What Happened To Vh1?

By Ned Hepburn on March 27th, 2009

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What the hell happened to Vh1? It used to be pretty quaint music videos with the occasional Behind The Music thrown in. Now it’s a clusterfuck of sadness and trainwreckery. It’s so bad, in fact, that it’s become one of the must-watch channels simply because of how bad everything is on it.

1) Let’s start with the cringe inducing I Love Money, which pits people together to do sad and shameful things and lie and cheat their way to a jackpot.
2) Or how about Rock Of Love, which showcases Brett Michael’s (aka The Guy Who Was In Poison 23 years ago) uncanny knack for hitting on skanks.
3) Celebrity Rehab follows D and Z-list celebrities into a rehab where – guess what! They all live together and fight and argue. Hint: It’s not really about the rehab.
4) Tool Academy. Which is about guys being dicks to their girlfriends.
5) Charm School. Pretty much the same thing as above. Blah blah. You get what I’m talking about?

And that’s just five shows, although the ENTIRE channel now is full of “talking heads live together and compete for money and get voted off” shows. I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad. I hate watching it, but I can’t stop. The constant ads for diet pills, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and work out machines only make you think about who the channel is trying to aim for: couch potatoes. And they’re succeeding with their one-two punch of a formula. Ad sales are through the roof: it’s the one channel that people seem to keep coming back to. It’s like bad pizza: when there’s nothing else, you’ll think its not so bad at all.

What’s strange is all the shows are shot in the same manner, with almost the same shots in all of them. Think about it: the quick edits, similar house layouts, and the same 6 or 7 sweeping shots of the outside of the house.

It was an experiment in popculturalism that seems to have gone weird at some point, because after Pop Up Video went off the air the whole channel seemed to go downhill. Pretty soon Behind The Music became a once a month thing, and now videos are practically non-existent: relegated to either very early in the morning or very late at night. It’s a shame. It used to be the half decent alternative to MTV once MTV stopped showing music videos: now there’s pretty much no channel that shows the once great form of music videos.

It’s a shame. Now it’s just trying to shock us by parading skanks all over the place. What happened, VH1? You used to be valid.