By BRIAN STELTER
Published: October 24, 2010
The second-season finale of “Jersey Shore” last week was one of the highest-rated hours all year on MTV. There was, perhaps, no better time to promote another boozy, in-your-face unscripted show.
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MTV
A scene from the finale of the second season of “Jersey Shore,” the hit show that has helped increase MTV’s viewing audience.
Instead, in every commercial break, MTV promoted “Skins,” a remake of a scripted British series about the sexually charged trials of teenage life that is scheduled to make its debut in January.
“We were using one of our biggest moments of the year to loudly shout about a very different kind of show,” said Stephen K. Friedman, MTV’s general manager.
MTV is enjoying a renaissance. Written off as irrelevant just a few years ago, the channel was resuscitated this year by the rambunctious cast of “Jersey Shore” and the young parents on “Teen Mom.”
Lest it rely too heavily on those shows, MTV is rapidly diversifying its slate of programs, “Skins” being one example.
“We’re in a constant state of reinvention,” said Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks Music/Film/Logo Group.
Mr. Toffler is fond of saying that MTV executives have to “embrace the chaos,” especially because MTV has a fickle young audience.
Advertisers and analysts have taken note of the revival. Benjamin Swinburne, a media analyst for Morgan Stanley, said “there’s no question that ‘Jersey Shore’ has been the catalyst” for ratings gains at MTV.
“But they’ve been able to build off that by taking some intelligent risks,” he added.
Investors expect advertising growth to accelerate in the next two quarters at MTV and its parent, MTV Networks, which is owned by Viacom.
Cast members like Nicole Polizzi, better known as Snooki, from “Jersey Shore” get some of the credit, but the rebound is also a result of rethinking the channel’s programs for the millennial generation, as those born in the 1980s and ’90s are sometimes called.
It is happening at a time of wholesale revamping within MTV. A year ago, Tony DiSanto, president of programming, approached Mr. Toffler about wanting to set up his own production company. Mr. Toffler asked him to stay on while MTV strengthened its programming leadership. That is what the last year has been about, as a half-dozen new executives have been hired away from Warner Brothers, E! and elsewhere. Mr. DiSanto will leave at the end of the year.
Under the new guard, flashy reality shows are out — “The Hills,” once a flagship franchise for MTV, wrapped up last summer — and a new buzzword, “authenticity,” is in. It is shorthand for a new “filter” for MTV’s programming decisions.
Until this year, MTV had been shedding viewers for the better part of a decade, falling to an average of 481,000 at any given time in 2009 from an average of 636,000 in 2005. MTV, which the MTV Networks chief executive, Judy McGrath, has said should be the “forever young network,” had clung to Generation X a little too long, some believed, at the expense of the millennials.
Compounding the problem, there was a perception that MTV was flailing online, where its audience was spending more and more time.
“We were the company that didn’t get MySpace,” said Ms. McGrath, referring to Viacom’s failed bid for the social networking site. News Corporation acquired MySpace, instead, and the site has since withered. “I don’t think about that anymore,” she said in an interview last week.
MTV’s music Web sites now have more than 60 million unique monthly visitors.
Mr. Friedman, the former head of MTV’s college channel mtvU, was put in charge of MTV in 2008, after Christina Norman departed to take over Oprah Winfrey’s forthcoming cable channel. He said he sensed that “reality was starting to feel really unreal to our audience,” citing the show “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF.” No one believed Ms. Hilton would actually find her new best friend through a reality show.
At the same time, the actual reality shows on MTV — unglamorous stalwarts like “Made” and “True Life” — were picking up new viewers.
“They were inspirational, authentic stories,” Mr. Toffler said. The channel saw a way forward, and most of its new reality shows, like “The Buried Life,” “World of Jenks” and “If You Really Knew Me,” share that DNA.
As a result of MTV’s research about the millennial generation, Mr. Toffler and Mr. Friedman said they had come away thinking that teenagers and twentysomethings nowadays were less rebellious than those in the past. They are not rebelling against their parents so much as they are watching TV with their parents.
These insights have informed the development of new shows, including “Jersey Shore,” which was first conceived as a reality competition show for MTV’s slightly older-skewing sibling, VH1. Mr. Toffler decided to redevelop it for MTV, and what changed says a lot about the channel today.
“As opposed to making it a competition, we accentuated the fact that they come around and support each other — yes, they fight with each other, but they are a family,” Mr. Toffler said. “You even see their parents come in and cook pasta for the house.”
Mr. Friedman added: “Four years ago, you never would have seen that on MTV. Parents were absent!”
Now parenting is the main topic of “Teen Mom,” which is second to “Jersey Shore” in popularity. “Teen Mom,” which features four young mothers, is a spinoff of “16 and Pregnant,” which started in mid-2009 and stunned MTV executives with high ratings out of the gate. Its second-season finale this month attracted an average of 5.5 million viewers, while the finale of “Jersey Shore” averaged 6.1 million.
This year, MTV is averaging 558,000 viewers at any given time, up 16 percent from last year.
MTV is restarting “16 and Pregnant” with new cast members this month, and it is bringing back “Jersey Shore” for a third season in January. Several “Shore” spinoffs featuring individual cast members are also under consideration.
But MTV’s programmers know they cannot rely too heavily on these two hits. “You have to plan for all of these franchises’ obsolescence,” Mr. Toffler said, “and we are.”
The channel recently gave up on production of “Bridge and Tunnel,” a reality show about young people who live on Staten Island. Asked by a reporter if it was simply “Jersey Shore” on Staten Island, Mr. Toffler said, “That’s probably exactly why we didn’t want to do it.”
That comes back to diversification. Still trying to come up with a viable successor to the music video countdown show “TRL,” MTV this month started a pop culture newscast on weekday afternoons called “The Seven.” A scripted show, “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” started last summer, and four more scripted shows will come online next year, including “Skins” and “Teen Wolf.” “Beavis and Butt-Head” is coming back, too, thanks to a newly reformed animation unit.
“The times when our network has been one-note,” Ms. McGrath said, “have never been as good as the times when we were diverse.”