The Channel That Believed in Accidents
VIVA launched on December 1, 1993 as Germany’s answer to MTV Europe, and the contrast was immediate. Where MTV had leaned into American grunge and adolescent fury, VIVA looked like someone had fed a decade of pop videos into a color-correction filter set to maximum. Saturated, melodic, slightly deranged—exactly what I needed at an age when I was still working out whether cool was something you performed or something you found.
Heike Makatsch, Stefan Raab, Nils Bokelberg—VJs who became something closer to personalities, in an era before that word had been colonized by influencer culture. They felt like older kids from a cooler neighborhood, not media products. The channel had this specific energy of something made by people who weren’t entirely sure what they were doing yet, which is always the most interesting energy for anything to have.
By the time Viacom bought VIVA fourteen years in and folded it toward the MTV template, the interesting part was already over. What remained was a name attached to a schedule that could have been generated by an algorithm optimizing for lowest-friction mediocrity—a relay station between comedy imports and the kind of reality programming that exists so people can hate-watch it during lunch.
The announcement of VIVA’s closure at the end of 2018, twenty-five years after launch, should have felt like nothing. The thing I was attached to had been dead for years. And yet. There’s something in the formal closing of an institution that makes the nostalgia specific and unavoidable—you can’t just say it was already gone, you have to sit with the original version: the colors, the lunatic energy, the pre-ironic sincerity of a channel that genuinely believed music videos were the apex medium. For a few years in the nineties, it might have been right.
The internet didn’t just kill music television; it dissolved the conditions that made music television matter. You needed a channel because you couldn’t choose—you had to wait, to be surprised, to catch something by accident at three in the afternoon. The algorithm has no accidents. VIVA’s best moments came from stumbling across something you didn’t know you wanted. That’s not nostalgia. That’s just a different relationship with culture, and I’m not convinced the new one is better.