll notice we stopped talking about music pretty
much altogether and get into the world of reality TV.
Speaker 1 (34:37):
All right, I guess that means a break, right, Yeah,
all right, we'll be right.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Back, So, Chuck, we talked about how VH one is
(35:10):
transitioning into reality shows and they didn't invent reality shows.
They were a really early contributor and they had a
lot of reality shows over the years, still do. But
they came up with the term celebri reality and I
did not know this, but so celebriality is usually minor
(35:31):
celebrities in a reality show, sometimes big celebrities, but the
whole thing that kicked it off. I didn't know this
was Ted Nugent's celebrity reality show, Surviving Nugent.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, I remember that being on. Didn't watch it, but
that was you know, Ted Nugent had people out to
do what Ted Nugent does, which is shoot guns and
shoot arrows and do things that the Nuge was into.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Yeah, it was like a competition reality show, and he
would have it. He was the arbiter of who stayed
or went, and competitions would be like them carrying manure
with their bare hands or climbing under an electrified fence.
And it was real enough that at one point Ted
Nugent suffered a chainsaw cut to his leg self inflicted
(36:20):
that required forty stitches.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
It's a lot of stitches, it really is.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
But this was not so Again, this was kind of
contemporaneous to The Osborne's which beat Surviving Nugent by a year,
in the same time as The Simple Life, So this
was definitely it was in the air that people wanted
to see celebrities acting bizarrely in real life. And I
just made such air quotes that actually just jammed one
(36:47):
of my fingers, right.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
This real Life became a big hit for them after
they co opted it from the WB A couple of
years after it debuted, it was a much bigger hit
on VH one, and that eventually led to maybe. I mean,
I don't know. I was about to say unlikely, but
maybe not because Flavor. Flav has so much charisma and personality.
I was always so into Public Enemy from like high
(37:13):
school on. They were probably my favorite hip hop group
of all time, and so it was a little weird
for me all of a sudden to see Flave like
doing his thing on a reality show. But The Flavor
of Love was a tremendous hit. It was only around
for a few years, but it was like it invaded
the zeitgeist in a big way.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
Yeah, and so he became a reality TV star thanks
to The Surreal Life. I think he was in season three,
and one of the other shows he was on was
Strange Love, which followed his relationship with Brigitte Nielsen, who
is a good two feet taller than him, striking blonde
(37:54):
who they fell in love when they met on The
Surreal Life and they shoed orders with Charro, Dave Coolier,
Jordan Knight from New Kids on the Block, and so
that spawned Strange Love and Flavor of Love, and then
Flavor of Love spawned I Love New York, starring Tiffany
(38:15):
New York Pollard, who is one of the contestants on
Flavor of Love. Flavor of Love also inspired Rock of Love,
which featured Brett Michaels from Poison replacing the Flavor flav
as the bachelor. Right.
Speaker 1 (38:31):
Yeah, the still the only show like that I've ever watched.
I did watch Rock of Love. Yeah. I don't know
why I started, but I started and I couldn't stop.
Speaker 2 (38:43):
That's the sign of a VH one reality show, right there, buddy.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, for sure. So whoever was pulling the strings, you know,
you know, after the Surreal Life was on and flav
was on, there there was some There was some guy,
some kind of square in the office that was like,
who's this guy with a clock? He's fantastic, right, we
got to get him his own show.
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Yeah, I know it's nuts, but it worked, for sure.
There were two other big offshoots from the Cereal Life.
I mean there were a cavalcade of them, but there
were some other big shows that came from it. One
was My Fair Brady, which followed Christopher Knight and Adrian Curry.
Christopher Knight was Peter Brady and Adrian Curry and their
(39:22):
unlikely relationship. They met on cereal Life as well.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
And then the site who is She?
Speaker 2 (39:27):
She was a playboy model?
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Ah?
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Okay, And then Salt and Pepper had their own show
because I guess they were on the Cereal Life. I
didn't know that, but they had. They were reuniting or
thinking about reuniting. I guess Pepa was trying to talk
Salt into it, but Salt had had a religious conversion
and was hesitant to take up the hip hop life again.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
Oh interesting, Well, it sort of filled a void. As
Livia sort of aptly pointed out that, you know, there
there was a big boom for sitcom about black families
in the nineties and even in the early two thousands,
but then there was sort of a dearth of those
for a little while. So this kind of, you know,
filled that void, and VH one took notice and started
(40:12):
sort of delivering content to Black America and still.
Speaker 2 (40:16):
Do yes, and they can take some guff for it sometimes.
