What music? The 17 best original shows on MTV

Sure, MTV’s reigning doofuses watched music videos, but the fact repeats air to this day with the videos stripped out shows there was much more to “Beavis and Butt-Head.” They even got a feature-length road trip film! With all due respect to a Carson Daly or a Martha Quinn, Beavis and Butt-Head are the faces of “MTV.” Their juvenile antics made themselves laugh their iconic laughs, but many a teenager (and adult) at home were laughing right along with them.

“The Real World” was not the first reality show, but it was the first to really make a cultural impact. It’s also the show that helped change MTV forever. The success of this cheap show that generated as much conflict and drama as anything scripted paved the way for an entire genre. It was a show about regular folk living together, ceding to be polite, and starting to get real. Media, and society, were changed, for better or for worse.

MTV tried its hand at a few game shows, but “Remote Control” is the best of the bunch, and the one that was tied into the sensibilities of the early MTV audience. The game show’s premise was that you were in host Ken Ober’s basement and was built around pop culture questions. An audience that was entrenched in pop culture for Gen Xers finally had a game show catering to them. Plus, the show gave early gigs to the likes of Colin Quinn, Denis Leary, and some guy named Adam Sandler.

If “Remote Control” was the Gen X game show, “The State” was the Gen X sketch comedy show. “The State” was really good, really funny, and really MTV. So much so when the group tried to move to CBS it tanked after one special. At least we always have “Porcupine Racetrack” and Captain Monterey Jack. Also, just look up the cast of “The State” sometime and see how much they impacted comedy to come.

“Say What?” was just an MTV show where they played music videos with the lyrics on the screen. “Say What? Karaoke” was built off that, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek karaoke competition show. It was silly and simple but fun. Also, it was hosted, for the most part, by Dave Holmes, one of our personal favorite MTV VJs.

Yes, that Jon Stewart. Before he was the snarky host of “The Daily Show” and then a comedic elder statesman, he was just a guy working in comedy, and a regular on MTV. “The Jon Stewart Show” was a nightly talk show on MTV, done in 30 minutes instead of a couple hours for those who had an MTV-style attention span. The show would become a 60-minute syndicated show after one year on MTV, but the MTV era is when the show was cool and fun. Fittingly, the last guests on the MTV show were the members of The State.

It’s one of those facts that feels like it can’t possibly be true, but it is indeed true. There were only 25 episodes of “Jackass.” In those 25 episodes, Johnny Knoxville and company became cult heroes and the favorites of many a teenage boy. Look, the stuff they did was dumb. It was dangerous, gross, and sophomoric. It didn’t matter. Nobody has carved out a niche in culture like the “Jackass” crew. Even if you don’t like their work (and many, many people love it to this day), you have to recognize just how impactful they were. Also, some of the stunts were funny. We just don’t like the gross-out stuff or the pranks.

“The Real World” was the catalyst for the reality genre, but the modern version of reality TV owes more to “The Osbournes.” It’s the variant that found its footing. Ozzy Osbourne was already famous, and “The Osbournes” followed him and his family as they lived their lives. It was obviously staged in many ways, but people ate it up. “The Osbournes” was a phenomenon. Kelly got to have a brief music career. Sharon became a celebrity in her own right. The cultural tentacles of celebrity-gawking reality TV it paved are found in the Kardashian empire, and even shows like “Real Housewives.”

Watching parodies of celebrities, rendered in clay, tear each other apart violently is such a specific idea, but one we were glad existed, if only briefly. Sometimes, the parodies were thuddingly obvious. The enjoyment of seeing, say, Rosie fight Oprah giving way to Eminem versus Kid Rock eventually got repetitive. The novelty wore off, but there was novelty there for quite some time.

MTV got into wealth porn and promoting luxury culture for a bit there. We had “Pimp My Ride,” for example, which was a show that immensely inconvenienced car owners (look into the logistical realities of that show sometime) for the sake of Xhibit’s career. “MTV Cribs” was awesome to some people, but for others with a different sensibility, it was funny. The way some of these celebrities “lived” was bizarre. It was a show that accidentally humanized celebrities it was trying to lionize. Once you see enough “Scarface” posters, the scales fall from your eyes.

