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Tune in today, September 8th, to Volume 106, 7 PM East, 4 PM West.

Hear the episode live on SiriusXM VOLUME: HearLefsetzLive

If you miss the episode, you can hear it on demand on the SiriusXM app: LefsetzLive

We just started watching “Borgen.”

I know, I know, it’s an old show, but it’s new to me. Jason Hirschhorn hipped me to the fact that it was finally on Netflix. Oh, I was aware of it, but I’m not buying a TV show, I’m on strike, we already subscribe to too many TV services.

Now if you haven’t seen “Borgen,” you should. For the lessons. Like “House of Cards.” Politics is a game, how do you stay in it? Compromise is key. If you just stand your ground you get nowhere. But if you compromise, your constituents hate you for it. It’s a conundrum. But the game-playing, it’s akin to all other industries, even walks of life. You see there are bullies and manipulators and the only way they respect you is if you stand up to them, if they can roll over you they just laugh and take further advantage. I know, I know, it’s the opposite of what you’d think, but if you want to have respect, you’ve got to be able to say no. And the work/family balance, and the way the prime minister’s husband helps her sort out the issues…I guess too many shows are about murders and war, situations which you’d never experience in real life, but you can identify with “Borgen,” I recommend it.

But I can’t really recommend “Nobel,” which we finished before “Borgen.” It’s a Norwegian show about the war in Afghanistan and some say there’s too much talking and not enough action, not that I’d agree, and it’s interesting but it’s not absolutely top drawer, put it on your list if you’ve seen absolutely everything.

But what we watched before “Nobel”…IT WAS FANTASTIC!

“The A Word.” My buddy Don Elford in Australia recommended it.

So I immediately researched the reviews. I’m sorry to say, if you recommend something that’s got a bad rating on RottenTomatoes, under 80%, the odds of me watching it are about zero. Actually, unless I know you well, the show you recommend must be in the nineties, or high eighties, why waste so much time on subpar viewing, life is short, it’s gonna end before you know it, sink your teeth into the good stuff!

“The A Word” had a 93% Average Audience Score and an 89% Average Tomatometer score so we fired it up, it’s on Amazon Prime. No, it does not cost extra, if you pay for Prime you can view it for free, and you should.

“The A Word” is in English. So if you hate subtitles, you’ve got no excuse. But I’d recommend you leave the subtitles on, because the accents can get heavy.

It’s shot in the Lake District. It is so beautiful, it will positively blow your mind. I did not know it was so close to Manchester, which I’ve been to multiple times, I wish I’d made the excursion.

So, living in the Lake District is like living in the country. Not everybody went to college, but everybody finds a way to survive.

Joe is autistic. That’s the premise of the show, I’m not giving anything away. But Joe’s parents won’t accept this, they want to will him to be normal. They believe with just enough attention, he can overcome…once they admit that he’s on the spectrum to begin with.

How do they find out? Well, they go to doctors, but really it’s the sister-in-law, Nicola, who points to Joe’s behavior. Nicola is one of those people who is smart, who is educated, but has no tact, cannot help herself from stating the truth, straightforwardly, sans nuance. You know, the kind you hate. Which Paul and Alison do. But she’s right.

And Nicola is married to Alison’s brother Eddie, who can’t get over the fact that she had an affair.

And Alison and Eddie’s father’s wife died and he copes by trail-running.

And the music teacher’s husband moved on and she misses intimacy and…

I don’t want to give too much away. But the point is, these are normal people.

Maybe you have autism in your family, maybe not. But seeing the disappointment when Paul and Alison realize the hopes and dreams they had for Joe won’t come true…it’s heartbreaking.

But Joe is a music savant. Yes, he lives for eighties ditties, the songs his parents grew up with. If you grew up in the States, you’ll know some of them, maybe if you grew up in the U.K. you’ll know all of them.

So what we’ve got here is a family drama. But what makes it so great is the characters are 3-D and they don’t always do what you expect them to.

You know American TV shows…it’s all kumbaya, everybody loves everybody, everything works out, or if it doesn’t someone is a villain who needs to pay the price. But that’s not how life works!

I’d love to get into the details with you, but I don’t want to ruin anything.

If you’re human, if you’re in touch with your feelings…

Or, if you’re human and you’re not in touch with your feelings…YOU SHOULD BE!

“The A Word” does not bludgeon you with messages. These are just people living their lives, dealing with the unexpected, trying to cope.

Alison is beautiful, but during the first season you want nothing to do with her.

This is not American TV. Sure, there are some great U.S. shows but the truth is it’s a great big world out there with a lot of great stuff just waiting for you to watch it. Hiding in plain sight, like “Borgen.”

Like “The A Word.”

THE A WORD | Official Trailer | SundanceTV

I’m looking for me
You’re looking for you

“The Seeker”
The Who

If this was on Netflix it would be the talk of the nation.

Media gets the message last. It fans the flames of the status quo, the breakthroughs always happen on the fringes. Meanwhile, industry, in an effort to maintain its sacred business model, surrounds its actions with hype that the media reports, giving the public a false sense of what is going on, assuming people are paying attention at all, assuming they’re not so deep into their niches that they cannot see what is going on around them, that they do not care what is going on around them.

We live in the binge era. For all the b.s. about the short attention span of the younger generation, nothing could be further from the truth. People want to go deep, they want to marinate in something, and they want no artificial gatekeepers, they want it all and they want it now, or whenever they choose to partake of it. We live in an on demand society, why do TV outlets continue to drip out material?

Worst offender is Apple TV+. Their shows get no traction, they’ve got no hold on the public consciousness. But believing they know better, because they’ve heard from the lackeys from Hollywood they’ve hired, they’ve completely missed the target. When you’re an upstart, when you’re looking for traction, you flood the marketplace with material, you don’t hold back. A superstar can get by with an album a year, but if you’re a wannabe on your way up? You’d better be dropping material constantly, interacting with your audience constantly. Otherwise you’re forgotten. You’re looking for that one hook that will start a conflagration of word of mouth after which newbies will go deep into what you’ve already released. Apple TV+ announces a new series, drops one episode, and then the series is forgotten. TV is not quite like music, as in you don’t have to grab them right away. TV is inherently a deep commitment. The key is to get somebody, anybody, to go all the way through the steps and then spread the word when they’re done, assuming the word is worth spreading. Supposedly “The Morning Show” is good, but the series took a while to build, the public moved on, and it’s hard to bring people back.

“Breaking Bad”? It broke on Netflix, years after it started, people want to binge, to get a sense. But Apple TV+ and HBO are still making us wait a week, HBO beholden to its old business model, all in the effort to build water cooler moments. But that was back when we all worked in an office, before everybody was a freelancer, before people weren’t timed by their bosses to the point they’ve got no free time. Furthermore, word of mouth in real life is a fraction of what it is on the web, you want to start it online, and now when everybody is home…

As for HBO, its problems are well-documented. HBO Max is hampered by being too expensive, the executives being worried about pissing off their cable partners. And sure, disruption usually happens after the initial event, in this case on demand streaming services, but once the new model gains acceptance to ignore it is death. Don’t forget, the public railed when Netflix announced its switch to a streaming format from DVDs by mail. A great company is ahead of the audience, an old, dying company falls behind. Kind of like Exxon, dropped from the Dow…it was so busy lobbying elected officials to maintain the status quo, to keep us in the fossil fuel era, it missed the switch to solar/electric. Tesla is making home batteries, not Exxon. And maybe Exxon had to be more than a fuel provider, maybe it had to use its expertise to make cars or… Or else Exxon needed to prepare for its death. Like Digital First Media’s acquisition and then starvation of local newspapers. They’re dead folks, at least in their current version. But all the old journalists and publishers are nostalgic about the old days and want to prop up a dying business model just like oldsters wanted to prop up the record stores twenty years ago. What happened? They died! You cannot hold back the future, not for long. There is no reason for a local paper to be doing national news. Now, with everything at your fingertips, the local paper has to distinguish itself from its national rivals…but so far, none of them has done this, and they’re all on the way to extinction.

