MTV's True Life Premiered 20 Years Ago This Week, A Look Back At Some Of Their Best Episodes
Source – Twenty years ago today, MTV premiered its documentary series “True Life.” The first episode, “True Life: Fatal Dose,” explored the lives of heroin addicts in Plano, Texas, amid America’s growing opioid epidemic.From its beginning, “True Life” set out to convey a diverse world and bring its inhabitants together by highlighting our shared experiences.
Episodes in the show’s 1998 inaugural season ran the gamut from working as an adult entertainer to living with HIV. One focused on the anti-gay hate crime that took the life of Matthew Shepard that year.
The show marked an important foray into long-form reporting for the network. The ensuing two decades would see “True Life” broaching equally vital discussions of sexuality, addiction, mental health, domestic and foreign strife, and love ? not all of which were always artful or entirely accurate but many of which served to usher important topics into the national dialogue.
Based on MTV’s current programming, it’s easy to forget how important the channel used to be. It defined an entire generation of young adults from the 1980s to the early 1990s known as ‘Generation X.’ It broke news, and made stars out of unknown bands like Nirvana and NSYNC. What Johnny Carson was to comics, MTV was to musicians. Not only was it important musically, it created a new genre of entertainment: reality TV. It started with shows like the Real World, and eventually morphed in to docu-reality like MTV’s True Life, which at the time was considered groundbreaking. A. because it shed light parts of society that people either ignored or didn’t know existed and B. because the stories were FASCINATING. The show followed everyone from junkies to comedians to people living double lives. But no matter how different the stories were, you always walked away feeling empathetic towards the person on screen. Even if you hated them it made you feel like you learned something about the human condition. There are so many episodes that it’s tough to choose which ones to highlight so I picked a few of my favorites.
True Life: I Have A Summer Share aka *Tommy Cheeze Balls
True Life: I Have OCD
Tue Life: I’m Getting Married
True Life: I’m A Meat Head
True Life: My Parents Are In Porn
MTV has the really good ones locked up on their website. I’m Questioning My Gender Again, My Boyfriends Fed Up With My Weight, I’m Hooked On Molly- the list goes on and on. Hopefully MTV moves away from its current programming strategy of remaking TRL and gets back to creating shows with actual substance. While they’re at it they should bring back Cribs, Jackass, and Room Raiders. Basically replace everything they’re doing today with what they did ten and twenty years ago. I bet their numbers would sky rocket. Happy twentieth birthday, True Life. Hopefully you get renewed for another ten years.