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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the adult contemporary edition.
Video hits one.
Yeah, did you remember that's what the VH stood for?
Yeah.
And I think that's, I think they ran that little thing I just did.
I think that was their, 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.
Well yeah, from what this research showed, that's exactly the kind of thing they would have run for like the first 10 years.
Yeah, probably.
And this is on VH1, 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.
Whoa, is that tonight?
Awesome, man.
I hope you have a bitchin' time.
Yeah, it should be some fun people watching and some good music.
Are you going to smoke PCP in the parking lot like that documentary?
Oh, you know it, baby.
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.
There you go.
So I think I'm good.
That sounds legit to me.
Yeah, I think I'm all set.
Well, have a great time.
That's cool.
Did you get in touch with Nita Strauss?
No, no.
She may not be a Stuff You Should Know person anymore.
Well, try waving to her from the audience.
Yeah, it's me.
Maybe when you're on PCP, you'll just crawl onto stage.
Yeah, maybe.
You never know.
I'm going to take the recommended two, so who knows what's going to happen.
So we're talking about VH1, which is basically the opposite of PCP.
Yeah.
As everyone knows, who's ever seen VH1, especially if you were around when it debuted back in 1985?
It's just like the older mellower.
More well again, adult.
Contemporary version of MTV.
And it bears a striking resemblance because it was launched by the same company that launched MTV.
That whole Warner Brothers Amex weirdness.
And one of the big reasons they launched VH1 is because they really wanted to put one of their competitors, Ted Turner's cable music channel, in the ground permanently.
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 your listener, but that's okay.
Oh, I see.
When I address you, I address you as cheerleader.
Thanks.
I appreciate that.
Uh, yeah.
So this is before they bought them out clearly, because they were essentially saying hey, cable companies, if you want another music video station, don't go buy Turner's thing.
Yeah.
Just take VH1 for free.
If you're getting MTV, we'll just throw it in.
Yeah.
Before video hits one, it was value add hits one.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And honestly, what?
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 VH1 did a better job and stayed more relevant in the long run.
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 VH1 still relevant.
There's no better word to put it.
Yeah, I think they ended up having much bigger shows when they started doing their original shows than MTV had.
For sure.
And, as we'll see every once in a while, MTV likes to still poach them because, even though VH1 is more relevant, I get the impression that MTV is still more powerful in that company.
Yeah, I'm curious with the dynamic there.
Let's find out.
Anyone who works at MTV or VH1, let us know.
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've lost that love and feeling was always mellow.
But I feel like Daryl Hall and John Oates even made it even sort of cornier.
Oh, you want to hear corny?
Sure.
I was listening to some beautiful music on YouTube this morning as I was studying.
Yeah.
And I heard a instrumental Muzak version of Gordon Lightfoot's Sundown.
Oh, boy.
And I was like, Chuck would love this one.
Yeah, I probably would have.
Because every time I hear that song, I hear you doing your impression of it, where you're just like mumbling the words.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Boy, that's when Canada turned against me personally.
Yeah.
And they forgave me.
We made up.
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 10 or 20 or whatever, and it was just hit after hit.
And the VJs that they had – again, this is the older sibling or maybe even, like, parent –
Yeah, like people in their 30s watched VH1.
Yeah.
Really old people.
Right.
People that David Bowie clearly said you couldn't trust any longer.
Yeah, exactly.
That was who the VJs were.
They were untrustworthy former radio vets like Don Imus.
Yeah, Imus was there, Frankie Crocker, Bowser from Sha Na Na.
Yeah, the best VJ, I think, of all.
Yeah, maybe so.
There was also a guy named Scott Shannon who we can thank for creating the Morning Zoo radio show format.
Oh, was he the guy?
He was the guy.
Wow.
Yeah, I think his headstone, if he's still around, it will eventually say, sorry.
Sorry.
Yeah, and it just has a fart machine that you can press.
That's not a bad idea.
That's really not, actually.
So one of the other things that differentiated VH1 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 accused of racism by the head of CBS records within a couple of years of its launch.
VH1 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, there was a place where you could see more black artists for sure.
