To you at home, the person that maybe has never been to New York, to stand outside the studio and scream, to come and sit in these chairs, to be this close to the guests, the ones that I've talked to every day just like this, and you've been here with music changes, etc.

Thank you for being here. Enough of me. It's a thousand show. Here's to a thousand more.

We have a great show for you today. In 2003, the show that had become MTV's flagship show, Total Request Live, aird its 1,000th episode. It was still appointment television for young viewers. Even as the boy bands broke up and Justin Timberlake went solo and Christina Aguilera got dirty with two R's, so you knew she meant it. Mtv was faced with a challenge it had faced before, how to reach a new micro-generation of young viewers. But in the wake of TRL, the network was programming for 13-year-olds instead of the college students and young adults that it had once targeted. And the 13-year-olds of 2003 were a little different from the 13-year-olds of They weren't as into the boy bands as their big sisters. And they'd grown up with computers, chat rooms, AOL instant messenger. Social media would be right around the corner. The kids were ready. The executives at Viacom, the massive media conglomerate that now owned MTV, were not. On this episode, we'll take a look at the bus that MTV missed in the early '80s, the unexpected journey it ended up taking instead, and how the very things it brought to the culture were about to be the things that precipitated its decline.

I'm Dave Holmes, and this is Who Killed the Video Star. In the years after the 1992 premiere of The Real World, though it was obvious how much less expensive unscripted television was to produce, pretty much only MTV was doing it. The Real World spinoff, Road Rules. The Road Rules spinoff, The Real World Road Rules Challenge. Mtv did documentary-style programming, focusing on musicians, like making the video or Cribs, or focusing on their fans, like Fnatic. And that was pretty much that, except for Jackass, which if you've seen Jackass, you that there is nothing that I can do with my words, nothing our editors can do with sound clips to do it any justice. Just find Jackass wherever it's streaming and watch it and don't get any stupid ideas. But in 2000, CBS aird a competition show called Survivor. Survivor was intense. Survivor participants had to live on an island, kill and cook their own food, treat their own injuries, put themselves in situations that made you have to read the words Supper Rating Wound in the entertainment section. Survivor was like nothing else that had ever been on television before, and viewers ate it up like so many island rats cooked over a fire.

The ratings were huge. Within a couple of months, everyone had their copycat show, and within a couple of years, there was pretty much nothing else on TV. What we were now calling reality television was all over the programming grid. Every major network had its own massive franchise, American Idol on Fox, Fear Factor on NBC, The Bachelor on Reality. Reality was the industry buzzword, the way extreme had been just a few years before. But the big ones were typically elimination shows, everyday hopefuls competing for Fame or a Million Dollars or the chance to be engaged to some guy for a while. What nobody had tried, not yet, was a reality sitcom. As head of programming for MTV, Brian Graydon greenlit the first one.

Meet the perfect American family.

Jack, stop telling people your audio is going to get into place because you're a fucking loser.

The Osborns.

That's one that you could feel going in, especially when I saw the dailies. And the first footage I saw, we didn't really know what the show was going to be. We just sent cameras to their house because we thought they were so insanely entertaining in real life. They had been featured on a small segment of Cribs where we had first seen the dynamic amongst the four primary family members, and that's what inspired us. When the first dailies came back, we literally had Sharon throwing ham over the fence at her neighbors.

Darling, the wicked witch has nothing on me.

You're already living next to the neighbor from help. Come on, cocky little Englishman.

And that was just gold. You can't tell someone to do that on reality TV. It's either authentic or it's not. I don't think any of us thought it would be the biggest show in the history of MTV, which it was to that point.

The Osborns got ratings, and those ratings grew. The premiere of its second season got 6.6 million viewers. While even at its peak, TRL mostly hovered at just under one million, and it was pulling in an audience was a little bit older. Damian Fahee was just starting his VJ career in 2003.

The biggest fan of the Osborns that I knew at the time was my mother. She was obsessed with the Osborns. She met Ozzie when he came by and Sharon, and she was like, Oh, my God. She just loved the show. But that's interesting that I always thought it was such a show for young people, but it definitely reached an older audience.

The controversy before that one on the air was that we were putting on a 50 plus a 10-year-old rock star, and MTV really thought of themselves as a channel for 25-year-olds, and we avoided anybody who was, God forbid, over 36. That was the controversy of whether or not we should put somebody in the role of a father who was that old on TV.