So, HBO Max is lagging in subscriptions. Primarily because it’s too expensive, the company trying to protect its cable partners. Furthermore, HBO Max is unavailable on Roku and Fire platforms, which is like making an album and only having it available on Apple, not Amazon and Spotify too. But the old executives believe they can bend the behavior of the public to suit their will, but that went out the window years ago. If you’re behind the public, you’re dead.

Furthermore, HBO is afraid of cannibalizing its cable product, ending up with a foot in both worlds, which is nowhere. But if the entire nine episodes of “The Vow” were dropped all at once on HBO Max, there would be a reason to sign up for the service. Services are built on hits, different from what came before. “House of Cards” on Netflix, “Hamilton” on Disney+. You’ve got to drop something so hot that it inspires people to watch it and spread the word. As for hype in traditional media…that’s like saying one critic’s review is equal to RottenTomatoes, which it is not. Oh, the creative industry hates RottenTomatoes too, they have an investment in opacity in a world of transparency. How successful would Amazon be without reader reviews? You’d buy a bad product and never purchase from the company again.

So…

The NXIVM cult. What do you know about it? Assuming you know anything at all. That they branded women and there was sex involved. That’s what makes the story enticing, but that’s just the end result of…

We’re looking for answers. You and me, everybody.

It started in the seventies, with EST.

Growing up a baby boomer was very different from growing up today. Oftentimes only one parent worked outside the home. State college was dirt cheap. And you could support yourself on minimum wage, you didn’t feel like you were falling behind if you didn’t initially hop on the corporate bandwagon.

So…

People started to wonder about life, looking for meaning, for answers. Their parents lived through the Depression. Their parents worked to survive. But their progeny, the boomers, they wanted more.

The sixties were a tumultuous age. Which faded quite quickly in the seventies. Nixon was president, the war continued, the boomers licked their wounds, they grew up, they were out of school, they were looking for something, they were looking into themselves. Ergo, the personal development industry.

Credit Tom Wolfe. He wrote the definitive piece in the summer of ’76, he labeled the era “The Me Decade.” You can read the original article here:

The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening

Wolfe was a brilliant writer. Not only in analysis, but readability! That’s what made Wolfe a star. You could read what he wrote, it intrigued you. Wolfe excoriated the pretentious “New Yorker,” because it was too reserved, too stuck-up and all read the same. Read it today, he’s still right. Wolfe was edgy in an era of conformity. But this was back when writers were respected. When a great magazine article bled into the national consciousness. And that was a long time ago. Today not only are magazines scrambling, they’re beholden to their readers, they’re dumbed-down entities to sell advertising. One article can break or boost a magazine, but usually that one article doesn’t even exist anymore. However, “The Atlantic” is doing a good job, because it spends money. The pros only work for money, the amateurs will do it for nothing.

So the century turns and you can get your message to everybody, assuming they’re interested. And Keith Raniere builds NXIVM.

But the most amazing thing about NXIVM is nobody knew about it! This would not have happened in the pre-internet era. But in the digital era there are so many stories, so many niches, that what lies in plain sight is rarely amplified. There are not only news niches, but activity niches, belief niches, that have nothing to do with what is going on in Washington, D.C. And you can find your niche on Facebook, but D.C. doesn’t know about it and the media is still caught up in the pre-internet mind-set, i.e. if they don’t write about it it doesn’t exist.

So what you have here is a crook. Just go to Keith Raniere’s Wikipedia page. That’s another thing you don’t want to do today, lie, not if you want to have a public profile. Raniere started with Amway, he was all about multilevel marketing, i.e. pyramid scams. And he got busted, but don’t they tell you in Silicon Valley that failure is a badge of honor, that you’ve just got to try again? Raniere tried again, he came up with NXIVM.

