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 did for.
Yeah, And I think that's I think they ran that little thing. I just did. I think that was 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 show, that's exactly the kind of thing they would have run for like the first ten years.
Yeah. Probably. And this is on VH one, 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.
Well is that tonight awesome? Man? I hope you have a bitch in time. Yeah.
It should be some fun people watching and some good music.
Are you gonna smoke PCP in the parking lot like that documentary?
Oh you know it, baby, I got my 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.
You go.
So I think I'm good.
That sounds legit to me.
Yeah, I think I'm all set.
Well, I have a great time. That's cool. Did you get in touch with Nita Strauss?
No? No, she may not be stuff you should know person anymore.
Well, try waving to her from the audience.
It's me.
Maybe when you're on PCP you'll just crawl on to stage.
Yeah, maybe you never know. I'm gonna take the recommended too, So who knows what's gonna happen.
So we're talking about VH one, which is basically the opposite of PCP. Yeah, as everyone knows. Who's ever seen VA one actually if you were around, and it debuted back in nineteen eighty five. 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 hold Werner Brothers, Amex Weirdness. Yeah, And the one of the big reasons they launched VH one 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 dear listener. But that's ok. Oh, I see when I address you, I address you as your leader.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Yeah, so this was before they bought them out, clearly, because they were essentially saying, hey, cable companies, if you want another music video station, don't go by Turner's thing. Yeah, just take VH one for free. If you're getting MTV, we'll just throw it in.
Yeah. Before Video Hits one, it was value ad Hits one. Well.
Yeah, And honestly, 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 VH one did a better job and stayed more relevant in the long run.
Uh, 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 VH one 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 and MTV had.
For sure, and as we'll see every once while, MTV likes to still poach them because even though VH one is more relevant, I get the impression that MTV v 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 VH one 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 lost that love and feeling was always mellow. But I feel like Daryl holland John Oates even made it even sort of cornier.
Oh you wanted 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 musaic version of Gordon Lightfoot Sundown, 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, 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 ten or twenty 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 thirties watched vach one. 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 vet's like don Imus.
Yeah, Imus was air Frankie Crocker Bowser from Seannahah, 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 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.
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 VH one 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, VH one 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 they there was a place where you could see more black artists for sure.
Yeah, and also a place for comedy. You know, m TV 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 VH one in nineteen eighty five, 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 VH one.
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 hower 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 nineteen eighty nine 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 know, I knew where your head is.
Yeah, and I know that one from the Romantic montage and 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. But they also played new stuff. There was plenty of Michael Bolton and crossover stuff. It also was playing on MTV, the VH one. 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, that's it just keeps happening.
That's pretty cool. Yeah, I love this ride for her.
Yeah. 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 VH one. They hadn't made videos. They were they were 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 or like you said, maybe even like TV appearances or something like that, and just basically make like a an edited version to make a music video for a
particular song. So they VH one 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 the 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.
Mid nineties, they found themselves floundering a bit, though, because they never really got an identity outside of being sort of the you know, you know, if you were an MTV kid, you thought VH one was kind of boring and it was like the stuff your parents might be into, kind of a little more square. And that's not an identity, no, well, 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 m and so, you know, they just lacked an identity aside from being square. And they also had the same pressures that MTV had when 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. Right, So they were trying to get rid of VH one, you know 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 that's not good. Actually, it was a dude named John Sykes who essentially saved VH one.
Yeah. Also iHeart media executive, is he? Yeah?
Okay, Well, congratulations John Sykes, because he definitely turned VH one around. He was what you would call a good hire. Yeah, because in nineteen ninety four they brought him on and he so changed VH one for the better that in nineteen ninety five their subscriber base was forty nine million households. Three years later it was up to sixty two million households. That's what they call the Sykes effect.
Yeah, yeah, and he'd walk out of the room and say you got pyched. They started new original music programming, and that was really part of the big rebranding effort that was so successful. Top ten Countdown in ninety four. Eventually Top twenty Countdown was sort of the big first one. But in nineteen ninety six 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, Apparently they got pushed back 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. Yeah, so they were like, no one's gonna 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. Like I remember watching it. I don't remember like setting my calendar to sit around and make sure I knew and when it was on, but I definitely found myself watching it quite a bit. It was a fun show. Storytellers came out in nineteen ninety six, 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. Got his keyboard as Kenny gave him, and he 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 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, it's an all time great sketch.
Better than Robert Gulay. That's pretty good.
Yeah, okay, one hundred times, maybe one hundred and twenty five.
Oh wow, you did the mask.
