by Lesley Aeschliman

Created on: January 10, 2008

I'm actually old enough to remember a time when the "M" in MTV stood for "music." I don't remember when MTV first actually launched in 1981, but my first exposure to the cable network happened around 1984-1985. Some of the earliest music videos I remember seeing on the network were Madonna's "Material Girl" and REO Speedwagon's "Can't Fight This Feeling."

Things at MTV started to change around 1986-1987, when the network started introducing programs that were not necessarily music-related. My first memory of such a show was Remote Control. It was MTV's first game show, and the trivia questions weren't limited to music. I also remember other non-music related shows such as Kevin Seal Sporting Fool and Totally Pauly. While to me, shows like that were annoying, but they weren't taking away from the music that still made up the core of the network's focus. That was due to the fact that MTV also had a lot of music-related programming and the music videos airing alongside the non-music programming.

However, that would all start to change in 1992, with the introduction of The Real World, which became an instant hit. A year later, MTV introduced another "reality" show called Road Rules. And as time went on, more and more non-music programming such as Celebrity Deathmatch, Aeon Flux, Singled Out, The Jenny McCarthy Show, and other non-music shows started occupying more and more of MTV's schedule. It got to the point where music videos were hardly aired on MTV anymore; in fact, when the late 90's hit, videos were either aired very late at night or as part of Total Request Live (although the videos aired during TRL were not the complete videos, and they were generally squished into a small area of the screen to make room for scrolling text, person on the street interviews (which made it hard to hear the audio for the music video, etc.)

Sadly, I don't see MTV returning to a focus on music anytime soon. The network still seems to be too enamored with shows such as My Super Sweet Sixteen and The Hills.

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