MTV Classic Is Nostalgia for Millennials. But Do They Want TV?

VH1 Classic is dead. This month, it was reborn as MTV Classic, a channel focusing on music videos and shows from the ’80s to the aughts. The nostalgia baton has officially been passed to the millennials.

In its first week, MTV Classic served up Mariah Carey in a butterfly necklace, TLC in silk pajamas and Gwen Stefani with a bindi. It broadcast reruns of “Beavis and Butt-Head,” “Daria,” Ashton Kutcher-era “Punk’d” and a retrospective on “Total Request Live.” Welcome to the BuzzFeed-ification of MTV — the music channel’s attempt to reel in youngish viewers by appealing to their sentimentality for the recent past.

As a millennial elder, I am MTV Classic’s target demographic. I saw “Beavis and Butt-Head Do America” in theaters. Daria was my high school antiheroine. In my day, if you wanted to watch the new Limp Bizkit video, you had to wait for Carson Daly to debut it on “TRL.”

Just a decade or two later, I’m ready to reminisce about Lisa Frank folders and Puff Daddy videos. It makes sense that millennials, the most recorded generation in history, would romanticize the era just before smartphones became ubiquitous. We’re fascinated by documents of life before everything was documented.

MTV Classic offers that stuff 24/7. In the morning, music video blocks are stocked with Super Soakers, scrunchies and velour separates. Evenings bring reruns of shows like “Jackass” and “Clone High.” There’s also fodder for the slightly older crowd: “Headbangers,” a hostless version of the old “Headbangers Ball,” delivers David Lee Roth prancing in a mélange of sparkly bodysuits, and Megadeth burning the Constitution. The video marathon “I Want My ’80s” features George Michael playacting as straight, on a yacht.

Too bad it’s all on TV. Millennials may pine for the television of the past, but that doesn’t mean that we want to watch it on a television. Our pre-internet nostalgia is a sentiment largely expressed online. We binge “Friends” on Netflix, collect Pokémon on our phones and scroll through evidence of resurrected ’90s trends (Gigi Hadid in a velvet choker, Kylie Jenner’s taupe lips) on Instagram.

As a kid, I watched MTV in my older brother’s bedroom, door slammed shut, hissing, “I am Cornholio!” back at the fuzzy old TV. But now culture is consumed on laptops and phones, while parents are watching prestige dramas on the living room flat screen.

The genius of BuzzFeed was its intuition that millennials don’t particularly want to consume nostalgic content as much as we want to link it, share it and pin it. It’s the shareability of the old material that manages to mine a sense of community (Only ’90s Kids Will Remember _______) and identity (What ’90s ________ Are You?).

MTV Classic is all consumption, no participation. Its Facebook page is dominated by VH1 Classic loyalists complaining about the new lineup or that music released in the aughts isn’t “classic.” The videos — Biggie sipping Champagne on a speedboat, Britney gyrating in front of the lockers — may be reliable adolescent triggers for the under-35 set, but airing them on television is totally out of sync with how we want to rewind and revisit our pasts.

Die-hard fans might opt to DVR “Wonder Showzen” and “Daria” instead of paying to watch them on iTunes or Hulu, but for the most part, the channel’s ’90s ear worms and throwback fashions are best packaged as linkable conversation starters, not cable video blocks. Post-YouTube, the experience of even watching an entire music video all the way through — much less 30 in a row, cut up by commercials — feels interminable. I kept wanting to X out the Nelly video and call up a Missy Elliott track. I did it on YouTube instead.

Meanwhile, plenty of pop culture embedded in early MTV has not aged so well. While many of the music videos called up from the ’90s and aughts feature artists of color, the channel’s nonmusical programming is not so diverse. MTV Classic is a reminder that the MTV of my childhood starred white people: Carson Daly, Mr. Kutcher, Johnny Knoxville, Butt-Head, Beavis, the cast of “Laguna Beach.” Notable exceptions include MTV Classic’s resurrection of the Run-DMC reality series “Run’s House,” and “Pimp My Ride,” hosted by Xzibit.

In 2016, MTV stars look like Nick Cannon of “Wild ’N Out,” DeRay Davis of “Joking Off,” Franchesca Ramsey of the web series “Decoded” and Nicole Byer of the forthcoming sitcom “Loosely Exactly Nicole.”

Yes, in order to be shareable, nostalgic content needs to exist online, but it should also nod to present-day social values. Ten years out, Ashton Kutcher in a trucker hat doesn’t feel retro. It just looks passé.