Yeah.
Legends was another big show that came out that same year, in nineteen ninety six. This just straight up rock dock stuff, pretty you know, straightforward, one hour documentary style. Again, you know, artists like Bowie and Retha 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 jen X followed in their footsteps. They kept buying new music, like they kept listening to music into their
thirties and forties. Previous generations hadn't done that, Like, apparently you were done with music when you turn thirty because life sucked and it was serious, and you were in black and white and if you were a woman, you were 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, I mean new music. That is like the mad Men. Guys listened to the whatever Artie Shaw or the whatever orchestra. But there were no guys in the nineteen fifties in their thirties 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 forty fives 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 and his jeep on a CB.
Yeah, that's true. It was weird, had a weird family.
He had an old Convoy soundtrack going.
That's true. He would get I think I mentioned he would get obsessed with like a song and that's it, and he'd say, hey, Scott, go record that like seventeen times in a row on on a tape for me in Scotty to listen to the seats.
Here's your tape of Hot Blooded seventeen times.
Ninety seven was when it really hit the big time with behind the music. I think Olivia helped us out with this went along with the MTV article and she aptly calls it legends 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, 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 ninety seven to I think twenty fourteen. 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 Life Garrett.
Yeah.
It was like a teen idol in the seventies 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 seventies. 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. Really, he was just sitting there, I guess, watching Behind the Music and mouthing along word for word with the dialogue between Life 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 nineteen ninety seven. We'll be back to jump back in time a bit and then go forward in time a bit. All right, so we're back. We promised to jump back in time, and we have to because ninety seven was Behind the Music. But in ninety five, VH one 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 Zulander, 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 more or two minute bit. But in the movie Zoolander, he faces his greatest public humiliation at the VH one Fashion Awards. So they showed up in the movie, which I just watched right, I watched recently, and it holds up. Man, it's pretty funny.
Yeah. I bet Ruby would like that.
I bet too. I would. I would definitely show it to her.
Is it just her kind of silly?
I think it is a very silly movie.
Ninety seven 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 caps to Save the Music Foundation.
Yeah, I read that they've donated two point eight million recorders to schools across the country.
Now are you kidding? There's unreal? 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, and in fact, listen to me for this part. If you would make us a music bumper for our ad biaks, 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, because we could put it in this episode.
I mean we can try.
Yeah, maybe I'll do it on the Instagram page. See what happened? Okay, all right, moving on to politics, right.
Yeah, apparently Bill Clinton was a big VH one viewer viewer. 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 nineteen ninety seven, 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 nineteen ninety eight. I remember this being a very big deal.
It is.
Yeah, they got Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain, Gloria Estefan, Carol King, and.
Who else Celine Dion.
Oh yeah, you can't have a Divas concert in ninety eight without Selene and 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 VH one, it was certainly one of the golden eras. Yeah, cable operators were still dropping VH one. I guess they hadn't gotten the news yet, right, So VH one 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 the I guess the cable operator there had dropped VH one, 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 VH one back up.
They're like Don Henley's coming. I want to mess with the hen You definitely don't want to mess with Don Hinley. 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 eighteen to forty nine 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 resultant were seemingly thriving.
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 VH one than say MTV, like Natalie Merchant. Celine Dion, as you mentioned, was enormous at this time. Yeah, probably would not see a Celenion video on MTV, but she was right at home on VH one. Yeahlah Bolton, Michael Bolton, alanis probably straddled the two says like the wallflowers or goo goo dolls or something like that.
Ooh okay, and these.
Are real deal. I watched some VH one blocks to come up with some examples, so all of those had videos on VH one. 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 dead?
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. It's 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 a like a stadium seat and she has a very unhappy look on her face and it says, anyone over forty when the third opening band starts to set up at nine pm. It's so true, man, It's fine, it just starts too late.
Yeah, I'm with you. Shows are starting earlier though. I feel like I read that like these legacy shows that I'm seeing, all these olds, they're they're they're getting up on stage at like, you know, opening band at seven, regular band at eight, out out by nine thirty five.
Hey, we start at seven promptly. If we ever start, try to Yeah, if we start later than seven, 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, really, because they're like they're not in yet, They're they're just getting here. There's a lot of traffic. It's actually traffic's fault.
And some towns are are worse for it than others. Some some towns are just like, we know, you're not going to start while we're getting licker. Sorry.
