UPDATED 7:05 p.m. ET: MTV president Chris McCarthy told Billboard that TRL hasn't been canceled. Rather, the revival has been successful enough to expand to an early morning and late night edition.
Total Request Late, which has been running at 11 p.m. since last month, is set to grow from two nights a week to four into the summer months. The morning addition, tentatively titled Total Request A.M., will be a one-hour music block that McCarthy compared to "the Today Show but through a music filter."
The afternoon edition of TRL—which is doing fine ratings-wise, according to McCarthy—returns April 9.
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Last fall, MTV revived its pop culture music video show Total Request Live. Unfortunately, a new report reveals that the reboot did not succeed in capturing the massive success of its ‘90s after-school predecessor. Ten years after its first cancellation in 2008, MTV is once again pulling the plug on TRL, according to TMZ.
TMZ claims to have obtained an internal email sent to employees announcing that the series is being canceled once again. The show will not be returning April 9 after its winter hiatus, but instead, MTV is going to “pivot to short-form content that will be featured on social and digital platforms." In case you didn’t know, the show is accompanied by a blog that features written music-related content. Judging from TMZ’s report, it seems like the blog and TRL's social media accounts are here to stay, even with the show’s cancellation.
The news hasn’t been shared on any of the show’s social media accounts, so it’s unclear when MTV will make an official public announcement. The ticket calendar for TRL live shows still lists the week of April 9 to April 13 as available.
When the show first aired in October, critics slammed the reboot for not including music videos and for featuring fairly lackluster performances to seemingly unenthusiastic teens. An interview from The FADER with showrunner Albert Lewitinn revealed just how out of touch the show’s producers and MTV were with the youth. As many predicted, MTV's relaunch of TRL failed to connect with the audience it needed most to survive: millennials. Goodbye once again, TRL.
