The De-blinging of MTV?

MTV is announcing a new program that takes the spoiled brats from My Super Sweet Sixteen and dumps them with indigenous tribes in Africa and Antarctica. It's called Exhiled! and it's a 180 turn from the ostentatious and limitless lifestyle glamorized in the original show.

The premise of this show stuck out to me, and I think it’s because it’s a demonstration of our swing away from soaking up the unattainable ultraglam world of My Super Sweet Sixteen to being more interested in “what’s right.” MTV is following that trend with Exhiled!. Over the next year, we will become more focused on what's right and what's wrong as the presidential election bears down on us. Things we haven't thought about for years are creeping back into our minds, and I think it's making us all a little more righteous. I think plenty of brands have picked up on their consumers being fed up (cashing out, as Faith Popcorn calls it) and have staked out territory as allies in “being fed up.” They’re anti-establishment; they’re rebel. But this MTV program may be going one length further to focus on life after being fed up—depicting what it’s really like out there in the world, rather than just being against what the world is not. "Our audience in the past few years has really begun to look at how they fit into the world; it's core to who young people are now," said MTV executive Dave Sirulnick. "Some of these girls had very little awareness of what was going on around them and were very self-centered. We thought, 'Here's an opportunity.'"