Some six months or so after sticking the proverbial fork in their long-running TRL franchise, MTV announced their plans for a new, live daytime program called The Alexa Chung Show at their up-fronts yesterday. The show will reportedly mix live celebrity interviews and musical performances (sound familiar?) with a social-media component powered by both Facebook and Twitter. Which all sounds well and good, we suppose, but there’s one outstanding question that we have before buying into this concept: Just who is this Alexa Chung person, anyway?
Well, if you are an active reader of the Cut (and if you aren’t, you should be), you’ll recognize her as being one of London’s biggest style obsessions of the moment. Which all makes sense, considering she spent her formative teenage years modeling for everyone from Fanta to Urban Outfitters. After growing sick of the fashion biz (who doesn’t!), the waify Brit transitioned into the television-presenting business for T4 in England, serving as both a host and reporter on a number of soft-news programs. And now, at the ripe old age of 25, she has MTV banking on the fact that she’ll be able to get millenials off their computers and onto the couch when they get home from school.
Chung is the latest in a long line of Brits to find a home at MTV, a family tree that reaches all the way back to the glorious Downtown Julie Brown era (wubba wubba!). Of late, the network seems particularly fascinated with Anglophilia, what with Tim Kash as the face of whatever remains of MTV News and the network having selected controversial comedian (and former MTV U.K. host) Russell Brand to host last year’s Video Music Awards. With our U.S. unemployment rate hovering around 9 percent, it would’ve been nice if MTV hadn’t outsourced this job, but we guess them’s just the breaks in the entertainment biz these days!
As for the show itself, it will be interesting to see how this one differentiates itself from and competes with the thoroughly goofy yet immensely pleasurable Attack of the Show, a progam which it sounds like it’s closely modeled on. We’re not yet convinced that Alexa Chung can compete with the impossibly shiny-haired Olivia Munn, but you can bet we’ll be watching when the show debuts on June 15.
Lauren Conrad leaving ‘The Hills’ [Variety]
Related: Alexa Chung’s New York Mission: Save MTV