Tonight was the final episode of MTV's TRL (aka Total Request Live), a show that, I must admit, I was already too old for when it debuted a decade ago. While I wasted a lot of time on shows like Ken Ober's Remote Control, Alex Winter's The Idiot Box, and Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-Head, for years whenever I thought of MTV, I thought of the personality-challenged Carson Daly-hosted TRL. Now it seems that I'll be thinking of The Real World and The Hills instead.

Funny, isn't it, that in a world where each cable channel has a shot at success if it can grab even a tiny sliver of a niche market, a channel named Music Television is abandoning it's once genre-defining successful music format (less than 20 hours of music per week on MTV these days -- and that's before the cancellation of TRL!) for the same sort of scripted "reality" programming found on E!, VH1, Spike, and dozens of others? Perhaps it's time to simply rechristen the network "More of the Same" Television.

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