This selection of shows is built mainly around an early era of MTV, and reasonably so. A lot of what it did in the days before it was a “Ridiculousness” channel wasn’t very good. However, there were some bold swings in there, and we want to recognize those. It wasn’t all cheap, inane reality shows. “Scream” is, indeed, a TV show adapted from the metatextual horror movie series. They made 30 episodes of “Scream” and it was ambitious, and sometimes quite successful. Kudos.

First, “Clone High” had a killer theme song. Second, the show was the first thing of note done by Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, who would go on to be major TV and movie directors. Bill Lawrence, of “Scrubs” and “Ted Lasso” fame, was also involved. The premise of this parody of teen dramas was that evil scientists had cloned famous people from history and were experimenting on them at Clone High, now that they were all teens. Joan of Arc, JFK, and more were there. Oh, and Gandhi, and nothing bad happened because of that. The show was iconoclastic and often really funny. “Clone High” was canceled after one season, but got a reboot on HBO Max in 2023. While the reboot is more “politically correct,” it’s still irreverent and funny so just relax.

“The Real World” begat “Road Rules,” which answered the question, “What if ‘The Real World’ was less good?” However, these two worlds were able to be brought together for “Real World/Road Rules Challenge,” which would eventually just become “The Challenge.” Alumni from these two shows would compete against one another in assorted sporting-style events, and eventually “The Challenge” would morph into its own thing. There are people who love “The Challenge” who have never watched “Road Rules,” or even “The Real World.” It’s a quasi-sport unto itself at this point.

Speaking of sports! “MTV Sports” gave us a pretty savage “The Ben Stiller Show” parody, but also was an MTV foray into reporting. Beginning in 1992 and ending in 1997, we don’t know how many episodes of “MTV Sports” they made. All we know is Dan Cortese, in all his Dan Cortese-ness, went around the country checking out sporting events while a million camera and editing tricks were going on in production. No non-music show feels as much like “MTV” as “MTV Sports.” Also, we can probably fold “Rock N’ Jock” in here as well.

Most animation on MTV was, let’s say, limited in scope and ambition. We aren’t knocking that style, but lush, robust animation was not the name of the game. “Aeon Flux” is the opposite of that. The German Expressionism-influenced animated show debuted as a six-part serialized story on “Liquid Television.” “Aeon Flux” then got to take its avant-garde, dystopian sci-fi further. There were five short episodes in season two, and then finally a season of 10 half-hour episodes to end its run on MTV. “Aeon Flux” was beloved enough to earn a live-action film adaptation starring Charlize Theron. Sure, the movie flopped, but that has nothing to do with the show.

This is the third pillar of the triumvirate of reality shows from MTV that basically came to define reality TV as a genre (not including competition shows). “Laguna Beach” was a reality show about a bunch of teenagers in the titular beach-y California town. Nobody was famous, but then they became famous. However, it wasn’t quite like “The Real World.” It never felt real. It always felt like television, not a documentary. In time, the “Laguna Beach” universe would shed the artifice, breaking through the fourth wall of reality television. Infamously, in the final episode of “Laguna Beach” spinoff “The Hills,” they remove set design to reveal the whole thing was shot on a back lot.

We come full circle here (and also it feels fitting because Daria would hate a show like “Laguna Beach”). Daria Morgendorffer began life on “Beavis and Butt-Head” before getting a spinoff. For our money, “Daria” is the best original show MTV ever did. The cartoon sitcom focused on the titular high schooler, having moved to the suburban landscape of Lawndale. Her smart, snarky, but secretly sensitive nature spoke to much of the MTV audience. Nobody wanted to be a Kevin, after all. Then we all grew up and realized that we now related to Jake to an alarming degree. Truly, it is a sick, sad world.