Idolator

How is MTV planning to top last year's MTV Video Music Awards, which, despite instilling something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder in the psyches of many a viewer (this writer included), achieved bigger numbers than those in previous years and epitomized the Internet-watercooler-driven strategy that MTV is so aggressively courting these days? ("There was a time when the music video itself is what happened in culture, but now it's the music video and what everyone has to say about it that is what's happening," Brian Graden, president of MTV programming, told Reuters in a piece on the endless remixing and revisiting of MTV's "we do show music" flagship FNMTV.) Will the Los Angeles-based ceremony/party/excuse for televised debauchery go back to the big-numbers well and reinvite Britney Spears, who, most of you will probably remember, sleepwalked through "Gimme More" to open last year's show? More »