Yeah, and also a place for comedy.
You know MTV.
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 VH1 in 1985 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 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 VH1.
No, but apparently there already was the half hour comedy hour on MTV, which I had totally forgotten about.
But do you remember that?
Oh, yeah.
That was a good hour comedy hour.
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.
Yeah.
And then their first sort of big original show.
I mean, Stand Up Spotlight did pretty well.
But My Generation, I remember in 1989 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.
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.
Yeah.
I knew where your head is.
Yeah.
And I know that one from the romantic montage in Naked Gun.
That's right.
And that's my Herman's Hermit story.
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.
Yeah.
But they also played new stuff.
There was plenty of Michael Bolton and crossover stuff that also was playing on MTV.
The VH1 would, you know, plenty of Rod Stewart, obviously.
Yeah.
Rod Stewart, turns out, was to music videos what Enya is to crossword puzzles.
Right.
Like perennial, right?
She just popped up again this week in the crossword.
Did she really?
Oh, yeah.
It's funny.
Yeah.
It just keeps happening.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
I love this ride for her.
Yes, that was kind of a problem though, is because some of these acts were already past their prime when they were showing videos on VH1.
They hadn't made videos.
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.
Yeah.
Or, like you said, maybe even like TV appearances or something like that, and just basically make like an edited version to make a music video for a particular song.
So VH1 was kind of hamstrung in a lot of ways right out of the gate.
Yeah, and that's all because Peter Noon demanded it.
Right.
He's a tyrant.
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.
Uh, mid nineties they found themselves floundering a bit though, because they never really got an identity outside of being sort of the you know I.
You know, if you were an MTV kid you thought VH1 was kind of boring and it was like stuff your parents might be into kind of a little more square, but and that's not an identity.
No, I know, but that's not an identity that you want to claim.
So they had like a mishmash of different 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.
And so, you know, they just lacked an identity aside from being square.
And they also had the same pressures that MTV had with competition coming in.
And so much so that cable operators were like I don't, like I don't want to.
Even though it's free, I don't want it anymore.
So they were trying to get rid of VH1 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.
Yeah, for free.
That's pretty sad.
That's not good.
Actually, it was a dude named John Sykes who essentially saved VH1.
Yeah.
Also, I heart media executive.
Is he?
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, congratulations, John Sykes, because he definitely turned VH1 around.
He was what you would call a good hire.
Yeah.
Because in 1994, they brought him on.
And he so changed VH1 for the better that in 1995, their subscriber base was 49 million households.
Three years later, it was up to 62 million households.
That's what they call the Sykes effect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And he'd walk out of the room and say, you got psyched.
They started new original music programming and that that was really part of the big rebranding effort that was so successful.
Top 10 countdown in 94, eventually top 20 countdown in. was sort of the big first one.
But in 1996, they really, really hit it big pop-culturally with a little show called Pop-Up Video.
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 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, And apparently they got pushback from the parent company because the parent company also owned Blockbuster.
And they knew from owning Blockbuster.
Foreign films didn't go anywhere because people didn't like subtitles.
So they were like, no one's going to 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.
Yeah, it was very clever and a huge, huge hit.
I remember watching it.
I don't remember setting my calendar to sit around and make sure I knew when it was on.
But I definitely found myself watching it quite a bit.
It was a fun show.
Storytellers came out in 1996, which was...
Clearly aimed at the kind of you know, younger boomer, maybe 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.
Yes.
And anytime I think of storytellers, I think of the Saturday Night Live skit with Neil Diamond.
I don't think I saw that.
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 that his keyboardist Kenny gave him.
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 it is Neil Diamond was never on Storytellers.
No.
Well, maybe that's how they got away with it.
It's worth going back and seeing, man.
I'll check.
It's an all-time great sketch.
Better than Robert Goulet?
Yes.
That was pretty good.
Yeah.
Okay.
A hundred times, maybe.
125.
Oh, wow.
You did the math?
Yeah.
Legends was another big show that came out that same year in 1996.
This was just straight up rock doc stuff.
Pretty, you know, straightforward one hour documentary style.
