A television control room showing multiple monitors displaying various MTV shows like Laguna Beach, Jersey Shore, and TRL.

Fewer people, however, will defend the network's programming in the 21st Century, the point at which MTV was taken over by reality shows about teenage airheads and hard-partying twentysomethings. Laguna Beach, Teen Mom, My Super Sweet Sixteen, and most infamously Jersey Shore all became mega-hits that spawned franchises and spinoffs, and all were held up as symbols of everything wrong with reality TV by its critics, with many suspecting that the shows were possibly staged and definitely trashy. (jackass is the lone exception; perhaps not coincidentally, it has little in common culturally with the aforementioned shows. Even then, the show lasted for only a short time on the network and also recieved criticism, but did grow into a nostalgic media franchise for many.) The only saving grace for those that didn't generate nostalgic memories was that they weren't TLC programming, another network that arguably stepped into an Audience-Alienating Era, but unlike MTV, never even left it as of 2025. Music was increasingly relegated to TRL, and even that was canceled in 2008, revived intermittently over the years. In the 2010s, MTV attempted to jump on the scripted series bandwagon and compete with fellow teen-oriented networks The CW and Freeform, but while they did put out some acclaimed shows like Awkward. and Sweet/Vicious and greenlit a new season of Beavis and Butt-Head, only Teen Wolf managed to become a legitimate hit on top of it, causing them to abandon scripted programming Ver más