In the wake of the Osborns, celebrities found a new way to stay celebrities by having a camera crew follow them around and just hoping for the best. It didn't always work.

The challenge was, even the most A-level artists don't necessarily good television as themselves. Jay-z can write the most amazing lyrics on the earth, but he's unlikely to be a great reality television star. And so a lot of times we would opt for somebody like nick and Jessica, who were arguably at the time more B-list than a list, but the dynamic was so interesting that they made good TV. I think there was a period where every celebrity thought, Well, just give me a half hour, and it was never quite that easy.

With the Osborns and then newlyweds, MTV's ratings were stronger and more consistent than they had ever been. But the programming had less and less to do with music, much less music video. Vjs like me and Damian didn't want to believe it, but the ratings didn't lie. And the ratings told MTV that a focus on music wasn't sustainable anymore.

Mtv just didn't get heavy into reality because they wanted to get heavy into reality. They were seeing rating success, and executives are going to chase ratings so the Ed sales department can do their thing. And it started to feel, A, like we were shedding, having a musical identity. And then it started to feel like a business.

In 2003, my contract at MTV ran out. The last show I worked on for the network was called Kidnapped. It was in studio, five day a week fear factor for kids. Every time one of your friends makes a mistake, we are going to punish you by having our sadistic evil clown throw a pie in your face. Let's put two minutes on the clock. I really don't want to talk about it. When we get back, we'll talk about the big hits of the highest rated years in MTV's history and the revolution that was brewing when the network wasn't watching.

Do you wake up in a cold sweat from your work dreams? Have a coworker who keeps inviting you to do escape rooms? Can't get a coworker to agree to do escape rooms? Or are you just genuinely not sure how to take the next step in your career? I'm Kate. And I'm Kim. And together we run Amy Poller's Company, Paperkite Productions. We've been friends and colleagues for years, so we know how important it is to feel like someone has your back at work. And we want to be that for you. So we're hosting a weekly advice show where we answer all your work-related questions.

Something amazing happened.

I got offered my dream job.

How am I supposed to bring this up to him without hurting his feelings? What should I do? I want to skip the pleasantries without being in a hole.

Careful. Money and friends, they don't mix, babes. They don't. And don't work with your friends. Make your friends at work.

All right, I can't believe I'm going to say this, but that was actually Million Dollar Advice.

Whether you need advice or just love to listen to other people's problems, this show is for you. Listen and follow Million Dollar Advice, an odyssey podcast, available now for free on the odyssey app and wherever you get your podcast.

Even when I was there, there was a joke, What is MTV? Is it the real... Is it Laguna Beach? Is it Jersey Shore?

That is MTV News Correspondent, Sue Chin-Pack. She was there, giving you the news at 10:00 to the hour, every hour, and working the red carpets at the Video Music Awards, even as she faced the eternal existential question of MTV.

Do you even play music videos anymore? When we were playing music videos and we had multiple channels that just played music videos, right? Those conversations had been happening since I got there, right? Even when it was the only station, even when it was playing music.

In the early '80s, the music video blocks that MTV was still playing were still getting lousy Nielsen ratings. But MTV's celebrity shows were outrating even network television, something that would have been unheard of in the '80s and '90s. But that success came at the expense of its musical identity. At the time, Damian Fahee noticed the change on Total Request Live.

I noticed it because they were coming on the show on TRL more and more. And then I noticed when they hired Steven Kaletty, on Laguna Beach, he came on and he was hired as a VJ. I was like, Oh, these shows are really making waves at the network. And then having to interview people from Laguna Beach. And it just seems so silly because you go from interviewing someone like Bono or Madonna, Will Farrell to, This is Brittany from Season 4. Remember from the hot tub scene where she ate a jalapeno in the hot tub? Whatever it was. You got to talk for four minutes about her eating a jalapeno and a hot tub. It's just like, What are we doing? This is so stupid.

Mtv News correspondent Chris Connolly was there to watch the network shift to reality. What you would say in retrospect is that when you go from being a channel that's defined by a culture, youth culture, and a loyalty to a demographic, to a channel that puts really big hits on the air, now you're like everybody else. Now you're chasing hits. And the culture picks up on what you've done and tries to emulate you. And that's a hard business to be in.

That's like what primetime TV is.

You need to hit sitcom, you need to hit TV show, you need to hit drama. Those are hard. Those are hard.

And so that was harder than getting the exclusive music video for Thriller.

