The Day They Cancelled VIVA Zwei
There was a channel called VIVA Zwei that used to broadcast the music nobody else would touch—post-punk, electronic, art-pop, the stuff that felt personal precisely because it wasn’t playing anywhere mainstream. Germany’s answer to MTV2 before MTV2 forgot what it was supposed to be. I watched it obsessively, the way you watch something you already suspect won’t last.
It didn’t. VIVA Zwei got cancelled. Then MTV bought the parent network VIVA. Then MTV stopped airing music entirely, replacing it with ringtone advertisements and reality programming. Then they fired Sarah Kuttner, who was the best presenter any music channel had produced in years—someone who actually loved music and let that show on camera. That’s the complete history of music television in four sentences.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the grey rectangular box that brought light and sound into my life, but at some point it became undeniable that the relationship is one-sided. The medium is rotting, and it’s rotting in a specific direction: cheaper, louder, dumber, with less and less respect for whoever happens to be watching. The news gets pushed to the margins. Programming that asks anything of you disappears. What fills the space instead is an apparently inexhaustible supply of court shows, call-in quiz shows, home shopping blocks, talent competitions engineered to sell ringtones, reality romance where the relationships are manufactured for cameras and dissolved immediately after filming wraps. Format after format designed to capture attention without earning it.
The cumulative effect, if you watch enough of it, is a specific kind of incuriosity—not ignorance exactly, but the slow training of yourself not to want more than what you’re given. You stop asking what else there might be. The screen fills your field of vision and your field of vision fills the screen, and eventually you forget they were ever separate things.
The honest solution is to throw the television out the window. It’s summer. Go outside. Whatever you absorbed from a week of daytime game shows will be useful to nobody, including you.