In part I saw it best explained on the Route
by Danielle C. Belton and She basically says, they broadcast
for Black Americans, but they're not at all beholden the
Black Americans, so they can do basically whatever they want,
and they very frequently feature stereotypes of black women. It's
(40:37):
like angry and violent and prone to yelling and stuff
like that. So it's like a mixed bag. Yeah, but
however you approach it. As of back in twenty fourteen,
I didn't see any more recent statistics, but in twenty fourteen,
VH one was the number one network in African American households,
followed by BET and the Oprah Winfree Network. We were
(41:00):
definitely doing something that Black America liked.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
They beat Oprah out. Yeah that's that says a lot.
Speaker 2 (41:05):
Yes it does, and yeah for sure.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Another show that got them a lot of flack eventually
was Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew Pinsky that premier in
two thousand and eight. There's a critic that Olivia found
named Kayleie Donaldson called it perhaps the most evil reality
TV series of all time. You probably know doctor Drew
from Loveline with Adam Carolla early on, and he doctor
Drew is it wasn't his. I guess a real you know,
(41:32):
therapist and trained at treating addiction, so he wasn't just
some some you know, pretty face that they put on TV.
And he claimed that he wanted to make it like
a real, like meaningful show where it was like an
antidote to the cruel, tabloid depictions of these people that
were suffering through addiction. But he, you know, he also
(41:54):
had to deliver an entertaining show, and those two things
could be at odds, and it got a lot of
flat because, like people started dying for their addictions.
Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, by twenty twenty four to twelve, of by my count,
about forty five rehab patients on the show had died,
a lot of them from like overdosing or direct complications
from their addictions, like brain aneurysms, which is about more
it's a little more than a quarter, which apparently is
(42:23):
actually in line with the success rate of traditional rehab.
It's just much much, much more visible. But it was
also again the l word lurid to just show people's
you know, low points and rock bottom after rock bottom
on TV for money for ad money, you.
Speaker 1 (42:42):
Know, yeah for sure, And speaking of lurid, we're loath
to mention Diddy, but there was a show called I
Want to Work for Diddy in two thousand and eight,
and a silver lining of that is that it launched
the career of Laverne Cox and also just launched the
sort of normalization of trans people on TV. A couple
(43:03):
of years after that show, Laverne Cox and fellow trans
women Jamie Clayton and Nina Poon got their own VH
one show called Transform Me. It was kind of a
queer eye for the straight guy kind of thing, but
for CIS women. And it was one of the first
shows with trans stars.
Speaker 2 (43:20):
Yes, like period and you put all this together and
VH one had its highest Nielsen ratings ever in this
era the late two thousands, the aught as we who
Lived Through It column and then tragedy struck and the
publicity was so searingly bad that VH one essentially through
(43:43):
the company that had been cranking out hit after hit
for them under the bus. And it centered around the
murder by a man named Ryan Jenkins, who had been
a contestant on not one or had been featured on
not one, but two VH one reality shows. He murdered
(44:03):
his wife, Jasmine Fiore.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah, he was a real estate developer. He was a.
You know, they got rich guys to be contestants on
a dating show called Megan Wants to Be I'm sorry,
Megan Wants a Millionaire and fifty one Minds was the
name of this company that was like churning out these shows.
After the show ended, he married Jasmine Fiore and he
(44:28):
got on I Love Money three, another VH one show,
and they said, fifty one months is like, hey, in retrospect,
I remember this storyline we had. It was going to
revolve around him calling his new wife a lot and
seemingly obsessive and jealous and very suspicious, and he ended
up murdering her in August of two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
Yeah, it got even worse than that. He tried to
prevent her from being identified, so he removed her fingers
and her teeth. He put her, folded her up in
a suitcase, and dump the suitcase in a dumpster. And
I read that it almost worked, but they identified her.
They had to identify her through the serial numbers on
her breast implants. And so all this comes out, and
(45:12):
it's very clear that Ryan Jenkins was to blame. He
hung himself in a motel room, and in his note
even he blames Jasmine Fiori for him killing himself. It
doesn't take any responsibility whatsoever for killing her.
Speaker 1 (45:29):
I remember that now. That's I wasn't familiar, But as
soon as he said that, I kind of remember that storyline.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Yes, and all of this happens in one month in
two thousand and nine. And if you were pumping out
lured reality show after lured reality show, your viewership is
going to be highly interested in this story. Yeah, and
it's going to get out, and it's gonna get out
to the rest of America. Who's going to make a
bunch of noise about how terrible these reality shows are.
And here's evidence of it. Because also that Ryan Jenkins guy,
(45:57):
it turned out that he had been convicted in Canada
of assaulting his girlfriend and it didn't show up on
a or he had been arrested, I'm sorry of assaulting
his girlfriend in Canada. Hadn't shown up on a background check.