The massive rating success of early Ots MTV made Viacom shareholders and the MTV Ad Sales Department very happy. But for the head of production, Brian Graydon, there was no to celebrate.

One of the things I realized is as much as I would have liked to have enjoyed, say, the Osborns when it was a big hit, that was usually when I was most nervous because if we were getting 6-0 ratings on Tuesday nights, I knew that a year from now I had to top that somehow. And so we were always planning two and three years out with development with an eye towards topping where we were currently. That wasn't always possible. But you really never got to enjoy the moment too much because the moment was deceptive. And especially in MTV, everything burned out about 10 times faster than it would on other channels. So sign I felt it could get a full nine seasons, but the Osborns got three barely, and that was typical of MTV. Very few shows would last longer than that. So we just had to be this relentless machine cranking out stuff, given that that was the appetite of the youth audience watching what we were making. I can remember those shows that were about 10 times bigger than I ever dreamed. One of them was Pimp My Ride, if you remember that show, which was just a car makeover show.

I know you have aspirations to be a musician, so we're giving you a Head Start.

We installed your own personal recording studio You're in your car. It didn't go much deeper than that. It was a very engaging, entertaining show, but it wasn't... I wouldn't call it novel or new or different. But that exploded and became the number one hit around the world. We could fill entire Saturday and Sunday with nothing but 24 hours of Pimp My Ride and get huge numbers.

In primetime, MTV had its big celeb reality shows. After the Osborns and newlyweds came the Ashley Simpson show. In the wake of Fox's The OC, MTV premiered a glossy high production value reality version, Laguna Beach, which led to The Hills. In the daytime, the network cranked out a series of teen dating shows, Room Riders, Dismissed, Next. Former TRL head writer Tim Healey remembers.

I mean, it began to feel a lot less organic. And the more reality they did, the less real it started to feel. When we would do spring breaks, we would go and we would do shows that didn't have any music in them. We would do crazy dating shows or I did these crazy shows with Jerry Springer. And those shows had a format, right? Those shows had a script, but the kids weren't delivering lines, right? So it felt real, right? So as a viewer, I always thought that it was compelling and more dangerous knowing that these kids are on TV and anything can happen, where a lot of those formatted shows, they did feel very canned. And look, it's because you're doing a When you're in a show like Room Riders or Next, and you get a 60-episode order, and you're banging out a show in a day, the producers just fall into this blueprint where it becomes less about making a show and more about making a widget, right? It's like, Okay, let's knock out these intros. And they deliver this line to this camera, and then they swing to that camera. And then... So it becomes assembly line.

I think that's what you started to feel, I think, low budget shows with a volume order and not much time in the schedule to shoot.

By 2008, Ashton Kutcher had wrapped his eighth and final season of the first, and some say, definitive iteration of Punk'd. The Jessie Metcafs and Stacey Kibler's of the world heved a sigh of relief. As Laguna Beach begat the hills, the Hills begat the City. Tila Tequila took a shot at love. Girls with wealthy fathers and entitlement issues celebrated their super sweet '16s. And Rob Dyrdek, a legendary skater in the Jackass Cinematic universe, went on adventures with his bodyguard in a show called Rob and Big. It felt like the torch was being passed again. In 2009, Brian Grayton decided to leave MTV, and you could say he went out on a high note. We had just premiered Jersey Shore and '16 and Pregnant, which would then become Teen Mom.

And those were two shows I had green-lit. And so it was actually on a high that was running against trends on the strength of two shows. And I think it allowed MTV, because of the strength of those shows, to stay in the bubble of the past even longer because the metrics and the way you did business in the past was still working for them on the strength of those shows. So it was an illusion, if that makes sense.

Teen Mom was a rating smash, but Jersey Shore became American canon just about immediately. But for as big and era-defining as it was, the show had just about nothing to do with music, unless you count Pauley D being a big Vegas DJ right now, which I don't, but I really want to see what those gigs are like. Anyway, journalist Rob Tannenbaum was starting to interview people for his 2011 oral history of the network, I Want My MTV. And the people he spoke to were not happy.