The truth is we live in a lonely society. Used to be you grew up in a burg, everybody knew you and you never lacked for community. Today, you can be in a zillion groups online and still feel lonely as hell. And, for all the anti-tech zealots, the truth is loneliness is the human condition, we’re all looking to connect, and if you provide that, people will jump.

Not me. My father was a skeptic. And usually it’s not the educated who make the leap. But the rich, those whose success is based on the outside not the inside? They’re ready fodder.

So, Raniere creates a system. Filled with charts and a patent application… All to give it a patina of respectability. Now the truth is many entrepreneurs are sociopaths, narcissists, you’ve got to be to stay the course and build your fan base. The average person does not start a cult, just someone slightly deranged with a hole in their heart. And people can be manipulated…remember Mystery and the “Pickup Artist”? Yes, find men who can’t get laid and dupe them into a system which manipulates women and…the truth is it doesn’t work for most followers. And you can convince women to go against their instincts. Well, we’ve got a president who is gaslighting the entire country, that’s not news. But it is news that there are businesses built on this approach, that do not get busted.

So, NXIVM promises to get rid of your fears and unlock your potential. Sounds good, right? And the key is to recruit successful people to sell the message, because you want to be like them, right? Furthermore, they give you the time of day, they’re your friend, suddenly you’re part of a group, your mood improves, you’re having fun…and then you’re all in.

What causes people to go all in? But even more interesting is…when you go all in, how hard is it to go all out? We see this in politics…you can’t change people’s minds, they’ve got too big an investment in their belief system. No matter what you confront them with they will not change, because they will have to admit they wasted time and money and now they’ve got to start all over.

But, NXIVM is all about rich, good-looking people.

It’s also about marketing. That’s the scariest part of episode 3, wherein Raniere teaches his acolytes how to sell. They’re just tools, cogs in his system, he rewards them for signing people up, with both status in the cult and cash, and they think they’ve got a winning formula, as they get ever more insular and move further away from society.

What you have to understand is these cults are attractive! Ever take the Scientology test? It’s always given to you by a newbie who sells you hard, that you need courses, no matter what you answered. And if you join…you can be a member with all these famous people, who will help you get ahead.

I hate to say it, but it’s the same thing with AA. Join AA and the other members will look out for you, not only will they be your friend, they’ll get you jobs.

Meanwhile, life outside the group is hard. Both economically and emotionally.

It’s the essence of religion. Do you want to place faith in a deity, a prophet, in return for a belief system that will organize your life and give you hope as well as fill up your social life, give you a sense of community?

After all, we’re just animals under the skin. We want to belong, we need to belong, and if you discard it all, you’re either an outcast or a leader. Yes, that was the essence of the adulation of the rock stars of yore. They rejected the system, they wanted to do it their way, and they made as much money as anybody and they were not restricted by society’s mores and…you wanted more of that, and you went to the show to hang with your like-minded brethren.

But then, the acts found out that stardom, money and sex, did not fulfill them. And the truth is most uber-successful artists are damaged. So in the late seventies, a lot of them started paying fealty to God, to Jesus. He helped them just like Keith Raniere, like L. Ron Hubbard, and the great thing about Jesus is he would forgive you! And a lot of these stars had a lot to be forgiven for.

But so many of these stars were uneducated. But, in the classic rock era, they were middle class, back when thinking for yourself was a mantra. But as the eighties wore on and income inequality burgeoned only the lower classes got on stage, the odds were too long. The intelligent worked behind the scenes, they knew the talent came and went but they remained. And they were opaque. Which is why the record labels hate digital media, zeros and ones, because their business model was theft, and that’s hard to do when the sun shines in.

The sun ultimately shined on NXIVM. Keith Raniere is in jail.

But don’t watch “The Vow” for the story, that’s missing the point. Yes, the narrative is interesting, but what is truly fascinating is the choices these people made. Would you have done the same? Could you have extricated yourself from the system?