So people were like, this stuff is terrible, And VH
one said, you know what, we agree. It's all that
company that sent us these shows. We didn't even want them,
(46:20):
We didn't even ask for them. This company fifty one minds,
they just made us run these shows, and they really
threw them under the bus and made it look like
they were turning their back on the whole concept, and
they did largely. There was a huge shift, but there
were still shows like Dating Naked that was on from
(46:40):
twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen, and a lot of their
existing reality shows continued on past this scandal, but they
did shift a little more to reality TV that was
made by black creators. They kind of moved away from
the more lurid stuff to a little more and growth
seeing black created shows.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
Yeah, RuPaul's Drag Race has been a big hit, sort
of a niche hit, but very very popular show. It's
you know it's RuPaul, so it's campy. It's a parody
of reality competition that launched in two thousand and nine
on Logo but then moved to VH one in twenty
seventeen and then eventually MTV in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
That's a long run.
Speaker 1 (47:25):
Yeah. Love and Hip Hop has been a very big
show created by Mona Scott Young. That was It started
out with kind of being about Jim Jones, the rapper,
and then eventually shifted over to his girlfriend Chrissy Lampkin.
And just the hip hop scene in New York in
their world.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
Say with Basketball Wives by Shaquille O'Neil's ex wife Shawnee Henderson. Yeah,
Big I just had its twelfth season. And then Nick
Cannon presents wild Nout, which is an improv competition show,
and they're still making new episodes. It started out on
MTV and the move to VH one when in twenty nineteen,
and very much like Ridiculousness, reruns of Wilding Out are
(48:06):
carrying VH one right now, apparently with Fresh Prince of
bel Air and My Wife and Kids reruns.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
I never saw Dating Naked. What was that about?
Speaker 2 (48:15):
It was exactly what it sounds like. Oh okay, exactly.
There's no it needs no explanation whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (48:23):
Okay I was kidding, oh.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Me, and you got me, buddy. I think we're even
for all time now. Okay, good well, Chuck said, okay, good,
And we don't have anything more to say about VH
one except go watch some VH one and that means
it's time for listener meal.
Speaker 1 (48:42):
That's right, by the way, I was not bagging on Wilco.
I hope it didn't come across that way. They are
sort of thrown in that Dad Rock category. But I
always love Wilco. I read all of Jeff Tweety's books,
was big into Uncle Tupelo, so I'm not bagging on Wilco.
I like Wolco.
Speaker 2 (48:57):
Jeff Tweety's The Spymaster and The Teen Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Well, yeah, of course, and The Tinker or two is
really good. Hey, Chuck, Josh and Jerry have been listening
for a few years and used to do the sandwich
method for listening to the episodes, but recently decided to
work all my way through and catch up to the present.
I find this is a better method personally, since listener
mail on references for past shows don't really make sense
when listening to newer episodes before listening to the episodes
(49:23):
that came before. AnyWho, this is not why I'm writing it.
I'm not sure if you're aware. But Chuck Stradamus struck
again the episode April twenty six, twenty eighteen. Does pyromania
actually exist? Josh brings up John Leonard or convicted serial arsonist,
mass murdered former firefighter, arsenist investigator, and Chuck around thirty
(49:43):
four to thirty nine says that's a movie waiting to
happen well, my friends. Seven years later, Apple TV releases Smoke,
a TV show based on John Leonard or Wow, yeah,
haven't watched the show, I definitely recommend watching, even though
I've spoiled the plot. Keep up the good work, guys. Ps.
Is Chuck's ability a gift or crazy coincidence? That is
Brenda s from Dallas, Texas and Brenda, I love that
(50:08):
you're getting my back? Is Chuckstra Damas because my past
predictions of Hugh Jackman playing p T. Barnum and most
notably that I thought Jared from Subway was a creep
long before his truth came out.
Speaker 2 (50:22):
Don't forget predicting Sharknado.
Speaker 1 (50:25):
Oh and Sharknado. That's true. That might be the feather
in the cap. But in this case, I don't know
if you can really claim Chucks Stra Dama's territory. If
it's just like, hey, that would make a good movie
and it became a movie.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
I feel like you really just burst Brenda's bubble.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
No, I'm bursting my own bubble. What do you think?
Can I get a ruling from you, dear leader?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
I will allow it as one of Chuckstra Dramas's predictions
that came true.
Speaker 1 (50:52):
All right, it's canon, Okay, not Nick Cannon.
Speaker 2 (50:55):
No, we're not wilding out here or not. If you
want to get in touch with us like Brenda and
try your luck at having us burst your bubble and
have a lot of alliteration as we do, you can
send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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