And what we saw over and over when we were doing interviews in 2009, 2010, the musicians we interviewed, they were apoplectic about these shows. I've never seen anything so stupid in my life. They were angry at the shows MTV was playing. Now, they had no right to, particularly because as we've been talking about, everybody has to get old and everybody has to be phased out of the thick of pop culture. But what they wanted was the glory days back. It wasn't so much that they hated the real world, although maybe they did. But it was less that than, I want my youth back. That's one of the oldest stories in the world. I want my youth back. If what you really want is music videos, not only do you not have to sit and wait for your video, you can go on YouTube. You can watch videos from 1965 every decade. Since then, you could spend the rest of your life watching music videos on YouTube, and you wouldn't even see a quarter of them. So why is MTV going to play videos? Just so people can feel young again? No. You want to feel young again, go to Sweden and get your blood changed.

Which brings us to Sumner Redstone. Sumner Redstone made billions in the entertainment business as the CEO of National Amusement, a chain of movie theaters. He took over Viacom, which owned MTV Networks in 1987. In the mid-outs, he was in his late '80s. And while, to my knowledge, he did not get his blood changed, he was still the CEO of Viacom. When we get back, we'll talk about the big changes he and the guy he eventually installed as his successor as CEO were not ready for, and how they were about to make MTV, and even traditional television in general, obsolete.

Big picture, the squandering of the MTV brand under the Viacom and now Paramount Global leadership is going to go down in history as one of the biggest wases of brand equity in the history of media.

That is Matt Bellany. He's a co founder of the digital media company Puck and the host of the podcast The Town. But in the odds, he was a journalist for the Hollywood reporter.

I mean, the fact that MTV has not successfully transferred over to the digital age is just a gigantic fail. It's a classic dilemma here. They had this thing that was hugely popular and profitable for decades, and they failed to see what was coming. You Viacom sued YouTube. When YouTube launched and all of a sudden, Daily Show and MTV clips were on YouTube, they sued it rather than figuring out what their own digital strategy was going to be.

Let's back up a little bit. For some background on what digital used to mean at MTV. Here again is MTV van driver turned head writer of TRL, Tim Healey.

Look, when I started at MTV, we had to share computers, desktop computers. You had to go to a signup sheet, and you would have to sign an hour slot. And that's when you had access to the computer and you can write your scripts, right? And then the technology, it just took off.

You remember that trip that the early MTV executives took to Tulsa in 1982, where they found out that the network was resonating with young people because the local record stores were all sold out of Duran Duran? Well, 20 years later, there was another MTV executive trip. Sounds like it was a little better funded. And the information that that trip turned up was a little more ominous.

I remember Dave Cyrilnik, who was executive vice president at the time. And I remember a bunch of MTV executives took a trip to Japan. And I remember Dave coming back and basically saying, they do everything on their phones in Japan. They watch TV on their phones. They watch videos on their phone. And he said, And even in stores, they pay for things with their phone. They don't use credit cards or they don't use cash. And I remember trying to wrap my head around that at the time, and it just seemed like science fiction. But it was pretty apparent to me that some of those upper-level executives saw the writing on the wall when they went on that trip.

We weren't all staring at our phones here in America, not yet. But the Internet was more accessible than ever. Connection speeds were getting faster. Kids were online.

I remember there was a big initiative on TRL to promote mtv. Mobile. Com/trl. If you're watching now, you can watch behind the scenes during the commercial breaks and mobile. Mtv. Secure-server. Com/net. It was like, no one's doing this. It was really like swimming against a very powerful current Gideon Yago was a correspondent for MTV News back then.

Basically, what happened was social networking became a thing. Frenster became MySpace. Myspace was a property that was being hotly corded by different outlets. Ultimately, Fox was the one that ended up buying it and buying it out for a couple of hundred million dollars. When that happened, Sumna Redstone said, We need our social network. I cannot believe that you didn't in-house create one, and we need to be a bigger player in this space. And so there was this MTV online push, which was the idea of doing broadband programming online to show that MTV was going to expand into the digital world. And it was like a half-ass version of it. It was like an old media brand, essentially trying to be a tech startup. Wasn't a bunch of people who were that familiar with tech, knew the space, could be that nimble or think that well. So there existed this broadband programming for the Internet audience. I think they went to Facebook and they tried to buy Facebook at that time, which was still a Harvard-based thing or it was just becoming like... I think Mark Zuckerberg asked them for a billion dollars, and they told him to go fuck himself because they don't pay that money.

And then I think within a year, all of the online stuff got yanked.

And by 2005, as YouTube is taking off, even people who loved MTV and wanted it to play more music are adopting YouTube as their own personal jukebox.