I have not gotten one e-mail about “The Vow,” not a single one. No one has talked to me about it. Today there’s an article in the L.A. “Times” about the directors, but most people I know no longer get the paper, it shriveled itself down to irrelevance, and the truth is the public is sick of hype, which this article is. It’s marketing, little different from Keith Raniere and NXIVM. I need to hear it from a compatriot, from someone without an investment.

Kind of like…

If you live in Los Angeles to this day you’re urged by friends to join the cult. Just come for a free seminar. The Landmark Forum helped them, it can help you! And if you resist too hard, they’ll start cataloging your faults. If you’re not with them, you’re against them. They need to shame you to get involved. You don’t want to be an outsider, do you?

In other words, “The Vow” is the story of America. How we’re all looking for answers, how we all want to join tribes, how we all want to belong, and if you go against the grain you’re a pariah.

Watch it.

The Vow (2020): Official Trailer | HBO

Tuesday September 8th at 9pm on A&E:

Biography: I Want My MTV

Seems like only yesterday.

But it wasn’t.

Watching this documentary you will feel old. You will feel like you lived through history, but that it was a long time ago.

MTV’s heyday was really the eighties. It bled into the nineties, it and its associated music video channels even lumbered into the twenty first century, but now they’re gone, history, for all I know there might still be channels on the cable, but I don’t know where or what they are and nobody ever talks about them and the truth is today’s movers and shakers in the music world never grew up in an era where MTV mattered, never ever.

But it did, it was everything.

Funny going from a monoculture to today’s Tower of Babel society. We all knew everything and now we know nothing, or just something in a very narrow silo. The only equivalent to MTV is the Trump show, we’re all aware of it, the shenanigans, but although the Donald is making it up as he goes, he has no sense of humor and doesn’t realize that we get sick of train-wrecks, that at some point you’ve got to change the programming.

Which happened with MTV with the firing of the veejays. It was like killing your brother or sister, your best friend, they were everywhere, omnipresent, and then they were nowhere. Eventually it leaked out that MTV’s philosophy was not to grow old with its fans, but to always appeal to the same young demo. A brilliant viewpoint that “Rolling Stone” refused to follow, but both entities are now in the dumper, because when it comes to art it’s always about the cutting edge, and if you’re not exploring, pissing people off, alienating your core, you’re dead in the water.

That’s the dirty little secret of successful artists…their fans want them to remain the same, even though when the acts give them what they want they still complain. But to walk into the wilderness? Some have done it, Bowie and Madonna, but everybody else seems stuck in time, locked in amber, with the same long hair/wig and the same outfits and it’s weird how they haven’t changed and we have.

Context…

The record business was in the dumper. A cash machine from the late sixties through the seventies, it was killed by corporate rock and the denigration of disco. This is not opinion, it is fact. CBS Records fired a ton of people, remembered by everybody working at that time, but how many of those people are still working in the business, how many are still alive?

It’s not only the VJs who disappeared, but all the execs too. Tommy Mottola was on screen briefly…does anybody fear Mottola today, does anybody care what he’s doing, is he even doing anything? Label heads were titans, now they’re unknown, just like the heads of movie studios. They’re not creative people so much as business people, it’s all about the bottom line, but Jack Antonoff says money is irrelevant if you’re ambitious, you just want to make it to the top.

And the star of this documentary, the man who appeared to have the most fun, was Les Garland. A legend inside the company’s walls, a known quantity in the business, all the ink went to Bob Pittman, who is heavily featured in this documentary, but Garland is the firecracker, the star, who knows all the musicians, whose office is always a party, who stays up all night just to roll into the building early the next day. In other words, have a good time while you’re doing it, that’s all that matters, everything else is irrelevant, like MTV itself, but once upon a time…

This is the viewpoint from inside the belly of the beast, from those who did not get screen time, who helped create the channel and its programming. And create they did. Maybe you can get the same charge from writing code, but I don’t think so. I don’t even think you can get the same charge from building a billion dollar business. Everybody had power and they were given a clean slate. Do what you want to, what feels right. And when you remove the reins, you’ll be amazed what people come up with, they don’t want to let the team down.