Yeah, But like with MTV, they would you know, start sort of changing things and rebranding. These are companies that just seemingly change the channels, not literally, but change their programming a lot, and like the names of the channel change a lot. Yes, Like you know MTV at MTB two and MTV Classic and VH one kind of did the same. They had VH one Soul which is now Bee tol Et Soul, VH one Smooth, which was more
like Kenny G kind of stuff. But then they're like who wants that, Let's change that VH one Classic Rock and then just VH one Classic and now it's MTV Classic.
It is quite a ride for that channel. Yeah, yeah, VH one smooth. I can't believe that ever made it outside of the initial meeting.
Yeah. True.
So VH one, 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 almost it dropped almost by fifty percent from ninety nine to twenty twelve. Yeah, and remember like it had been relaunched in ninety four as like VH one 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. And they kicked it off in grand style with the one hundred Greatest Artists of Rock and Roll, hosted by none other than Kevin Bacon. Yeah, and this kicked off their whole great the Greatest Countdowns format, which started in ninety eight ninety nine, sorry and ran to twenty twelve.
Yeah, which you know, I was kind of thinking about it. They ended up the last episode was forty Greatest Pranks, Part four, so and I was like, what a weird kind of thing. But that was right in the middle of the of the listical 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 list top ten list list list list list.
Yeah. I mean, where do you think ten 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 changed with the time.
Yeah. Plus also they can be kind of thin every once in a while, though it's a good one. I don't I can't think of any off the top of my head, but we've done some good top tens that.
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 nineteen ninety nine show that basically said where are like one hit wonders in former child stars? What are they doing now? 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 the h one didn't fare as well on the movie front. But they did have one sort of noteworthy one called Two of Us,
which which was okay. It was in two thousand. It was a fictionalized story about when Paul McCartney and John Lennon were hanging out in nineteen seventy six, the night that LORDE. Michael's 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 three thousand dollars?
Was that what it was?
That's what I saw, which I was like, even in nineteen seventy six, 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 you was it that far from the Dakota what happened? Supposedly they were two stoned, that's as the story goes at least.
And by stone do you mean on Heroin?
Probably no, I think they each took two.
PCPs as per the instructions. So by this time they finally dropped pretense this would be VH one we're talking about again, and they just stopped using the music first tagline because it was just a boldfaced 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 Grayden,
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 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 greenlighting 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 Eighties was the first big big hit out of that camp that premiere in two thousand and two. 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. I think he was one of the comedians.
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 headstyle, well 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 Talk Soup, which was a clip show of talking heads.
Yeah, so Talk Soup.
Would be covering another clip show, but it worked. Talk Soup was great.
Yeah, I enjoyed Talk Soup. I Love the Eighties 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 eighteen forty nine demographic, and so they did the I Love the Seventies, I Love the Nineties they did I Love the New Millennium, which only covered through two thousand and seven, because it debuted in two thousand and eight and I think in twenty fourteen. I Loved the two Thousands was the last
one in the series that ran. Another great show was called Best Week Ever, and then eventually Best Week Ever with Paula Tompkins. Yeah, because friend of the show in our pal Paul was the host where they recounted the last week and this was a big launching pad for a lot of great, great comedians.
Yeah, it was. It was a spinoff from I Love the Eighties. 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 we're not the household names there are now. But Nick Krole, Paul Sheer, Doug Benson, Rob Hubel, a little comedian named John Mulaney, the wonderful Jessica Saint Clair, Michael Shay, Michael Ian Black, Patton Oswald, and I was watching some of the Best Week Ever this morning and Paul's wonderful wife. Have we've spoken about Janey had had Tompkins was in one of the little bits, and I
had no idea Jane was ever on there. So I'm I took a screenshot and I'm gonna text it to her later nice.
So if it was launched in two thousand and four, those people's careers did start to take off around that time or after that, so yeah, 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, like 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 eighties was. So v H one was doing a pretty good job shifting away from music, right, but they still hadn't gotten
into what we would call reality yet. And it's about here that you'll notice we stopped 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, So, Chuck, we talked about how VH one 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 celebri reality and I did not know this, but so celebriality 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 it. 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. And it was real enough that at one point Ted Nugent suffered a chainsaw cut to his leg self inflicted that required forty stitches.
It's a lot of stitches, it really is.
But this was not so Again, this was kind of contemporaneous to The Osborne's 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 actually just jammed one of my fingers, right.
This real 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 VH one, 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. 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 Flave like
doing his thing on a reality show. But 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 shoed orders with Charro, Dave Coolier, 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 Brett Michaels from Poison replacing the Flavor flav as the bachelor. Right.
Yeah, the 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 VH one 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, some kind of square in the office that 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 Cereal 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 cereal Life as well.
