This first comprehensive, integrated analysis of MTV provides new ways to understand television and popular music narratives. "Goodwin's approach is multidisciplinary, highly detailed, very perceptive-and it works. The industrial approach to music television favored here covers a lot of ground and provides the kind of clear, focused thinking so often lacking in other accounts of MTV." --Cinefocus "This thoroughly researched and annotated book does a splendid job of geting to the heart of music television and its relationship with popular culture." --Popular Culture in Libraries "Reasonably but firmly takes on the postmodern analysis of MTV as a pastiche of deliberately unmeaningful images and what are called in the trade 'blank parodies' of other 'texts.'" --Chicago Reader "Goodwin achieves his ambition to 'advance and reframe' the debates around music video and music television" --Journal of Popular Music "A smart book: it will have an impact on the debates surrounding popular culture." --Susan McClary

Between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows, including Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, Catfish, and Jersey Shore, which were aimed at predominantly white youth audiences. In Millennials Killed the Video Star Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture—ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities.