Sunday, April 21, 2024

The Look: Coachella

BY DC CUEVA 

Whether it's buying songs piecemeal to create my playlists for every major trip, having a brother in law who's done DJ gigs for a long time, or experiencing a meet & greet with my favorite band two decades ago, music is something that is a vital part of my daily life -- even though I am someone who doesn't sing or play an instrument. But live music is a different story: only a small handful of times that I have ever been to a concert -- most recently, a free live show by a local cover band on Fremont Street in downtown on my most recent trip to Las Vegas last Halloween weekend.

Every other time that I've seen musicians perform live has been through television or YouTube, most especially when we had to go through that dark time in our world that is thankfully now in our rear view mirror. It took for that long pandemic pause for music fans everywhere around the world to really and truly understand how vital concerts and live music are to the industry, and it took for the biggest summer blockbuster the music world had ever seen to bring that magic of performing of all of us once again. The immense impact of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour continues to cast an immense afterglow a year after it took to stadiums across America, shattering records and bringing her to greater superstar status.

However, it is only part of a live music story that features thousands of gigs -- large and small, chart-toppers and up-and-comers, and stadium tours to club shows -- that crisscross the country and the world every year... most especially when the summer comes around. As the live music season gets underway once again, music fans have something to look forward to: major festivals from EDM events in Miami and Vegas to Lollapalooza in Chicago and Bonnaroo in Tennessee... not to mention major tours, stadium shows and lots more. But over time, one event has grown to becoming THE event in American music.

It may not be the largest one of its kind... nor does it take place during the actual summer months themselves. But like golf at Augusta signals the arrival of springtime in the sports world, it's the annual gathering of hundreds of thousands of music fans, fanatics and those lucky to get those precious tickets to an event at a polo ground 120 miles from the country's second largest metropolis that has grown from humble beginnings to become the single most highly anticipated annual live event in American music. That is the case with Coachella -- now twenty-five years young.

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Inside MTV Reality: Welcome Back to The Challenge All-Stars, Part Four

BY DC CUEVA 

May we say hello to all of you, and welcome back Inside MTV Reality at DCBLOG with the hope that 2024 has been good to you so far. As we wrote here Saturday, this site has been on a hiatus for most of the last year & a half to something more important to me than everything else: helping my family after our biggest heartache, and also growing my reputation as a YouTuber. But with a new appreciation for what's really important to me, we're set to resume regular activity and to properly mark our tenth anniversary of covering the shows you love and a lot more than that - although it'll be a little different.

The year as far as MTV Reality television is concerned has seen a first for that longtime staple of Thursdays in that everyone who has called Jersey Shore home is now under one roof, as we await what happens when Ronnie & Sammi see each other for the first time in forever as the franchise marks fifteen years young this summer. Also turning that age is the Teen Mom sorority, where they and the one who represents this world there of Cheyenne and her fellow MTV'ers, are out of country again for their third Vacation down in South America. And then, there's the one things that what we follow the most...

Poster & Pics: Paramount+/Andy Reeves
As much as this site is marking a belated birthday season here, fans like yourselves are marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the launch of The Challenge as a regular MTV series when alumni of The Real World and Road Rules went on that first cross-country road-trip. The show has changed quite a bit since then, and plenty has gone down in the course of what has been thirty-nine seasons of the MTV show, along with a slew of spinoff shows in its many and various forms. And we have been following this world ever since CT won his first career title, except for the past couple seasons including its second season on network television last summer on CBS with Big Brother, Survivor and Amazing Race alums competing alongside MTV Challenge alumni.

After that, this past fall and into the winter -- and prior to it eventually turning the same age as me, the show gave the opportunity for those who have not won one of these that chance to have the stage to themselves unabated. Battle for a New Champion saw a slew of new competitors and familiar faces take to the floor in search for win #1, and we saw plenty go down: a friendship of love show alumni going the way of the dinosaur, two who have mastered 39 days of outdoor captivity have control of the regular season until the finals, and even a few champions try to crash the whole thing without being mercenaries entering the game. And it was a Romanian who followed in the footsteps of a Big Brother champ in proving that those don't have to produce the big time drama and still be competitive enough to win it all.