And then the site who is She?
She was a playboy model?
Ah?
Okay, And then Salt and Pepper had their own show because I guess they were on the Cereal Life. I didn't know that, but they had. 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.
Oh interesting, Well, it sort of filled a void. As Livia sort of aptly pointed out that, you know, there there was a big boom for sitcom about black families in the nineties and even in the early two thousands, but then there was sort of a dearth of those for a little while. So this kind of, you know, filled that void, and VH one 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 Route by Danielle C. Belton and She basically says, they broadcast for Black Americans, but they're not at all beholden the 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. Yeah, but
however you approach it. As of back in twenty fourteen, I didn't see any more recent statistics, but in twenty fourteen, VH one was the number one network in African American households, followed by BET and the Oprah Winfree Network. We were definitely doing something that Black America liked.
They beat Oprah out. Yeah that's that says a lot.
Yes it does, and yeah for sure.
Another show that got them a lot of flack eventually was Celebrity Rehab with Doctor Drew Pinsky that premier in two thousand and eight. There's a critic that Olivia found named Kayleie Donaldson called it perhaps the most evil reality TV series of all time. You probably know doctor Drew from Loveline with Adam Carolla early on, and he doctor
Drew is it wasn't his. 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, 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 flat because, like people started dying for their addictions.
Yeah, by twenty twenty four to twelve, of by my count, about forty five rehab patients on the show had died, a lot of them from like overdosing or direct complications from their addictions, like brain aneurysms, which is about more it's 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 you know, low points and rock bottom after rock bottom on TV for money for ad money, you.
Know, yeah for sure, And speaking of lurid, we're loath to mention Diddy, but there was a show called I Want to Work for Diddy in two thousand and eight, 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 VH
one show called Transform Me. It was 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 VH one had its highest Nielsen ratings ever in this era the late two thousands, the aught as we who Lived Through It column and then tragedy struck and the publicity was so searingly bad that VH one essentially through 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 VH one 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 I'm sorry, Megan Wants a Millionaire and fifty one 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 three, another VH one show, and they said, fifty one 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 two thousand and nine.
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 dump 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 Fiori for him killing himself. It doesn't take any responsibility whatsoever for killing her.
I remember that now. That's I wasn't familiar, But as soon as he said that, I kind of remember that storyline.
Yes, and all of this happens in one month in two thousand and nine. And if you were pumping out lured reality show after lured reality show, your viewership is going to be highly interested in this story. Yeah, and it's going to get out, and it's gonna get out to the rest of America. Who's 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 a 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 VH one 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 fifty one 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, and they did largely. There was a huge shift, but there were still shows like Dating Naked that was on from twenty fourteen to twenty sixteen, 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 and growth seeing black created shows.
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 two thousand and nine on Logo but then moved to VH one in twenty seventeen and then eventually MTV in twenty twenty three.
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 in their world.
Say with Basketball Wives by Shaquille O'Neil's ex wife Shawnee Henderson. Yeah, Big I just had its twelfth season. And then Nick Cannon presents wild Nout, which is an improv competition show, and they're still making new episodes. It started out on MTV and the move to VH one when in twenty nineteen, and very much like Ridiculousness, reruns of Wilding Out are carrying VH one right now, apparently with Fresh Prince of bel Air and My Wife and Kids reruns.
I never saw Dating Naked. What was that about?
It was exactly what it sounds like. Oh okay, exactly. There's no it needs no explanation whatsoever.
Okay I was kidding, oh.
Me, and 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 VH one except go watch some VH one and that means it's time for listener meal.
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 love Wilco. I read all of Jeff Tweety's books, was big into Uncle Tupelo, so I'm not bagging on Wilco. I like Wolco.
Jeff Tweety's The Spymaster and The Teen Yeah.
Well, yeah, of course, and The Tinker or two is really good. Hey, Chuck, Josh and Jerry have been listening 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 on 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 twenty six, twenty eighteen. Does pyromania actually exist? Josh brings up John Leonard or convicted serial arsonist, mass murdered former firefighter, arsenist investigator, and Chuck around thirty four to thirty nine 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 or Wow, yeah, 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 crazy coincidence? That is Brenda s from Dallas, Texas and Brenda, I love that
you're getting my back? Is Chuckstra Damas because my past predictions of Hugh Jackman playing p T. 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 Chucks Stra Dama'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 Chuckstra Dramas's predictions that came true.
All right, it's canon, Okay, not Nick Cannon.
No, we're not wilding out here or 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 Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.