Viewers Beg for Cancellation of MTV Video Music Awards After Chaos, Incompetence, and Gross Madonna Ruin Already Vile Awards Show
I know a great many of you are too young to remember this, but there was a time where MTV not only played music, they gave awards for it.
Heck, not only did they have the Video Music Awards, they also had movie awards, too — and people cared about this stuff! Sure, it wasn’t on the same level as the Grammys or Oscars, but these shows were seen as their quirky, edgy, less-famous relative. Like the Chris Penn to Sean Penn, or the USFL to the NFL. (Don’t tell The Donald I mentioned that league.)
MTV was never terribly good, and yet Gen X’ers and older Millennials will talk about it like Baby Boomer Democrats trying to tell their kids about Kennedy Camelot to explain why a dimwit anti-Semite who believes a congressional seat is his birthright is a Big Deal to them.
I’m not sure why we ever thought it was so rad, to use the parlance of those times, but maybe it was just by comparison. Because I was surprised to discover on Sunday that 1) MTV still exists, 2) the VMAs still exist, and 3) goodness, they seem awful even by the standards of the 1990s.
The evening was best summed up by Madonna when she accepted the award for “Best Dance” — which, considering the 68-year-old Madonna was mostly washed up by the time I was old enough to start caring about music that wasn’t “Weird” Al Yankovic, is proof that the VMAs should be taken out of their misery like Ol’ Yeller.
Her speech — in which she either does a very good impersonation of an inebriated person or is indeed very inebriated — began thusly: “First of all, I want to get this thing out of my [butt]. It’s been there all night.” She then struggles to get a mic cord out of her posterior, then admits, “I’m kind of unclear as to what this award is for.”
You and me both, but given that Madonna is someone who mocked Courtney Love for her substance abuse during an infamous VMAs interview over 30 years ago now, it’s impressive that Love is sober, sane, and still with us.
Madonna is alive, sure — even if the majority of her body is probably younger than the 68 years she’s been physically present on this earth, at this point — but it’s clear her mind has gone beyond that great dancefloor in the sky, at this point.
Speaking of Love and her late husband, we might as well get to the highlights of the evening, which mostly involved living people paying tribute to dead people. (See: Nirvana receiving the Video Vanguard Award, obviously with one member in absentia, and Kacey Musgraves paying tribute to Dolly Parton.)
Nothing but love for these legends tonight. Nirvana receives the Video Vanguard Award at the MTV VMAs! pic.twitter.com/NRaL018Hdh
— Video Music Awards (@vmas) September 28, 2026
Kacey Musgraves delivers a moving performance of “I Will Always Love You” in tribute to Dolly Parton at the 2026 #VMAs. pic.twitter.com/RCuEiM0G8n
— Kacey Musgraves Access (@KaceyAccess) September 28, 2026
There was also another tribute to George Michael, this one by a singer-songwriter named Sombr (no clue, either), trying to perform “Father Figure.”
What’s amazing about this performance is that it seemed quite obvious to me that it was lip-synced and still wasn’t any good. But I have no proof that the guy lip-synced it, to be fair.
During a raunchy performance alongside Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX, Madonna actually proved she was doing so or performed some sort of miracle whereby she didn’t actually sing:
Madonna singing without moving her mouth!?? 😭😭 #VMAS pic.twitter.com/uKVHB8P6GZ
— Nick | ❤️❤️ (@EnjoyMissJanet) September 28, 2026
Oh, and I almost forgot about the host: Snoop Dogg, an admitted sex trafficker and one-time accused murderer who is now so family friendly he literally voiced a cat in “The Garfield Movie.” I’m assuming that cat didn’t have any lines about smoking a fat blunt or prostituting women, but even though my kids wanted to see that filmic conflagration, I managed to — unlike at least one guy who’s crossed Snoop’s path — dodge that bullet, so I couldn’t tell you for sure.