Again, you know, artists like Bowie and Aretha 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, but they started making kind of good shows to support it.
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 Gen X followed in their footsteps.
They kept buying new music.
Like they kept listening to music into their 30s and 40s.
Previous generations hadn't done that.
Like apparently you were done with music when you turned 30 because life sucked and it was serious and you were in black and white.
And if you were a woman, you wore 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 spending money too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean new music that is like the Mad Men guys listen to the whatever Artie Shaw or the whatever orchestra.
But there were no there were no guys in the 1950s in their 30s saying like, what's what's what's new out there?
Right.
What can you turn me on to?
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 45s of was Jackie Gleason somehow.
At least your dad had records.
My dad didn't even listen to music hardly.
Your dad made his own music in his Jeep on a CB.
Yeah, that's true.
It was weird.
I had a weird family.
He had an old convoy soundtrack going.
That's true.
He would get, I think I've mentioned, he would get obsessed with like a song and that's it.
And he'd say, hey, Scott, go record that like 17 times in a row on a tape for me.
So he could listen to the same song.
Here's your tape of Hot Blooded 17 times.
Uh, 97 was when it really hit the big time with behind the music.
Um, I think Olivia helped us out with this one, along with the MTV article, and she aptly calls it legends, uh 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 uh the stories about what happened, you know, the real gossipy stuff.
Lurid even, I think, in a lot of ways.
Yeah, and it ran for a long time.
It did, 97 to, I think, 2014.
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 Leif Garrett.
Yeah.
He was like a teen idol in the 70s.
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 70s.
And it was very melodramatic and very kind of drippy.
And it just kind of made it out as a meme eventually.
I saw Brian on Family Guy.
They started one of the episodes.
Oh, really?
He was just sitting there, I guess, watching behind the music and mouthing along word for word with the dialogue between Leif Garrett and his friend.
Shall we take a break?
I didn't expect that, but you know what?
I love that you surprised me, so sure.
All right.
It's 1997.
We'll be back to jump back in time a bit and then go forward in time a bit.
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Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.
On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.
32 lost nuclear weapons?
Wait, stop?
What?
Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.
Who still wore knee pads.
Yes.
It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.
The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.
I'm like, oh, wow.
Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.
What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.
I forgot whose podcast we were doing.
Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.
Let's see how it goes.
Listen to Season 4 of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right.
So we're back.
We promised to jump back in time and we have to because 97 was behind the music.
But in 95, VH1 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 Zoolander, who we just mentioned, I think in the MTV episode he appeared for the first time at the fashion awards.
Yeah.
It was like a pre-taped little bit, one or two minute bit.
But in the movie Zoolander, he faces his greatest public humiliation at the VH1 Fashion Awards.
So they showed up in the movie, which I just watched.
Oh, that's right.
I watched recently and it holds up, man.
It's still pretty funny.
Yeah.
I bet Ruby would like that.
I bet too.
I would definitely show it to her.
It's just her kind of silly, I think.
It is a very silly movie.
97, 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 cap as the Save the Music Foundation.
Yeah, I read that they've donated 2.8 million recorders to schools across the country.
Now, are you kidding?
Or is that real?
I'm kidding.
Are you mocking the recorder?
Yes, I am, Chuck.
Oh.
Hey, if you're a recorder maestro out there, just keep on doing it.
Oh.
Don't listen to Josh.
No, don't listen to me.
In fact, listen to me for this part.
If you would make us a music bumper for our ad breaks, that would be awesome.
Yeah.
Well, if you can get it, well, it'll be.
I wish we could put the call out before this episode came out so we could put it in this episode.
I mean, we can try.
Yeah, maybe I'll do it on the Instagram page and see what happens.
Okay.
All right, moving on.
To politics, right?
Yeah, apparently Bill Clinton was a big VH1 viewer and 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 1997, don't 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 1998.
I remember this being a very big deal, because they got Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan, Carole King and who else.
Celine Dion.
Oh, yeah.
You can't have a Divas concert in 98 without Celine Dion pounding her chest.
No, that's a murderer's row of Divas.
Yeah, absolutely.
