MTV’s nostalgia problem, explained by The Challenge

You’d be forgiven for thinking this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) was a rebroadcast of a previous ceremony. From performances by Lenny Kravitz and Public Enemy to the archival red-carpet looks worn by many attendees and host Megan Thee Stallion, the show’s homages were as central to the celebration as the current artists who were nominated. The overall throwback vibe was supposedly in service of the awards show’s 40th anniversary. However, the ceremony didn’t look that different from last year’s VMAs, which featured a tribute to the now-disgraced Diddy or other recent ceremonies honoring Busta Rhymes, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and LL Cool J. This seems to be MTV’s playbook: force-feeding older viewers ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s nostalgia, especially now while they struggle to reel in the young people in the age of streaming and TikTok. For a brand that once represented the freshness of youth culture, it seems to be frozen in time. The cable network is at an interesting crossroads: Should it try to court an elusive Gen Z audience, or should it keep chasing the last generation that watched them? Since 2019, the network has been banking on reunion-style shows and all-star editions of iconic series like Teen Mom, Jersey Shore, Catfish, and, most recently, the former VH1 show The Surreal Life. If you’re younger than 30, there’s not much on their current schedule that would immediately draw you in, particularly when streamers — like Netflix and even Peacock — are making buzzier content for teenagers and young adults, with popular reality shows like Love Is Blind, Love Island USA, and The Traitors. The ultimate case study in MTV’s uncertain future is its Road Rules spinoff The Challenge. Now the longest-running show on the network, having started 26 years ago, the Road Rules competition series has successfully carried the legacy of MTV throughout structural changes and mergers, recently expanding with an All-Stars edition on Paramount+ and The Challenge: USA on CBS, and some international versions. However, the present iteration of The Challenge hasn’t exactly maintained the spirit of MTV. Currently, the show is attempting to conjure memories of its golden age with Battle of the Eras, the 40th season of the show, but the program falls flat without the unvarnished edge of the past. What was once a compelling clash of personalities and amateur athletes is now just a generic sports competition. To watch The Challenge from its early days to where it is now is to see how MTV has lost its way as a brand. The series might seem like an invincible force in television, but it’s only as fun as the infrastructure around it. But what’s the value of MTV nostalgia without all the weirdness and unpredictability? The Challenge represented the rowdy ethos of MTV. Now it’s something a lot safer. The Challenge has undergone several transformations since it premiered in 1998. The show ultimately became a competition between cast members of MTV’s Road Rules, where a group of attractive strangers live in a traveling RV, and Real World, where exactly seven attractive strangers share a house. (In later seasons, they added cast members of the dating show Are You The One?). Typically set in an exotic location, contestants live in what is essentially a frat house while they compete in a series of physical and mental games. These assignments range from outrageous stunts — like transferring food to a fake chicken’s mouth while dressed in a chicken suit — to brutal elimination challenges, like the Hall Brawl where players wrestle each other to reach the end of a narrow passage. Over time, the production’s budget has increased, and the show has become more physically demanding and stunt-y as a result. Die-hard fans refer to it as “America’s fifth sport,” and some competitors even undergo intense training to prepare. However, the boozy fights, romantic drama, and rivalries that span the seasons have always been as important as the actual gameplay, so much so that the premise of several previous seasons (Battle of the Exes, Rivals, etc.) rests upon personal beef and alliances. The Challenge maintains and extends these years-long storylines by reusing many of its most notorious and messiest competitors, like Johnny “Bananas” Devenanzio, Chris “CT” Tamburello, Laurel Stucky, Cara Maria Sorbello, and Aneesa Ferreira. [Image: The cast of Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Fresh Meat at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/GettyImages-106009052.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] While the fighting and debauchery adds an exciting layer to an already impressive athletic showcase, these moments of chaos have often been truly ugly, coming at the expense of women, people of color, and queer people. Particularly in earlier seasons, there’s an uncomfortable amount of misogynistic language, hostility, and condescension toward female players. Black contestants have been met with similar microaggressions, if not blatant racism. Producers tried to rectify this in 2020 when they hastily suspended contestant Dee Nguyen for making an inappropriate joke on Twitter about the Black Lives Matter movement. They also made the controversial choice to edit her out of the rest of the season. This foreshadowed a more censored approach to the program, one that would completely change the feel of The Challenge. Efforts by the network to remedy a culture of poor behavior on The Challenge was well-meaning but ultimately over-corrective. For