MTV's Total Request Live is now only live twice a week and is taped for the other three days. With a huge drop in viewers from its peak until now --757,000 viewers per day to 351,000 -- TRL decided to broadcast live shows only twice a week in order to cut costs.
I don't even understand how that works. I thought the whole point of the show was that viewers voted throughout the day for their favorite videos and then the most requested videos were played. So either the order is just going to stay the same every day, or this is proof that yet another one of MTV's "reality" shows are not reality. They claim that the taped shows won't be edited, so I guess the plan is to keep the videos in the same order. I think it would be smarter to just air the show once or twice a week instead.
Andrea Feczko @ Sat, 03/24/2007 - 1:25pm
Even as an impressionable eighth grader, I never really believed that my voting would influence the TRL countdown. If taping a few segments instead of doing a live show keeps music videos on MTV, then I guess it's a good thing.
Also, I highly doubt the order of shows would be affected. Without giving away too much information, the order of shows is not really under MTV's, or any music channel's, control. Hint: Think of countdown shows more as part of a larger marketing and PR push.