I remember the first time I discovered YouTube, and it was before an episode of TRL in a small little office that had a few computers in it. And Jamie Jasta, he was a rock VJ, and he was on this website watching concert videos. I remember going, What is that? And he goes, Oh, it's called YouTube. I go, Can I search anything? Like any band? I could just watch their video. He's like, Yeah. I'm like, Oh, my God. I remember just being so excited, thinking, That's what I'm going to do when I go home. I'm going to cancel plans and just watch concert videos all night on YouTube. And that's what I did. I went home that night and I was watching, and then I thought to myself, It hit me that, Oh, if concert videos can be on this, then music videos can also be on this.

Here's Brian gray. In the mid-outs, he's still the head of programming for MTV.

A lot of technology was premiering, but none had upend to television. And then television, cable in particular, continued to be a growth business up until 2010, '11. So that initially you're quite nervous, but then a few years pass and nothing much seems to happen. And so you lull yourself into thinking, Oh, this must be like movies and TV. They can both exist. But ultimately, there were profound consequences. The one that was most apparent for MTV was that on YouTube, I could watch just the videos I wanted to watch, and I didn't have to wait for the DJ to tell me what was next and what I'd be watching. And there was no way we could ever win in the music video business again on air. And that was pretty apparent pretty early on. But it was also one of those things you didn't want to speak out loud because you still had TRL at the height of its popularity and music videos were still core. But that was the thing that most alarmed me initially was I could program it as a viewer.

Youtube had all the videos, with the added benefit of them being on demand, something TRL and MTV could never give you.

The ability to be able to go onto this website and type in anything you wanted to see and have it pop up. You had to be a blind person not to see that that was where it was all heading.

Mtv wasn't blind, but they weren't prepared either.

I remember when YouTube started and when Facebook started, it was seeing the way the record companies felt about MP3s, which was, We got to shut this down. This will be nothing. We're the record company. We've got all... And that's the analogy that I would make is there was a bit of this pompous attitude that this will never go anywhere. Kids are always going to need a place to see their favorite celebrities. They'll never get closer than this.

And I got to be honest, I I think by the time we were in the waning days of TRL, MTV was like a big, gigantic aircraft carrier. It's not impossible to turn a thing around, but it's going to take a hell of a long time.

It's also possible that the decision-makers at Viacom, like Sumner Redstone's successor as CEO, Philippe Delmon, just didn't know how to steer.

In a time where things were starting to move very quickly because of things like YouTube and Facebook, and they can be more agile, that was not the time to have seven meetings about what color the MTV Mobile font should be.

Youtube was a threat. And because Viacom hadn't yet figured out how to work with it, they did what a massive corporation does. They sued it. Here's Sally for TDS.

For years, there was a lawsuit back and forth because a lot of our proprietary content was starting to get uploaded onto YouTube. And this was before there was rights deals made made. Now, every single network or platform has a YouTube channel, and other companies like the NFL or NBA, whatever, made deals with YouTube and figured out how to monetize it. But we sued them. Now everyone looks at YouTube as an extension and a promotional platform, and Instagram and Facebook and everything else. But back then, it was competition. No one was like, Maybe we should embrace this because they've got the technology. Google bought YouTube, right? They have the technology. We didn't have that tech. We weren't in the technology business at that time.

With YouTube and early social media, the interactivity that had made Total Request Live so popular was now available to everyone, everywhere, all day long. A new age was arriving, and the high-up executives of MTV's parent company, Viacom, unlike the WarnerMX executives of 1981 who stayed out of the way and let the young people cook, got themselves very involved. They didn't know what to do, but they also didn't know how to get out of the way.

You might also remember that the boss that I revered Tom Fruston was fired because he didn't buy my space for not being forward enough. So I found that doubly ironic that then the replacement CEO seemed to want nothing to do with the unfolding digital future. He just wanted more ratings and more ad dollars. And that formula was the power formula for about 20 years, but it was no longer the right formula in the mid-10s, which eventually then caught up with him as well.

After Tom Freston was fired, Sumner Redstone installed his longtime right-hand man, Philippe Dauamont, a CEO of Viacom. Philippe was more of a bean counter than a music guy. He was more interested in a good quarterly earnings call than staying relevant in popular culture. And on his watch, MTV's personality fated away even further. Here's Gideon Yago from MTV News.

