Back in 1999, MTV’s TRL was the hottest thing going. The rise of the daily, live video-countdown show had neatly coincided with the rise of teen pop, and stars like Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and Christina Aguilera fueled the fan frenzy both inside and outside the show’s Times Square studio. Audience members screamed and squealed while requesting their favorite videos, and the outside throngs went crazy over just a small glimpse of a Backstreeter or ’N Sync member in the windows above. More than once, the surrounding streets were shut down to accommodate the people outside. TRL became as much a part of MTV’s identity as the moon man.
Now, with the teen-pop boom long over and music audiences turning to the Internet for their video-watching needs, TRL is barely hanging on, with dwindling ratings and constant rumors of cancellation and/or a complete overhaul (a plan to rebrand the show as YouRL, with a focus on online videos and content, was supposedly abandoned because focus groups responded poorly to the idea). Scruffy everyman host Carson Daly, who defined the show’s early days as much as Britney did, decamped years ago for NBC late-night, and his predicted career path as the next Dick Clark has been overtaken by Ryan Seacrest.
Watching TRL now, there’s no outward indication that it’s not just as important to pop culture as it once was. The bumpers still feature graphics of excited crowds standing outside the studio, even if no such crowds exist anymore. The young audience members still get unduly excited over appearances from hot new sensations like Colbie Caillat and Sean Kingston. The videos on the countdown are generally as vapid as ever, with the occasional pop gem hidden among the dreck. Not that you get to see much of them—the show still only plays portions of its 10 counted-down videos, with about three per episode getting barely a glimpse as Daly-surrogate host Damien Fahey talks over them, and the rest showing for a minute or two.
Much of the onscreen clutter that defined the show’s aesthetic in its early years is gone, though: There are no longer inserts of fans screaming for their favorite artists or shouting out to their friends, no crawls at the bottom of the screen hyping upcoming guests. There’s an occasional, relatively unobtrusive “backstage cam” popping up now and then, but otherwise the videos are completely visible. Still, the show is a poor venue for checking out the artistry of the music video, diminished as it may be—Fahey is constantly reminding viewers that they can watch videos in their entirety on the show’s website, an acknowledgement that MTV in general, and TRL in particular, are no longer the preferred method of delivery for music videos.
The show’s one other nod to the current music landscape is its revamped countdown formula, which no longer relies solely on audience votes (perhaps because they’ve dried up along with the audience). Instead, a combination of votes, radio airplay, online downloads and streams and ringtone purchases are taken into account to determine a video’s chart status. While the new metric is very of-the-moment, all of the show’s other elements—Fahey’s awkward audience interaction, the gimmicky celebrity interviews that take up far more time than the actual videos, the mail-bag segment (complete with actual bag of e-mails printed on paper)—hearken back not only to TRL’s early days, but also to the long tradition of upbeat, unhip music-countdown shows going back to Dick Clark himself.
So TRL is a relic both of a recent time and of a far more distant one, and by tying itself so closely to its peak, it’s essentially engineered its own death. A recent segment called “Countdown Castaway” checked in on teen-pop footnote Ryan Cabrera, only a few years removed from his brief moment of popularity. As Fahey explained what Cabrera had been up to recently, the young audience members looked as bewildered as people their age will likely be a decade or two from now when grown-ups tell them about this show called TRL.