So, even despite all of this reprogramming very, very successful and popular programming you could argue that if this wasn't the golden era of VH1, it was certainly one of the golden eras.
Yeah.
Cable operators were still dropping VH1.
I guess they hadn't gotten the news yet, right?
Yeah.
So VH1 kind of organizes something similar to I want my MTV, that MTV had used before it started getting picked up by cable operators.
And they actually staged a protest in Denver because I guess the cable operator there had dropped VH1.
And they got Don Henley and John Mellencamp and Jewel to fly out there and protest.
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 VH1 back up.
They're like, Don Henley's coming.
You don't want to mess with the hen.
You definitely don't want to mess with Don Henley.
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 18 to 49 year old demographic.
That is so juicy.
And everyone knows those are 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 result and were seemingly thriving.
Yeah.
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 VH1 than say, MTV.
Like Natalie Merchant, Celine Dion, as you mentioned, was enormous at this time.
You probably would not see a Celine Dion video on MTV, but she was right at home on VH1.
Yeah, Michael Bolton.
Michael Bolton.
Alanis probably straddled the two.
Same with like the Wallflowers or Goo Goo Dolls or something like that.
Ooh.
Okay.
And these are real deal.
I watched some VH1 blocks to come up with some examples.
So all of those had videos on VH1, everybody.
That's the kind of research you can expect from stuff you should know.
Yeah, I think like before dad rock was a term that was probably the angle.
What's dad?
I've not heard that before.
So what does it cover?
Dad rock is kind of like.
I know Wilco gets thrown in there a lot as, 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.
I saw this meme on Instagram where it's this girl sitting in like a stadium seat and she has a very unhappy look on her face.
And it says anyone over 40 when the third opening band starts to set up at 9 p.m.
It's so true, man.
That's funny.
It just starts too late.
Yeah, I'm with you.
Shows are starting earlier, though, I feel like.
I read that, yeah.
Like these legacy shows that I'm seeing all these olds.
They're getting up on stage at like you know.
Opening band at 7.
Regular band at 8.
Out by 930 945.
Hey, we start at 7 promptly.
If we ever start later.
We try to.
Yeah, if we start later than 7, it's the venue itself saying please let us hold, because we're making mad cash at the bar.
Yeah, it's actually the audience's fault.
Yeah, it really is.
Because they're like, they're not in yet.
They're just getting here.
There's a lot of traffic.
It's actually traffic's fault.
And some towns are worse for it than others.
Some towns are just like, we know you're not going to start while we're getting liquor.
Sorry.
Yeah.
But like with MTV, they would, you know, start sort of changing things and rebranding.
These are companies that just seemingly changed the channels not literally, but changed their programming a lot.
And like the names of the channel change a lot.
Yes.
Like, you know, MTV to MTV2 and MTV Classic and VH1 kind of did the same.
They had VH1 Soul, which is now BET Soul.
VH1 Smooth, which was more like Kenny G kind of stuff.
But then they're like, who wants that?
Let's change that to VH1 Classic Rock and then just VH1 Classic.
And now it's MTV Classic.
It's quite a ride for that channel.
Yeah.
Yeah, VH1 Smooth, I can't believe that ever made it outside of the initial meeting.
Yeah, true.
So VH1, 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.
It dropped almost by 50% from 1999 to 2012.
Wow.
And remember it had been relaunched in 94 as VH1 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 than a countdown.
Yeah.
And they kicked it off in grand style with the 100 Greatest Artists of Rock and Roll, hosted by none other than Kevin Bacon.
Yeah.
And this kicked off their whole The Greatest Countdowns format, which started in 99 and ran to 2012.
Wow.
Yeah, which, you know, I was kind of thinking about it.
They ended up – the last episode was 40 Greatest Pranks Part 4.
So – and I was like, what a weird kind of thing.
But that was right in the middle of the listicle 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 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 lists, top 10 lists lists lists lists, lists.
Yeah.
I mean, where do you think our 10 dumb criminals episode came from?
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 change with the time.
Yeah, plus also they can be kind of thin.
Every once in a while, though, it's a good one.
