TVSquad

I put a full description of the new shows after the jump.

I'm one of the many people who laments the "channel drift" that has affected MTV. A network that started out as, well, "music television" has clearly become "anything but music television." There's even a graph now on GraphJam the depicts how The Real World caused the downfall of MTV. The graph shows how the airtime for music videos has decreased as The Real World grew in popularity. Perhaps it should also measure how the cast of The Real World became more attractive and subsequently less intelligent.

The graph posits that by 2010 music videos will be nonexistent on the channel. Also, interesting is the rise of what the graph calls simply "other crap" that coincides with the rise of shows like The Real World and Road Rules. I assume "other crap" refers to shows like The Hills, My Super Sweet Sixteen, and Made -- shows that have replaced music videos in primetime (and replaced music videos with their incessant reruns in daytime).

Despite the fact that I'm part of MTV's target demographic, I don't really watch the network. I only tune in as I'm getting dressed in the early morning and MTV's running its morning music video block. For the rest of the day, MTV seems to avoid actually playing full music videos like the plague. Instead, they fill their programming schedule with awful reality shows about spoiled pre-teens and dating shows so depressing that contestants are even willing to pee all over themselves to get out.

Now, please allow me to frolic about in my own fantasy world, in which I create my idea of MTV's perfect programming schedule. There are only five -- FIVE -- MTV shows that I would keep. That's right. Everything else should be full-on music videos. In my own MTV, there will be no Laguna Beach, no Pimp My Ride, and certainly no Yo Momma (how did they manage to pitch that?!)

Reality shows are an easy target. At their worst, they combine narcissistic competitors in a state of arrested development with manipulative editing and piss poor production values. They are base, coarse, often times racist and tedious beyond belief. They bring out the worst in us - our collective desire to see other people humiliated.

Fortunately, all reality shows are not the same. I mean, would Tim Gunn be involved in anything that wasn't a class act? Shows like Project Runway and, to some extent, The Amazing Race redeem an otherwise unfortunate genre littered with wife-swaps, cat fights, strangers picked to live in a house and competitive testicle eating. There is plenty of good among the bad, and in my neck of the woods, certain reality shows are as much "must see TV" as any scripted program. I'm looking for the same thing in both anyway - emotional truth.