LAWRENCE, Kan. – After three years of coming close, MTV has finally taken one last plunge toward ruining the last shred of its original self. The cable network’s long-running Video Music Awards took a nose dive Sunday night with drastic changes to format and location, not to mention a level of payoff-less manufactured hype that would make Fox chief Rupert Murdoch blush.

After introducing the VMAs in 1984, only three years after the network’s inception, the awards grew to become a legitimate event with actual awards, known for memorable performances and surprise appearances. More recently, the show became a rare break in MTV’s schedule of non-music-related programming to pay homage to the very form that put it on the map. From time to time, there might have even been some actual anticipation of who would win the unique Moonman statues. But all that has changed.

Filed under:
Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. — Saturday Night Live may have suffered one of the biggest losses in the show’s 32-year history. The show returned last weekend without director Beth McCarthy Miller calling the shots, for the first time in 11 years. Reports from USA Today and Variety have been unclear about who made the decision to end McCarthy Miller’s reign as director, and it’s even more baffling how Don Roy King was chosen as her replacement.

McCarthy Miller came to SNL after rising to the rank of senior director at MTV before leaving to direct The Jon Stewart Show, whose short lifespan perfectly coincided with the late Dave Wilson’s retirement from SNL. Wilson’s departure, however, appeared to have been far more premeditated as a live shot in the control room showed him salute at the close of the 1994-95 season finale. McCarthy Miller had no such curtain call.

Filed under:
Late Night TV, Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Television by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. — Despite correcting some errant judgment from the last couple of years, MTV’s recently-announced lineup for its upcoming Video Music Awards still leaves much to be desired. While the cable network has returned the VMAs to Thursday night instead of Sunday and back to it’s home in New York City, both of which are for the first time in two years, scheduling may have kept MTV from getting the director it deserves. With this year’s VMAs occurring within days of the Emmy Awards, the show’s last three directors – Beth McCarthy Miller, Louis J. Horvitz and Bruce Gowers – are all unavailable because of their nominations for Outstanding Directing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program. Horvitz is also directing the Emmy Awards telecast. MTV, therefore, had to hire UK director Hamish Hamilton for its longest-running award show. Hamilton, who has directed the MTV Europe Music Awards as well as countless music DVDs, has no doubt made a name for himself internationally, but his ability to cut a show on the fly is still debatable. His style of employing erratic camerawork and cutting often results in a jarring visual chaos that is, at the very least, unsettling. He was the director behind the Live 8 performances in London, of which I was very critical, and has directed the last few U2 concert DVDs. If his style remains unchanged, this year’s VMAs could be dizzying, but I will gladly eat my words if he proves me wrong.

Filed under:
Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial by Scott A. Winer

ROSWELL, Ga. — After a series of poor live programming decisions by MTV, such as the Live 8 debacle, the 2004 MTV Movie Awards and Video Music Awards, and the Super Bowl XXXVIII Halftime Show, the cable network seems to be headed back on the right track for the upcoming Video Music Awards.

For the second straight year the show will be on a Sunday at the American Airlines Arena after having been held on Thursdays for the past several years in either New York or Los Angeles at various locations, including Radio City Music Hall, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center and the Universal Amphitheatre.

Filed under:
Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Television by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. – I’ve needed a couple of weeks to recover from the unfortunate event known as Live 8. It seems every media outlet has weighed in, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t share my own thoughts.

First of all, it was painfully obvious that MTV and VH1′s July 9th re-broadcasts of two consecutive, commercial-free five-hour blocks of Live 8 performances (one block on VH1 followed by another on MTV) were responses to the overwhelming number of scathing reviews of their previous week’s telecast of the concerts on July 2, 2005. It was not out of generosity to their audience, as they would have liked people to believe. They made some big time errors that they couldn’t rectify until a week later.

Filed under:
Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Television by Scott A. Winer

LAWRENCE, Kan. — This morning, as I was driving from Kansas City to Lawrence in my car “Black Beauty,” who will travel her 222,000th mile this week, listening to D.H.T.’s remake of the Roxette song “Listen To Your Heart” on the radio, I began to get nostalgic. Reflecting on the good old days before “pop” and MTV came in and practically decimated music and my beloved medium of television.

I wonder if most teens even realize that the MTV is an abbreviation for Music Television. What music?! It has instead become a brand that seeks to capitalize off of all that is “pop,” more recently accepting the responsibility of defining “pop” – music and culture – in the first place. With the notable exceptions of Beth McCarthy Miller, Carson Daly and Jon Stewart, MTV has produced mediocrity in massive quantities, people with no hope for survival in broadcast television. The network has become far too big, no longer emphasizing music as it was intended to when it launched in the early 1980′s.

Filed under:
Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Television by Scott A. Winer

ROSWELL, Ga. – SNL wrapped up its 30th season with an unfortunate performance by both the on and off-air crew. The writing continued to lag, as writing supervisor Paula Pell ended her time at the show. One careless tech mistake in a UPN parody and questionable staging for Coldplay ended the show’s third decade in disappointing fashion. Despite NBC’s stellar coverage of the triumphant display by Afleet Alex in the 130th running of The Preakness Stakes, led by producer David Michaels and director John Gonzalez, at Maryland’s Pimlico Race Course, the SNL finale fell short of an otherwise superb day for the network. Whether producer Steve Higgins is where the change must be made is for the show’s creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels to decide. Since the departure of Tim Herlihy in the late-1990s, Higgins has been at the helm with director Beth McCarthy Miller. McCarthy Miller, who dodged the bullet of being the director behind the disastrous Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, has remained in good standing at SNL although she was passed over by alma mater MTV for the 2004 Video Music Awards. She deserves to remain in her position on the show, but better musical guests need to be booked throughout the season in order to ensure that she has good material to work with. Furthermore, tech errors must be addressed before the show converts to high definition in coming years.

Filed under:
Late Night TV, Music/Variety, Opinion/Editorial, Sports TV, Television by Scott A. Winer