I can't think of any off the top of my head, but we've done some good top 10s.
Yeah, I mean, they're pretty breezy, which I think people enjoy from time to time.
For sure.
So the luridity kind of really started to show itself a little more with Where Are They Now, a 1999 show that basically said where are one-hit wonders and former child stars?
What are they doing now?
Yeah. let's just peek in on their sad lives and see what's what.
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 VH1 didn't fare as well on the movie front, but they did have one sort of noteworthy one called Two of Us, which was okay.
It was in 2000.
It was a fictionalized story about when Paul McCartney and John Lennon were hanging out In 1976, the night that Lorne Michaels 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.
I saw $3,000.
Was that what it was?
That's what I saw, which I was like, even in 1976, that wasn't that much money.
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, it wasn't that far from the Dakota.
What happened?
Supposedly, they were too stoned.
That's as the story goes, at least.
And by stoned, you mean on heroin, probably.
No, I think they each took two PCPs.
Oh, there you go.
As per the instructions.
Yeah, yeah.
So by this time, they finally dropped pretense.
This would be VH1 we're talking about again.
And they just stopped using the music first tagline because it was just a boldface 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.
And so MTV Networks hired a new guy named Brian Graydon.
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 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 project management where you just do a bunch of stuff.
Some of it fails and you just keep going.
Yeah.
I mean, not a bad idea.
No.
And the other thing about it too, is that kind of stuff like green lighting 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.
Yeah.
And I Love the 80s was the first big, big hit out of that camp that premiered in 2002.
It was 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.
He was one of the comedians.
He was.
He was on like a million episodes of it, 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 head style talking and reminiscing about whatever the decade was.
Yeah, it's funny.
So it was a clip show of talking heads and it would frequently end up on TalkSoup, which was a clip show of talking heads.
Yeah.
So TalkSoup would be covering another clip show, but it worked.
TalkSoup was great.
Yeah, I enjoyed Talk Soup.
I Love the 80s 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 1849 demographic.
And so they did the I Love the 70s, I Love the 90s.
They did I Love the New Millennium, which only covered through 2007 because it debuted in 2008.
And I think in 2014, I Love the 2000s was the last one in the series that ran.
Right.
Another great show was called Best Week Ever and then eventually Best Week Ever with Paul F Tompkins.
Yeah.
Because friend of the show and our pal Paul was the host where they recounted the last week.
And this was a big launching pad for a lot of like great, great comedians.
Yeah, it was.
It was a spinoff from I Love the 80s.
I think P.F.
Tompkins was one of the comedians, one of the frequently recurring comedians on that show.
Yeah.
You want me to list out some comedians who started there?
I would love that, Chuck.
Please, please do.
And I'm not saying that they were not doing anything, but certainly were not the household names they are now.
But Nick Kroll.
Okay.
Paul Scheer, Doug Benson, Rob Hubel, a little comedian named John Mulaney, the wonderful Jessica St.
Clair, Michael Shea, Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswalt.
And I was watching some of Best Week Ever this morning.
And Paul's wonderful wife who we've spoken about, Janie Haddad Tompkins, was in one of the little bits.
And I had no idea Janie was ever on there.
So I took a screenshot and I'm going to text it to her later.
Nice.
So if it was launched in 2004, those people's careers did start to take off around that time or after that.
So 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 of those names were pretty much recognizable today.
That also is a testament to just how popular Best Week Ever and I Love the 80s was.
So VH1 was doing a pretty good job shifting away from music, right?
But they still hadn't gotten into what we would call reality yet.
Right.
And it's about here that you'll notice we stop talking about music pretty much altogether and get into the world of reality TV.
All right.
I guess that means a break.
Right?
Yeah.
All right.
We'll be right back.
All right.
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Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.
On our new season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.
32 lost nuclear weapons.
Wait, stop?
What?
Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.
Who still wore knee pads.
Yes.
It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.
The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.
I'm like, oh, wow.
Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.
What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.
I forgot whose podcast we were doing.
Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.
Let's see how it goes.
Listen to Season 4 of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So Chuck, we talked about how VH1 is 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 celeb-reality.
And I did not know this.