What went down there will set up what should a most compelling battle for the ages when the fortieth season of the MTV Challenge comes our way once the autumn air hits after the heat of this summer. And this comes at a time where TV's longest-running reality competition franchise has once again hit the mainstream just as it did having the stage to itself when the world lost its mind. One GOAT and a fellow reality icon just claimed the season 2 crown of the streaming world's most buzzworthy reality show, coming after a 7-time champ also took his world tour to The Traitors just after joining fellow Villains elsewhere on the dial, one that will soon have a longtime nemesis joining in too. And we cannot forget about two other Challenge alums joining a battle of reality show GOAT's over at Jeff Bezo's place.

And it's also in the world of streaming, and in the entry of MTV's parent company into that world, that provides us with the stage to the main event of this spring... a bit later than planned, but it's one thing that's been in the rear view mirror of so many of you in Challenge Nation for some time. When Paramount+ launched back in 2021 the MTV Reality world was sure to be a major part of its offerings, and it's no surprise that The Challenge would play a big part of it. The result of that: the most exciting thing to happen in this world in years of the All-Stars spinoff series... and after the break, we bring you our first look at Season 4 as South Africa welcomes back legends, power players and more to a star-studded season that promises to be quite a season. And to Challenge Nation, welcome back again.

Saturday, April 6, 2024

DC FORUM: Welcome Back Inside MTV Reality

A Word from the Blogger
BY DC CUEVA 

This week officially kicks off the tenth anniversary season of Inside MTV Reality on DCBLOG -- something that's a little belated but still something that we have been looking forward to for some time. It is a celebration of sorts that, like what we had to go through just a few years ago at this time, was something we had to put off for various reasons. One is for matters that affected the showbiz industry when Hollywood was shut down during the dual writers' and actors strikes last year... but the most important one, for this one at least, was of gaining a better appreciation of what I have and for the people around me when family time has been needed after our ultimate of heartaches.

I might have been late to the party somewhat, considering that this fan has been watching these shows since 1998 -- and who has a vault of memories of watching over this world even before I join the social platform formerly known as Twitter. But the advice I got from a fellow fan and NorCal'er in Andrew Kirk gave birth to this very site back in 2013 (yes, this celebration is later than we had planned and now during the first full year of blogs)... and there was no better time to get ourselves initiated in this world than in the midst of what had to be one of the greatest times that any fan of these drama-filled, trash TV has ever had the pleasure of enjoying. 

That time in the first quarter of 2014 provided a glimpse of what the next generation of MTV Reality would offer over the rest of the decade and in the Twenties: the first-ever major alteration of the longest standing format in the reality genre and the channel's first entry into the modern reality dating show subgenre both here in the U.S. and overseas. There was Season 25 of a first of its kind reality competition series, more tabloid-friendly drama among the most scrutinized group of young moms, a pair who roamed the country to expose online love, and other samplers of the life of being young. And all of this took place while most of the OG's of the biggest MTV series ever were on their first hiatus.

What took place both that year and the one before that in the last half of 2013 in the last pre-twist Real World in Portland and the Rivals II Challenge helped set the stage for our amazing run that followed of covering the shows, the people, the moments and the stories that turned this person from just a fan who watches these shows like you, into going on a path of fulfilling a lifelong dream of being in the journalism and media worlds -- albeit for a fan blog like this and later my own YouTube channel documenting my annual trips to Las Vegas. Those two shows above would be joined by the aforementioned Are You The One, a few years later here by the U.S. version of Ex On The Beach, and by a few other shows that expanded my MTV horizons even further in this wild and wacky world.

Even before joining social media in the public form of it (this one had a MySpace to start out and joined Facebook for just his inner circle in the '00s) I've already enjoyed a wide variety of MTV content, which made getting into the sultry drama of the Florida version of The Hills and Laguna Beach of Siesta Key outside Tampa Bay more easier. The same held true for their wild party-hard counterparts in Floribama Shore up in Panama City Beach, which got me into the door of the global Shore franchise marked by the Jersey originals when their bromance of Pauly and Vinny went for love... and where anyone who has a P+ subscription can see its international versions too. And there's many other shows that might not have reached their level of being on multiple seasons, but we have covered them too in and around those.