So, much of this is history. Documented. But still, Michael Nesmith gets a lot of screen time, he could have been involved, but he didn’t want to be a businessman, just like Meg Griffin refused to be a VJ. Small choices turn into big mistakes. You’ve got to be willing to take a flier, to jump. Even Mick Jagger… They want him to do a commercial? Is he gonna get paid? Garland whips out a dollar and Mick is closed. The “I Want My MTV” campaign is born. Pete Townshend is next. Then everybody wants to get on board. That’s the way it always is, everybody’s gun-shy until you lock the heavy-hitter, then they all want to be involved.

As for the retelling of the story… All the big points are covered, but I wouldn’t have told the story quite the same way.

There was the idea. Then the launch. Then the campaign to get the channel on all the cable services.

All the initial clips were of old rockers in performance, and then…

Came Culture Club and the other English new wave acts. Not that the movie does not mention this, but it skates over the fact that this happened in 1982! That’s when the power of MTV started to be evidenced. And then came Duran Duran, with its expensive videos, and the change was complete. You had to look good, your clip had to be innovative, you had to spend bucks, and the field was wide open if you delivered on these accounts. In other words, the programming niche was not really that narrow.

And then came Michael Jackson. I was not in the room, but the story on the street, documented everywhere, is that Walter Yetnikoff threatened to pull all of CBS’s clips from the channel if Michael’s wasn’t aired. MTV caved. But in this movie, MTV wants Michael Jackson, but when the company delivers “Billie Jean” instead of “Beat It,” they’re hesitant. The stories are not inherently contradictory, but the Yetnikoff story makes MTV look bad, and gives power to the record companies, and that does not fit with the narrative. Although they do credit David Bowie with changing their programming philosophy, airing videos by black artists. This was a big battle back then, as was the airing of hip-hop, which is dealt with fairly in this doc, it’s just interesting that the kids of all the old rockers are now deep into hip-hop.

But it’s completely different. If you were on MTV, you were BIG! GIGANTIC! No one is that big today, NO ONE! There ended up being MTV outlets all over the world, you could tour everywhere, you were rolling in dough, you can still tour to this day. As for today’s artists? The biggest, from Beyonce to Lady Gaga to Bieber… None of them are even as big as Pat Benatar was. Remember “Fast Times”?

Yes, MTV was influential. It WAS the culture. You learned how to dress and…

The movie makes Viacom the bad guy. This is the first time I’ve heard that with this emphasis, that when sold to Viacom the air bled out of MTV, the lunatics were no longer in charge of the asylum. But in any event, we got a game show, “Remote Control” and then other half hour shows, many reality-based, to prop up ratings, and it was over. Yes, the reign of MTV was very brief, maybe ten years, from 1981-1991, for the following decade it was running on fumes, not where the action was, and when the internet and Napster and then YouTube put the means of distribution into the hands of the customers, it was all over.

Videos became an on demand item online. And despite all those inane articles about the death of music video, there are now more videos than ever before, it’s just that the video is no longer everything, but just a piece of the puzzle, a way to see the act.

And although he’s seen, there’s no mention of the power of Abbey Konowitch. Yes, one guy was ultimately responsible for what got played and what did not. Nothing could be further from the truth today. What gatekeepers there are are much less powerful.

So it was clear, they were there and you were here. They were on screen, they worked at MTV, and you were at home, and your greatest desire was to be involved. You didn’t want to work at a bank, or in tech, or become an entrepreneur, you wanted to be involved with MTV, not only the engine of youth culture, but all culture!

Yes, the documentary makes MTV seem like the little engine that could. But the truth is Michael Jackson just blew it up. It already had purchase. People would turn it on and never turn it off. Can you imagine that today, sitting at home and waiting for ANYTHING??

Now it’s all on demand. The audience is in control. Everybody can play. However, something has been lost. The truth is, the internet and the creativity it has spawned is just as momentous as MTV, it’s just that more people are in control and there’s no dominance. MTV added coherence, clarity. If it made it on the channel, it was worth knowing about. And all the worthwhile acts were on major labels. It wasn’t until the early nineties that indie labels really started to get any traction.

So, what am I saying here?

The truth is you know almost everything in this movie. Not EVERYTHING, but it’s like looking at a family photo album. Yes, there are business insights, tips, and those might be unknown, and they’re important and cool, but really it’s about what was on screen. You were there, just like they were! That’s another thing that was left out, the contests! Win Mellencamp’s house? That was the lottery in those years.

So, the truth is this should have been a six to ten-parter. Ninety minutes is just a survey. There are good talking heads, there’s reference to both Billy Squier’s pink video and Tawny Kitaen, but all that might seem miniscule in retrospect was positively gigantic at the time. The channel was on 24/7, ninety minutes is not enough.

Then again, who is the audience?

Well, if it was on Netflix, kids would tune in to dig deep into history. Remember the impact of the Motley Crue movie? Kids want to go deep, they do not have short attention spans, in truth they want something to chew on, that they can marinate in, and if you’re delivering fluff they’ll treat it that way, by ignoring it or sampling it at best.

All the battles…the twenty first century cries for more videos on the channel…they seem quaint these days.

But make no mistake, MTV and music were positively PRIMARY in the eighties. Has there been any musical event in the twenty first century with even a tenth of the mindshare and impact of Live Aid? OF COURSE NOT! And you wanted to get rich, but you also wanted to give back. Sure, you might have hated Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren, but the news they were delivering oftentimes couldn’t be gotten elsewhere or was ignored by the target audience…MTV was a public service, in tune with its fans!

So, MTV is a great illustration that nothing lasts forever, that you must pivot. Pittman and Sykes made their way back to radio, but a lot of people got lost in the shuffle, they thought it was forever, and it was not. Nothing is forever, be ready to pivot, think about the future or you can be left behind.

And very little is remembered. Ask a millennial who Martha Quinn was. She gets very little airtime in this documentary, but what is truly overlooked is she was America’s Sweetheart. Normal, yet cool. Plucked from the suburbs to hang with the heaviest of the hitters. You wanted her to be your friend or your girlfriend or… One can argue strongly that MTV never recovered from her firing.

It was so long ago. Decades. But back then it seemed that MTV would be forever, like the Yankees. Or physical media. Or…funny what gets left behind.

So, if you’re playing to impress others you’ve got it wrong. No one cares. Come to L.A., during non-Covid days, you’ll see people who couldn’t leave their hotel room in their heyday walking the aisles of Whole Foods or Ralphs alone, unbothered.

And in the past…the past just faded away. But now we’ve got all this footage, all these videos, that are just a click away. The past coexists with the present. And this impacts music, it used to be the oldies were forgotten, but now every act has to compete with Led Zeppelin and Michael Jackson, never mind the Beatles.

But no one is competing with MTV. It’s a dead paradigm. Kaput! A hula-hoop, yet with more meaning. Not inert like a pet rock, but just a moment in time. And, of course, never forget MTV made instant stars, and oftentimes they fell off the radar screen just as fast. To last, you must pay your dues. Which is what is going on today, but it’s the opposite of the MTV era, people can’t believe it’s taking this long to break through!

But it’s about commitment, taking risks.

And that’s what the original MTV team did, push the envelope.

Fun. That was MTV. Both on screen and off. In the offices and at home. You wanted to get closer to the magic, you needed the magic. It was in an era where everybody was still optimistic, when the American Dream still existed, you truly believed you too could make it, even if the odds were long.

But some did. Some worth paying attention to, and some not. MTV blew up Dire Straits, but it also blew up Warrant.

But remember the first time you heard “Money For Nothing”? Or saw “Sledgehammer”? They captured the zeitgeist. That was MTV.

If you lived through it, you’ll want to watch this doc. Not because you will learn so much but because you will be brought back to what once was. It’s not exactly nostalgia, more a memory of a past era, that you were a part of.

We haven’t had that spirit here since 1991.

We’re waiting for more.