But so celeb-reality is usually minor 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.
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.
Yeah, it was like a competition reality show.
And he would have, 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.
Yeah.
And it was real enough that at one point, Ted Nugent suffered a chainsaw cut to his leg, self-inflicted, that required 40 stitches.
It's a lot of stitches.
It really is.
But this was not so again.
This was kind of contemporaneous to the Osbournes 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 I actually just jammed one of my fingers.
Right.
Yeah.
The Surreal 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 VH1.
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.
Yeah.
I was always so into Public Enemy from like high 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 Flav like doing his thing on a reality show.
But the 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.
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, who they fell in love when they met on The Surreal Life.
And they shared quarters with Charo, Dave Coulier, 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, New York Pollard, who is one of the contestants on Flavor of Love.
Flavor of Love also inspired Rock of Love, which featured Bret Michaels from Poison, replacing the Flavor Flav as The Bachelor right.
Yeah, 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.
That's the sign of a VH1 reality show right there, buddy.
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 kind of square in the office.
It was like, who's this guy with a clock?
He's fantastic.
Right.
We got to get him his own show.
Yeah, I know.
It's nuts, but it worked for sure.
There were two other big offshoots from The Surreal 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 unlikely relationship.
They met on Surreal Life as well.
And then who is she?
She was a Playboy model.
Ah, okay.
And then Salt-N-Pepa had their own show, because I guess they were on The Surreal Life.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that.
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.
Wow, interesting.
Well, it sort of filled a void, as Livia sort of aptly pointed out, that...
You know there was a big boom for sitcoms about black families in the 90s and even in the early 2000s.
But then there was sort of a dearth of those for a little while.
So this kind of, you know, filled that void.
And VH1 took notice and started sort of delivering content to black America and still do.
Yes.
And they can take some guff for it sometimes.
In part, I saw it best explained on The Root by Danielle C. Belton.
And she basically says they broadcast for Black Americans but they're not at all beholden to Black Americans.
So they can do basically whatever they want.
And they very frequently feature stereotypes of Black women.
It's like angry and violent and prone to yelling and stuff like that.
So it's like a mixed bag.
But however you approach it back in 2014 I didn't see any more recent statistics, but in 2014, VH1 was the number one network in African-American households, followed by BET and the Oprah Winfrey Network.
So they were definitely doing something that black America liked.
They beat Oprah out.
Yeah, that says a lot.
Yes, it does.
And BET.
Yeah, for sure.
Another show that got them a lot of flack eventually was Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew Pinsky.
That premiered in 2008.
There's a critic that Livia found, named Kaylee Donaldson, called it perhaps the most evil reality TV series of all time.
You probably know Dr. Drew from Loveline.
With Adam Carolla early on and he, Dr Drew is, was and is, I guess, a real, you know 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.
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 had to deliver an entertaining show.
And those two things could be at odds.
And it got a lot of flack because like people started dying from their addictions.
Yeah.
By 2024, 12 of, by my count, about 45 rehab patients on the show had died.
A lot of them from like overdosing or direct complications from their addictions, like brain aneurysms.
Yeah, which is a little more than a quarter, which apparently is 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 low points and rock bottom after rock bottom on TV for money, for ad money, you know.
Yeah, for sure.
And speaking of Laura, we're loathe to mention Diddy, but there was a show called I Want to Work for Diddy in 2008.
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 of years after that show, Laverne Cox and fellow trans women, Jamie Clayton and Nina Poon, got their own VH1 show called Transform Me.
It's 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.
Yes.
Like period.
And you put all this together and VH1 had its highest Nielsen ratings ever in this era.
The late 2000s.
The aughts, as we who live through it call them.
And then tragedy struck, and the publicity was so searingly bad that VH1 essentially threw 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 VH1 reality shows.
He murdered his wife, Jasmine Fiore.
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 or, I'm sorry, Megan Wants a Millionaire.
And 51 Minds was the name of this company that was like churning out these shows.
After the show ended, He married Jasmine Fiore and he got on I Love Money 3, another VH1 show.
And they they said 51 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 2009.