example, night-out scenes, where a fight might break out or cast members might hook up, are now used as opportunities for competitors to discuss game strategy. On podcasts dedicated to the show, cast members constantly complain about messier drama being left out of the show. “You see a sort of progress happening in terms of the show not being as problematic as it was before,” says Challenge fan Kelli Williams, who co-hosts the podcast Beyond the Blinds. “But then there’s also the [newer] problem that it takes away from the drama of the show.” In response to BLM and changing ethical standards in reality TV, The Challenge has struggled to evolve while focusing on the aspects of the show that made it fun. In newer seasons, including the current Battle of the Eras season, the tone of the show has become almost comically serious and inspirational, as though the contestants are competing in the Olympics or for some greater cause beyond winning money and being on TV. Even the show’s dry, no-nonsense host, T.J. Lavin, has a gentler manner. It hardly feels like it’s from the same network that discovered Snooki and Spencer Pratt. “You think of someone like Leroy,” says Williams, of fan-favorite Leroy Garrett, a Real World alum who first competed on The Challenge: Rivals. “When he came on the show, he was a sanitation worker, and you’re watching him jump over cars over water. You’re like, ‘Wow, he’s not trained to do this.’ Whereas now people have to prepare for The Challenge, and they call it the ‘fifth sport.’ Be real right now. This is The Challenge.” Battle of the Eras catering to Gen X and millennial fans is exciting in theory. But the neutered flagship show can’t resuscitate the original DNA of MTV. Where does MTV go from here? MTV was always going to have a difficult time sustaining itself as a cultural tastemaker, especially as a cable station in an online world. But the network has a history of reinventing itself to meet the moment. The channel, founded in 1981, was initially targeted toward white, male rock fans until it was forced by public pressure to feature music videos by Black R&B and rap artists, debuting the program Yo! MTV Raps in 1988. When MTV’s first generation of viewers started outgrowing the channel in the early ’90s, it pioneered reality programming, starting with Real World and, later, shows like The Osbournes, The Hills, and Jersey Shore. As Amanda Ann Klein writes in her book Millennials Killed the Video Star, MTV executives have always had to work hard to maintain MTV’s key demographic. “The youth audience is fickle because the moment a company figures out how to create content that pleases them, they age out of that content,” she writes. Reality shows sustained the network for nearly two decades, in addition to music-focused hits like Total Request Live (TRL) and MTV Unplugged. The early 2010s saw the final season of Jersey Shore, the surprise scripted hits like Awkward and Teen Wolf, and the last truly memorable VMAs thanks to Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke – before a few years entering the proverbial programming desert, running episodes of the clip show Ridiculousness almost 24/7. By 2019, it seemed as though MTV had found a solution by upcycling successful IP. The reunion show Jersey Shore: Family Vacation garnered big ratings and was followed by a Teen Mom reunion series and a not-as-successful reboot of The Hills. On Paramount+, MTV launched The Challenge: All Stars and Real World: Homecoming. [Image: The cast of Jersey Shore: Family Vacation on The Jenny McCarthy Show in 2018. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/GettyImages-1021995388.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Much of MTV’s library of ’90s and early-aughts content also became available to stream on Paramount+. In the book Television’s Streaming Wars, Florida State University professor Leigh H. Edwards writes about how MTV’s nostalgic marketing strategy cleverly (if not temporarily) reignited interest in the brand. “In effect, MTV turns existing IP into new content on streaming that targets the older streaming audience and encouraging those viewers to rewatch older content,” she tells Vox. “These series generate nostalgia by including flashback footage that encourages audiences to go watch the original episodes.” This nostalgia approach, though, is more like a life jacket than a sustainable business plan. Real World: Homecoming is no longer available to stream and was seemingly canceled. The Challenge: All Stars has become less and less distinguishable from the original series as the casts overlap. Despite all the relative star power of Battle of the Eras, the landmark season still represents a ratings decline since the highly watched 35th season, Total Madness. Last year, Variety reported that MTV was the 44th most-watched television network in 2023, an 11 percent drop in total viewers from the previous year. If there’s any hope for an MTV revival, it’s that the viewership for this year’s VMAs increased by 8 percent compared to last year’s show. One has to think this has more to do with appearances by big, next-gen artists like Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan — as well as ratings magnet Taylor Swift — than the show’s tributes to its peak era. At a time when networks are constantly renamed, rebranded, or completely scrapped, losing MTV wouldn’t be surprising, but it would be a huge cultural blow. Unfortunately, a network can only rely on nostalgia for so long before it looks like a graveyard.

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MTV’s nostalgia problem, explained by The Challenge