It was only fitting that I signed on my presence on the social platform formerly known as Twitter on the night of a Real World season premiere a year before DCBLOG began in 2012. And in addition to getting to directly interact with cast members (which I did a lot of in the early years), it became the platform to see how everyone -- they, you and the fellow MTV fandom -- saw the shows take place online, and our Social-Pulse presentations in well over hundreds of them became a signature of this site. And we have seen a lot of memorable moments go down over the past decade: from two steals of the entire money Challenge prize purse, and the controversial final night of the only AYTO season to go broke, to when we comforted a Bronx ladies' man when he lost a parent half a continent away... and so many others that made our jaws drop, got us talking on social media, and made the next-day water cooler talk.

The people who we've met in the MTV world over the past decade have been many by the hundreds: there's the 7-time champ whose theft on the Rivals III finale cemented his legend status that's taken him beyond The Challenge the past few years. There's a leading lady of that show's new generation who was part of an AYTO cast who overcame the mightiest odds to the money, and made friends of the music world en route to her debut. And there's a man whose imprint is on virtually every MTV Reality show we've followed the past ten years, which has taken him from the Bay to Hawaii, to many Challenges and even the Teen Mom franchise. And Bananas, Nurys and Cory are a few of the plethora of personalities who we've followed over these ten years, both on these shows and crossovers into the mainstream that's helped to keep MTV relevant in a way even today.

The approaching of this summer's Paris Olympics sees not only my favorite sporting event and binge-worthy guilty pleasure, but also an aspect DCBLOG takes part of our inspiration from: the many human stories among the thousands of athletes competing told during the Games by the world's networks using a decades' old playbook by one of sports television's greatest icons of going "up close and personal." And the ExtraTime series has told so many of those stories over the years as we've gone beyond the shows to cover this world at large through the MTV Reality prism: from Cory's perfect match going for a dip with the world's most notorious "problem child", to an alum of a forgotten winter version of Jersey Shore and his quest to reconnect with his perfect match half a world away during the pandemic... and hundreds of others that have taken them to other shows, pop culture, and those stories sometimes that will make you laugh out loud, shed a tear, make you feel pressured to go after someone perhaps.

That first full year of our blog coverage ten years ago was also when we tearfully lost two Challengers in a span of just two weeks after they competed together on Exes 2. It's that same feeling that we all went through together saying farewell to Diem Brown and Ryan Knight that November of 2014 is one I also went lived through myself eight years later... and that has had a reason with me taking that hiatus. But if he can talk to me in my dreams, then my dad will obviously tell me to keep doing what I love doing... and I feel refreshed and ready to return to this hobby, which we are proud to do here this spring a decade after we started this thing.

For the last year & a half, I've enjoyed this relatively limited slate of the MTV schedule as just a fan and interested viewer before the idea of becoming a content creator came about... as well as broadening my viewing options by doubling the number of streaming services I've subscribed to compared to a year ago. But when we get this all restarted all over again, it will be as if we never left... but going forward as our original intent was to provide, it's the role we've embraced as storytellers that will become more of a focus on this site, while still offering timely and traditional episode recaps. We'll also expand our focus to my other passions of sports, music, other shows, Vegas and other things... and in every instance, we will maintain the high level of standards and quality commitment that this site has set forth over this run, even if I might be a bit too rusty getting back in the groove -- but just leave me some slack.

Ten years -- it has been quite the time in our world since early 2014 when the journey we've taken inside this fascinating world of reality television and its pioneer began to take full shape during that amazing time. When we all needed that escape from the chaos of everything going on in this world especially the past few years, watching this timeless genre has represented that ideal respite. And while there's a lot that has changed, others have weathered that storm to still be here... and we are, after some time away. And what does the next decade have in store? We'll find out when we preview The Challenge: All-Stars Season 4 in a few days... and Welcome Back as we once again go Inside MTV Reality on the BLOG.

- I AM DC
@DC408DXTR