MTV is Bringing ‘TRL’ Back

2017-08-03

Story by Charles Ken

MTV is inching itself back to being music-focused with the return of ‘TRL’

You know all of those jokes about how MTV, Music Television, doesn’t play music videos anymore? Well, it looks like the music is coming back—at least regarding one show.

MTV’s popular “TRL” program originally ran as a live afternoon show ran from 1998 through 2008. It featured interviews with musicians, pop artists, music videos and more all in a picturesque Times Square studio.

The president of MTV, Chris McCarthy, tells The New York Times that a new season of “TRL” will kick off in October. The network is building a new Times Square studio for the show.

“When you came into Times Square, you would say, ‘Let’s go to MTV,’” he said in the interview.

“If we’re going to come back and reinvent MTV, the studio is a given,” he added. “It is the centerpiece.”

While the originally “TRL” shut down right when social media was getting going, the new version of the program will actively engage social media, such as Instagram and Snapchat.

“MTV at its best — whether it’s news, whether it’s a show, whether it’s a docu-series — is about amplifying young people’s voices,” McCarthy said. “We put young people on the screen, and we let the world hear their voices.”
MTV, according to McCarthy, is also replacing the “Moon Man” Video Music Award statue with a gender-neutral “Moon Person.”

“Why should it be a man?” Mr. McCarthy said in the Times interview. “It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be transgender, it could be nonconformist.”

Charles Ken
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