Courtesy MTVFrom 1998-2008, MTV’s live afternoon show TRL was a pop culture behemoth. Artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera made their TV debuts as music artists on the show, which was shot at a studio overlooking Times Square.
Well, this fall, MTV is bringing the program back.
MTV President Chris McCarthy tells The New York Times a new version of the show will debut in October and the network is building a new Times Square studio to serve as the show’s home.
“When you came into Times Square, you would say, ‘Let’s go to MTV,’” he told the paper, now he’s hoping to rekindle that kind of attention for the network.
“If we’re going to come back and reinvent MTV, the studio is a given,” he said. “It is the centerpiece.”
The show took requests and put messages from viewers on screen in an era where social media was just budding, and McCarthy hopes to bring back that sense of connection.
“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,” he said. “We put young people on the screen, and we let the world hear their voices.”
Updates for the social media era will include unique daily content for Instagram and Snapchat.
McCarthy also revealed to the paper that the network is replacing the “Moon Man” Video Music Award statuette with a gender-neutral “Moon Person.”
“Why should it be a man?” Mr. McCarthy told the Times. “It could be a man, it could be a woman, it could be transgender, it could be nonconformist.”
MTV already changed its MTV Movie & TV Awards into one where awards for acting are not given out in gender-based categories.
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