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The Unlikely Savior Behind MTV's Resurrection
https://www.forbes.com/feature/chris.../#27698b4c10df
CHRIS MCCARTHY HAS REFOCUSED THE AGING NETWORK ON WHAT IT DOES BEST: REALITY TV.
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Chris McCarthy remembers the first time he watched MTV. As a teenager in working-class Levittown, Pennsylvania, he'd tune into the Friday night comedy series Just Say Julie. It starred Julie Brown, who hosted as her big-haired, Valley Girl alter ego. She was both VJ and critic—as likely to play Madonna's music videos as to mock Madonna.
"Brown just had the craziest, wildest show. It was very queer, and there was just something about that. I loved it," recalls McCarthy, 43, who now runs MTV as the channel's president.
Just Say Julie aired between 1989 and 1992 during the network's heyday, a decade after MTV burst on the scene and turned music videos into a cultural juggernaut. By 1992, MTV Networks was doing more than $400 million in revenue while reaching 112 million homes worldwide. But that dominance was fleeting. By the 2000s music videos were deader than disco, and MTV only survived the decade with a string of unscripted, or reality, television series, including hits like MTV Cribs (2000-2011) and Jersey Shore (2009-2012). Those shows aged poorly, and the channel came close to blinkering out of existence after a failed attempt to follow the industry boom in expensively produced scripted television—MTV's The Shannara Chronicles and Finding Carter never came close to the success of AMC's Mad Men or HBO's Game of Thrones.
In the five years leading up to 2016, MTV's ratings plummeted nearly 50% in its core 18-49 demographic, according to Nielsen, and the network's operating revenue fell more than 17% to $1.15 billion, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence data. MTV's struggles mirrored the decline across its parent company, Viacom. Shares in the $12 billion (market cap) firm have lost about 50% of their value over the past five years. Not one of its 16 channels—a lineup that includes Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1—has scored a standout show amid the shift to scripted TV, even as rivals, like Fox's FX channel, HBO, Netflix and Amazon, all experienced viewership booms.
Yet MTV is emerging as a lone bright spot for Viacom, and McCarthy is something of an unlikely savior, an industrial engineer who followed a maverick career path and started at MTV hawking branded credit cards. After getting the top job in 2016, McCarthy completely reversed the network's direction, refocusing it on its past success—inexpensively produced teen-friendly reality shows—and forcing it to more fully embrace the Web. It certainly seems to be working: MTV revenue increased to $1.2 billion in 2017, its first year of sales growth since 2013. "The impact he has had on the business has happened faster than most people would have thought," says John Janedis, a media analyst at Jefferies. Ratings have risen for three consecutive quarters in that 18-49 demographic.
"When Chris started at MTV, he came to the same conclusion I had when I ran International—unscripted programming is at the heart of MTV," says Viacom CEO Bob Bakish. "So he repurposed money that had been used on more expensive scripted programming and started spending it on unscripted programming, producing more hours of content that is consistent with what the audience wants."
Even before music videos began moving to the Web in the late '90s, MTV had tried its hand at reality television-first with The Real World in 1992, then Road Rules, which followed strangers living together in an RV, in 1995. It decided to fully embrace the genre in the 2000s with lighthearted programs skewed to a young audience. First came MTV Cribs (2000), featuring celebrities giving tours of their homes, and stunt-tastic Jackass (2000), followed by the network's pièce de résistance, Jersey Shore (2009), the wildly popular chronicle of eight callow, heavy-drinking 20somethings. Those shows were cheap to make—less than $1 million an episode, a third or so of what scripted TV costs to make—and scored big ratings. At its peak in 2011, Jersey Shore became MTV's most-watched show ever, with more than 8 million viewers.
Around this time, McCarthy was working as a freelance consultant after having returned to school for a Wharton M.B.A. (He had studied industrial engineering as a Drexel undergrad, then worked in production and marketing at McNeil Consumer Healthcare and for chemical company Ciba-Geigy.) Through a friend, he met the host of another popular reality show, Survivor's Jeff Probst, in 2004. "I would meet with Jeff at a hotel that doesn't even exist anymore in L.A., and he helped me to write stories and treatments," McCarthy recalls. Together they came up with the idea for the country music competition show Gone Country. Viacom bought the pitch for $5,000—Probst let McCarthy keep the earnings—and aired the series on Country Music Television for three seasons. Its 2008 debut season set records as the highest-rated series on the network ever, at the time.
