Flipping channels last night shortly before midnight, I saw that FOX had Pitbull with P-Diddy (or whatever he goes by these days), and ABC had Carrie Underwood and Jimmy Buffet. Tivo claimed that NBC would have Gwen Stafani, but all I saw was Carson Daly talking (which is pretty much all I ever saw when I would flip past him on MTV's TRL).

All those musical acts waxing poetic about life and love: it's the same old sentiment wrapped in shiny new paper. Today's artists can't hold a candle to the classics.

Looking in your eyes I see a paradise.
This world that I found is too good to be true.
Standing here beside you want so much to give you
This love in my heart that I'm feeling for you.

Let 'em say we're crazy, I don't care about that.
Put your hand in my hand, baby, don't ever look back.
Let the world around us just fall apart.
Baby, we can make it if we're heart to heart.

And we can build this dream together,
Standing strong forever.
Nothing's gonna stop us now.
And if this world runs out of lovers, we'll still have each other.
Nothing's gonna stop us, nothing's gonna stop us now.

Now that's a song about life and love. Pay attention musical acts, because you're going to have to try harder in 2016. The past has set a pretty high bar.

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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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