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 dumped 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 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 Fiore for him killing himself.
It doesn't take any responsibility whatsoever for killing her.
I remember that now.
I wasn't familiar, but as soon as you said that, I kind of remember that storyline.
Yes.
And all of this happens in one month in 2009.
And if you are pumping out lurid reality show after lurid reality show, your viewership is going to be highly interested in this story.
It's going to get out and it's going to get out to the rest of America is 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.
It turned out that he had been convicted in Canada of assaulting his girlfriend and it didn't show up on 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 VH1 said, you know what?
We agree.
It's all that company that sent us these shows.
We didn't even want them.
We didn't even ask for them.
This company, 51 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.
Yeah.
And they did, largely.
There was a huge shift.
But there were still shows like Dating Naked that was on from 2014 to 2016.
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 engrossing Black-created shows.
Yeah.
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 2009 on Logo, but then moved to VH1 in 2017 and then eventually MTV in 2023.
That's a long run.
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 and their world.
Same with Basketball Wives by Shaquille O'Neal's ex-wife, Shawnee Henderson.
Yeah, big hit.
It just had its 12th season.
And then Nick Cannon presents Wild N' Out, which is an improv competition show.
And they're still making new episodes.
It started out on MTV and then moved to VH1 in 2019.
And very much like Ridiculousness.
Reruns of Wild N' Out are carrying VH1 right now, apparently with Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and My Wife and Kids reruns.
Yeah.
I never saw Dating Naked.
What was that about?
It was exactly what it sounds like.
Oh, okay.
Exactly.
It needs no explanation whatsoever.
Okay.
I was kidding.
Oh, man, 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 VH1 except go watch some VH1.
And that means it's time for Listener Mail.
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 loved Wilco.
I read all of Jeff Tweedy's books.
I was big into Uncle Tupelo, so I'm not bagging on Wilco.
I like Wilco.
Jeff Tweedy's The Spymaster and The Tinkerer?
Yeah, of course.
And The Tinkerer, too, is really good.
Yeah.
Hey, Chuck, Josh, and Jerry.
I've been a listener 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 and references for past shows don't really make sense when listening to newer episodes before listening to the episodes 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 26, 2018.
Does pyromania actually exist?
Josh brings up John Leonard Orr, convicted serial arsonist, mass murdered, former firefighter arsonist, investigator.
And Chuck, around 34, 39, 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 Orr.
Wow.
If you 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 a crazy coincidence?
That is Brenda S. from Dallas, Texas.
And Brenda...
Barnum and most notably that I thought Jared from Subway was a creep long before his truth came out.
Don't forget predicting Sharknado.
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 Chuck Stradama's territory, if it's just like hey, that would make a good movie.
And it became a movie.
I feel like you really just burst Brenda's bubble.
No, I'm bursting my own bubble.
What do you think?
Can I get a ruling from you, dear leader?
I will allow it as one of Chuck Stradamus' predictions that came true.
All right.
It's canon.
Okay.
Not Nick Cannon.
No.
We're not wilding out here.
We're 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 stuffpodcasts at iheartradiocom.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to our new podcast.
We're rewatching the series from start to finish and talking to iconic guests like Betty herself, America Ferreira.
There was this moment when the glasses went on and it was like, this is our Betty.
Listen to Viva Betty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When news broke earlier this year that baby KJ, a newborn in Philadelphia, had successfully received the world's first personalized gene editing treatment, it represented a milestone for both researchers and patients.
But there's a gripping tale of discovery behind this accomplishment and its creators.
I'm Evan Ratliff and, together with biographer Walter Isaacson, we're delving into the story of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, the woman who's helped change the trajectory of humanity.
Listen to Aunt CRISPR, the story of Jennifer Doudna with Walter Isaacson on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Michael Lewis here.
My bestselling book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and burst of the US housing market back in 2008.
A decade ago, The Big Short was made into an Academy Award winning movie.
Now I'm bringing it to you for the first time. as an audiobook narrated by yours truly.
The Big Short story what it means to bet against the market and who really pays for an unchecked financial system is as relevant today as it's ever been.
Get The Big Short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
