Behind the Music Ushered in a Golden Age of Cultural Literacy

This week, Paramount+ debuts its new feature-length documentary Milli Vanilli, about the early '90s pop act who hit big with songs like "Girl You Know It's True," won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, and then were mired in scandal when it was revealed that band members Fabrice Morvan and Rob Pilatus hadn't sung the vocals on their album and had been lip-syncing in all of their live performances.

A story like Milli Vanilli's has a huge generational component, not only to the Gen Xers who were there for the band's pop moment, but also to younger generations who have experienced so many levels of artifice within pop music that the idea of a scandal over lip-syncing seems deeply quaint, if not nonsensical. But perhaps the biggest generational divide over a Milli Vanilli documentary is that, for a certain demographic who was raised on cable TV of the mid-90s through early aughts, the Milli Vanilli story has already been told by the highest authority that TV back then could muster: VH1's Behind the Music.

In fact, Milli Vanilli was the subject of the very first episode of Behind the Music. Over one short hour in 1997, the documentary series laid out the band's story from the perspective of Morvan and Pilatus, putting a pair of human faces on what had for several years been a punchline. A year later, after Pilatus died of an apparent drug overdose, the show aired an updated coda on the band's story.

Behind the Music debuted August 17, 1997, part of an overall effort by VH1 to diversify its programming beyond simply music videos. The previous fall, the network had introduced Pop-Up Video, which would play popular videos accompanied by factoids on graphics. If Pop-Up Video was the snack food of this new wave of “edutainment” on the network, Behind the Music was a three-course meal.

In its first year on air, the show premiered 38 episodes on a variety of acts from the 1960s up through the current day. And because VH1 had so many hours of programming to fill, Behind the Music episodes were aired over and over again, turning that particular generation of VH1 viewers into the most informed consumers of popular music in history (an utterly unverifiable claim, but it's emotionally correct).

The Behind the Music generation emerged with intimate knowledge of the Milli Vanilli scandal, the various romantic entanglements that made and broke Fleetwood Mac, the death of Selena, the salacious stories from Studio 54, the untimely deaths of Harry Chapin and Karen Carpenter, and so much more. Ask someone within the right age range who had cable, and they will be able to recite chapter and verse the financial math that led to TLC declaring bankruptcy, or the story about the Mamas and the Papas winning enough money at a craps table to fly home from a recording session in the Caribbean. The series ended in its original form in 2014, though it was resurrected in a slicker (and less probing) format in 2021. Currently, Paramount+ has a small selection of original-run Behind the Music episodes available to stream (including, blessedly, the TLC one).

Behind the Music wasn't alone on an island either. The show was preceded by The E! True Hollywood Story, which debuted a year earlier with its own tell-all approach to stories about all sorts of famous people from beyond the music industry. This was all happening concurrently as MTV was keeping its audience abreast of the latest in pop culture developments via MTV News, The Week in Rock, et cetera. The peak of this era of edutainment came in 2002, when VH1 premiered I Love the '80s, a 10-part week-long primetime special where a group of pop culture luminaries from the '80s and various commentariat from the present day (journalists, comedians, Daisy Fuentes) recapped the high and low culture that captivated people during what many regard as our most ridiculous decade.

More often than not, I Love the '80s (and its sequel series dedicated to the 1970s and 1990s, which debuted in 2003 and 2004) gets brought up when discussing the waves of nostalgia that swept through pop culture after the turn of the century. Too rarely do we talk about these shows as pre-YouTube repositories for the kind of monoculture we've mostly lost. Back then, the shared cultural memory banks could encompass everything from the Challenger explosion to New Coke to the "Like a Prayer" music video. And if you weren't old enough to experience those things firsthand, you learned about it secondhand from Hal Sparks and Mo Rocca on I Love the '80s.

Recently, documentary features and narrative limited series have tried to replicate that kind of pull-back-the-curtain look at popular culture of the recent past. The myriad documentaries on Britney Spears and Janet Jackson, Hulu's Pam & Tommy series, films about Queen, Elton John, and N.W.A., that Madonna movie that keeps threatening to get made — they all feel like they're feeding into a chasm that was left behind when the edutainment boom died off.

The irony of having nostalgia for nostalgia shows like I Love the '80s shouldn't be lost on anyone, but it's a symptom of a culture that currently has access to everything that's ever existed in pop culture (via YouTube or Spotify or streaming sites) but fewer and fewer platforms that put that culture into any kind of context. In other words, we wouldn't need a Milli Vanilli documentary if we still had Behind the Music airing on TV (or available to stream beyond the select few episodes on Paramount+). Younger generations would have a better sense of the culture that preceded them, and thus be better able to process the culture of today. There's no better time than the present to bring these shows back and let the talking heads of 2023 (I volunteer!) have at the last 50+ years of pop culture, one decade at a time.

Joe Reid is the senior writer at Primetimer and co-host of the This Had Oscar Buzz podcast. His work has appeared in Decider, NPR, HuffPost, The Atlantic, Slate, Polygon, Vanity Fair, Vulture, The A.V. Club and more.