I remember the commercials that MTV had for MTV out of the promos Department, vividly as a viewer, and I could not name Claim one as someone who worked there because it was too precious. You weren't going to give up 30 seconds of ad time once you were part of this big conglomerate. Fuck no, that's leaving money on the table. Why would you have an in-house group of filmmakers and animators and creative geniuses burn through that cash? Once it started to skew away from a model that there were just these gaps that you could fill with cool shit because of, I don't know, the ways that music videos were programmed, it lost that identity.

And increasingly, it lost the kids.

Kids like anti-establishment. I think I don't even know if it ever could have worked because at that point, MTV, you had social media, which was seen as the hip, cool, new thing. And so I almost feel like inevitably, the brand of MTV was starting to age in the eyes of teenagers. I remember hearing from kids, Oh, I don't watch that. That's my older brother's network. My older sister watches MTV. I watch YouTube, and I'm on Facebook, and I'm on MySpace, whatever the thing was, which is so... That's the beauty of getting older as you realize how corny the cool thing you were into. It actually was a completely corporate thing.

By the late auts, YouTube is chipping away at MTV. The 2006 Video of the Year, VMA, went to at the Disco's, I Write Sins, Not Tragedies, a video I don't think they ever actually played on the network. Total Request Live got less live, shooting a week's worth of episodes in a day with no screaming kids outside. It was a cost-cutting maneuver.

The point in time where I realized it was over was once TRL started being prerecorded, and it was no longer live because it was cheaper to record two shows Monday, two shows Tuesday, and then do a live show on Wednesday. And so I go, Okay, that's not good. And it also just took a lot of the fun out of the It just isn't the electricity. There isn't the... And so that was lost, I think. We're prerecording a show that sells itself as being live. It's in the title of the show.

Total Request Live lasted for a decade. Kind of an eternity in MTV years when you think about it. The last TRL aird live on MTV in November of 2008. Beyoncé was there. Justin Timberlink was there. We invited an up and coming 18-year-old country crossover artist to come and get everyone to sign her TRL yearbook. Hold on, let me see if I can find her name. Sorry. Oh, yeah. Taylor Swift. The last proper number one on the TRL countdown was She Got Her Own by Neo with Jamie Fox and Fabulous. Does not ring a bell for me either. After that, the big studio overlooking Times Square went dark. The last peep show was over. And it wasn't just MTV. By this time, Top of the pops, that long-running BBC chart show that inspired the first generation of music video stars, aird its last show in 2006. Shakira's Hips Don't Lie was its last number one. No fighting. According to Sue Chinpok, it's the circle of life.

When I sit down with a person who, say, under 25. It's like going into a time machine and you are Father Cricket. And it's not even like, back when we used to have music videos, it's like, No, go further. Back when there was no social media, go farther. Then you start to paint yourself into a corner of like, what even am I talking about? Why am I even talking to this young person who's like, A VJ? Okay, a VJ is someone who on TV. Oh, TV. Okay, hold A channel. My kids don't know what a channel is. Change the channel. What do you mean change? What channel? Tv. I mean, we have a TV monitor, but we all watch TV, mostly on our laptops. Tv TV. I mean, it's just the size of a screen.

Things change, especially in the world of media, especially as technology advances exponentially. You can't get too attached to any one thing. But while we were recording interviews for this podcast, we witnessed the death of something truly important to us and to the people we were interviewing, and to a lot of America, including, if you've been listening this whole time, you. In our next episode, we'll tell the whole story, and we'll pour some out for MTV News. Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV is written and narrated by me, Dave Holmes. Executive, produced by Jenna Weis-Burman, Dave Holmes, Jim Webber, and Chris Callen. Our Story Editor is Maddie Sprung-Kaiser. Produced by Lloyd Lockerage, Ian Mott, and Terence Malungo. Edited Fixed and mastered by Chris Baisel. Production support by Javier Cruises. Special thanks to JD Crowley, Maura Curren, Leah Reese Dennis, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Allison Jeffrey, and Hilary Shuff. Who Killed the Video star, the story of MTV, is an odyssey original.

I'm Lauren Sherman, the writer behind Puck's Fashion and Beauty Memo Line Sheet. And I'd like to welcome you to my new show, Fashion People.

On every episode of Fashion People, I'll be talking to insiders about the stuff we're all whispering between the press releases, from M&A rumors to celebrity stylist Dish to the future of legacy media.

Be sure to follow and listen to Fashion People, a presentation of Odysee in partnership with Puck.

Available on the free Odysee app or wherever you get your podcast.