The first episode from the reborn Jersey Shore Family Vacation in April 2018 was the network's highest-rated new show in six years.
Through various meetings with Viacom for Gone Country, McCarthy met an executive at mtvU—an MTV channel targeting college campuses—who hired McCarthy as a marketing freelancer in 2004. His assignment: convince students to buy mtvU's credit card. "I got the job because nobody wanted it," he says. McCarthy succeeded enough to earn a promotion to vice president and then to general manager of mtvU and MTV2, a sister channel of MTV.
By 2010 the main MTV network had started following competitors into the world of scripted TV with poorly reviewed and poorly rated attempts, like The Hard Times of R.J. Berger, a tale of an unpopular kid becoming the big man on his high school campus, and Death Valley, the story of an LAPD unit taking on vampires, zombies and werewolves. Still, MTV spent like its more successful peers, shelling out $2 million or $3 million per episode, sometimes 350% more than its bread-and-butter reality shows cost.
McCarthy took over MTV in July 2016 (only five months after taking command of VH1 and Logo, a lifestyle channel). He looked at ratings from MTV's international networks, which never abandoned unscripted programming, and knew reality television could still work for MTV. He quickly scrapped the network's scripted shows, like Sweet/Vicious, a sexual assault drama—yes, really—and The Shannara Chronicles, a fantasy. Like the rest of MTV's scripted slate, neither had ever managed remarkable ratings.
In their place, MTV brought back Jersey Shore, this time sending seven characters from the original cast to Miami. (In addition to its start in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, the Shore group has previously journeyed to South Beach and Florence, Italy.) The first episode from the new Jersey Shore Family Vacation in April 2018 was the network's highest-rated new show in six years and the most-watched reality premiere on cable since 2012. "Our DNA is the unscripted space," says McCarthy, dressed in sleek black pants and a sporty quarter-zip sweater in his glass-walled office overlooking Times Square. "And for me it's like, all right, what's already working? And then how do we actually take it to the next level."
There's now Floribama Shore, too, which went on air in November 2017. Like Jersey Shore, it features attractive young people coming of age amid drunken debauchery while living together in a house, this time on Florida's Gulf Coast. The show is off to a good start, becoming the highest-rated new series on MTV since 2014. MTV obviously can't get too much of a good thing: Two more Shore-esque spinoffs are slated to debut for later this year—one set in Kentucky and another in Staten Island.
"[McCarthy] knows his audience," says Viacom CEO Bakish. "He knows his competition. He looks hard at what is working, what isn't—and why."
Another resurrection: Total Request Live, back after a nine-year hiatus. To appeal to a younger crowd, McCarthy hired social media stars like YouTube comedians Liza Koshy and the Dolan Twins as correspondents. When it debuted, the revival didn't do well on traditional television, where teens were unlikely to tune in live. But clips exploded online and on mobile, occasionally beating Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show in Nielsen's social rankings. "It was an eye-opening experience to see how actually the media's changing," McCarthy says. "It's like, all right, how do you actually target different demos by platform? Young people are carnivores of content. You just gotta listen." He heard them—and began airing digital-friendly TRL shorts on Facebook and Snapchat. At night, when older viewers are watching, a new show, Total Request Late-Night, airs in a format closer to the original—music videos and guests from other MTV properties. Since premiering in February, the show has become the number two original cable series in its 11 p.m. time period. A morning version of the TRL franchise, which almost exclusively plays music, launched in late April.
The addition of Koshy and the Dolans to TRL is a masterstroke. As up-and-coming stars from social media, they're far cheaper to hire than any big, traditional talent. And they come with their own highly popular distribution channels for MTV: their social medias accounts. "Digitally, what they are doing with TRL is great," says Dani Benowitz, a VP at media-buying firm Magna. "Having both social influencers," like Koshy at TRL, "as well as a … presence [on traditional TV] is really nice."
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05-17-2018, 08:37 PM
