Reheat & Serve

By James Poniewozik Monday, Jan. 26, 2004
    • ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY TERRY COLON

    If you are of a certain age — somewhere between Madonna and Britney — your memories of high school or college probably include profound, intense late-night conversations that went something like this: "Dude! Remember Lite-Brites? Remember Webster? Remember Frankie Goes to Hollywood?"

    Thanks to the tireless efforts of VH1, it is becoming nearly impossible, dude, not to remember. A longtime way station for people too old for sister network MTV and too young for the History Channel, the music network found sudden relevance in 1997 with water-cooler hit Behind the Music , a saucy bio show about the travails of rock stars. But VH1 binged on the show, running and running it until it collapsed (much like its earlier hit Pop-Up Video ). In 2002, with ratings scraping bottom, the network brought in new management to decide, in effect, what VH1 was about. Which really meant deciding what its viewers — mainly adults born after 1964, that is, Generation X-ers and those a bit younger — were about.


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    The answer: recycled culture. Gen X had demonstrated an early appetite for nostalgia — witness That '70s Show and the Brady Bunch movies — and the network courted it with I Love the 70s and I Love the 80s , limited-run series in which moderately famous actors, comics and musicians riffed on mass-culture icons from Kojak to Kajagoogoo. The series riveted twenty-and thirtysomething channel surfers, as though tripping a Manchurian Candidate —like synapse. In just over a year, VH1's ratings jumped more than 100% among 18-to-49-year-old viewers. (Also, of course, recycling culture is faster — and often cheaper — than creating original entertainment.)

    "We tapped into the one thing we all have in common," says MTV/VH1 entertainment president Brian Graden, "which is our relation to pop culture." Now VH1 has packed its schedule with rememberfests like 200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons and the new Bands Reunited , a reality show that tracks down, Blues Brothers —style, the members of '80s bands like Berlin and Extreme for reunion concerts. Coming up are the series Surviving Nugent , a reality show built around '70s rocker Ted Nugent, and a "postmodern" remake of The Partridge Family that will begin as a reality show in which viewers will help cast the sitcom.

    The key to the channel's success is in capturing the tone of Gen X nostalgia, at once snide and affectionate. Executive vice president Michael Hirschorn calls VH1's focus not "nostalgic" but "retro," which he defines as less "sentimental and teary." (Although one could reasonably define it as "I am so not old enough to be nostalgic.") "The channel had been in a baby-boomer mode, which was very serious about music," he says. "We turned that into 'Let's have fun with pop culture.'"

    Specifically, with really cheesy pop culture. Gen X developed its identity by being compared, usually unfavorably, with baby boomers. In part, the standard critique was that Gen X's culture was inferior — its music phonier, its ideals shallower, its icons pettier than those of the 1960s. True or not, as this cohort pushes 40, it has perversely rebelled against this gibe by embracing it — remembering its tackiest, most disposable childhood icons most fondly of all. If Gen X-ers turned nostalgic much earlier than the 30-year-olds of decades past, maybe it's because, inundated with video, musical and commercial messages from birth, they have lived more media lives in fewer years. For them, Hanna-Barbera cartoons and embarrassing-in-retrospect videos were a staple of growing up — one part Mom's cooking, one part surrogate mom. So I Love the ... et al. celebrate pop culture's dross: more Bananarama than R.E.M., more Top Gun than Tom Wolfe.

    VH1 is still nominally a music channel. But in the era of J. Lo and American Idol, The Osbournes and the Michael Jackson circus, being a music channel does not mean being about only music. Says MTV Networks Group president Judy McGrath: "Music culture is now a place where you'll find Liza Minnelli and OutKast and the Queer Eye guys on the same stage." So a popular VH1 subgenre is shows about current celebrity culture only tangentially related to music — Fabulous Life of ..., 100 Hottest Hotties and so on. "I was in Puerto Rico at our sales meeting," says VH1 president Christina Norman, "and someone asked me, 'What does VH1 stand for?' And I said, 'It doesn't stand for anything'"—although technically it does. "Video Hits One? That's what it was 20 years ago."

    Now, arguably, as important to VH1's identity as the musicians are people like comic Mo Rocca ( The Daily Show ). He has appeared on enough clip shows—70s, 80s and the new Best Week Ever — that one might believe VH1 has him chained in a basement studio. "I consider myself the David McCullough of '70s and '80s pop culture," says Rocca, who notes that the affection for that culture is not limited to people old enough to remember those decades. "I speak at colleges, and the kids are nuts over these series," he says. "They don't know anything about the Civil War, but they know Battle of the Network Stars ."

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