Like Madonna, Snoop D-O-double-G is much closer to the double-A-R-P than his glory days in music — although, unlike the Queen of Pop, at least Snoop has something other than recreational plastic surgery to fall back on.
Unfortunately, he had to wait to ply that trade, as the show was delayed. It turns out that, since the shindig was being televised on MTV, CBS, and streaming service Paramount+, MTV had to wait until the Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys game ran over its allotted time due to a furious Ravens comeback, The Sun reported.
They’ve learned their lesson from the “Heidi” game, a reference only slightly older than Madonna’s career.
And “Heidi” was actually good! This, well…
#MEEK living the dream on the #VMAs carpet 🔥 pic.twitter.com/ZXwi1jFVqP
— Video Music Awards (@vmas) September 27, 2026
🏆 Bruno Mars performs a pre-recorded live-stage performance of ‘Dance With Me’ for this year’s MTV Video Music Awards (2026).
This particular performance is from his recent ‘The Romantic Tour’ – Day 59 finale show at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami.#VMAs pic.twitter.com/jKkzEDtcaU
— MARSCHIVES (@marschives) September 28, 2026
… not so much.
I can say that I’m not in the demographics for this, but that’d be lying. If it’s on broadcast TV and it involves MTV — which is a nostalgia brand at this juncture, especially when it comes to actual music — it’s pretty clear that I am who they’re going for, especially when the host is Snoop Dogg and the biggest name at the awards not married to Travis Kelce was Madonna.
Even Taylor Swift is creatively at her first career low, in terms of her musical output, and save for an unexpected renaissance, it’s pretty clear Mars’ best days are well behind him.
Thankfully, in this era of permanent nostalgia farming, neither will become irrelevant, lest I or my fellow oldsters ever have to listen to a whole Sombr song of his own authorship. But the TV audience had the same thoughts I did.
From the U.K. Daily Mail:
Many former fans took to X to share their concern about the ‘boring’ event, adding that they struggled to see a future for it.
Advertisement - story continues below‘Getting the feeling this might be the last VMAs,’ one viewer wrote.
‘There’s no shame in bowing out gracefully. Gotta read the room,’ another added.
‘I thought it was just me, this… is boring,’ shared a third, before someone else wrote, in part: ‘Honestly the VMAs have felt like a funeral for years.’
And you didn’t have to search hard to find this sentiment on social media:
Cancel VMAs
A mess https://t.co/AJEUKU12VF— GAMÉBOY🍭in a GETAWAY car (@gameboychae) September 28, 2026
vmas got so bored of their own show they cut it early pic.twitter.com/BltOjms1H3
— mal⁷ (@boratyg) September 28, 2026
If the VMAs wanted to really make news, they would have let Courtney Love accept the award on behalf of Kurt Cobain and not tell Dave Grohl till he was already on stage
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) September 28, 2026
Or let her speak as the sober-sitter of record for Madonna. Man, wouldn’t that be irony?
But then, perhaps this era of everything, everywhere, all of the time has awakened us to a fact none of us wanted to admit during the 1990s and 2000s: Both MTV and the VMAs were never any good.
Sure, it’s easy to remember that era as belonging to Kurt Cobain, but you were more likely to see conglomerate-pushed wannabes than you were the actual article. (Even a diehard liberal will concur that Gavin Rossdale’s Bush is still worse than either George H.W. or George W.)
Meanwhile, as for Madonna, what can we say? During her 1995 catfight with Courtney Love, Madonna was inching her way toward irrelevancy. When she was last on the VMAs in 2003, which featured her infamous kiss with Britney Spears, she was definitely irrelevant. Now, in 2023, she’s not just irrelevant, she’s reached Full Retirement Age for Social Security.
And the No. 1 act Sunday night, as voted on by both the industry mavens at Billboard and the wannabe indie-kids at Pitchfork? Madonna. If that’s not a sign that it’s time for MTV’s parent company to pull the awards out of the same place that Madonna pulled that mic cord out of, nothing is.
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