- Music
- 31 Jul 17
Total Request Live ('TRL') will return in October.
Once upon a time, MTV was primarily a music channel. With the growth of the internet and reality television, this became a thing of the past midway through the '00s.
Emblematic of this shift was the end of Total Request Live, which ran from 1998 to 2008.
Hosted by Carson Daly, it featured the top ten requested videos of the day, along with celebrity and musician guests.
MTV President Chris McCarthy sees it as part of a plan to "reinvent MTV", which has also included scrapping MTV News, and re-tooling reality shows Wild'n Out and Fear Factor.
TRL will require a "massive" studio facing Times Square, which is currently under construction.
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McCarthy has come out strongly on his vision for the channel since becoming President of the company in 2016.
“MTV at its best — whether it’s news, whether it’s a show, whether it’s a docu-series — is about amplifying young people’s voices,” he says. “We put young people on the screen, and we let the world hear their voices. We shouldn’t be writing 6,000-word articles on telling people how to feel.”
While you're waiting for October, here's a parody courtesy of Saturday Night Live: