106 & Park
BET's live countdown couch — AJ and Free, a screaming studio audience, Freestyle Friday battles, and the top hip-hop and R&B videos of the day. For fourteen years, this was where rap premieres actually happened.
106 & Park premiered on BET on September 11, 2000, named for the address of its original studio in East Harlem at East 106th Street and Park Avenue. Hosts A.J. Calloway and Marie 'Free' Wright ran it like a block party with a countdown attached: the day's top hip-hop and R&B videos, a live audience packed with teenagers, and the artists themselves dropping by the couch the same week their singles hit radio.
The address stopped being literal almost immediately — after Viacom acquired BET in 2001, production moved to the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan, making the title a misnomer for the rest of its history — but the show's place in the culture only grew. Freestyle Friday, its weekly head-to-head rap battle judged in front of the crowd, became an institution of its own. AJ and Free left together on July 28, 2005, and after an interim stretch the couch belonged to Terrence J and Rocsi Diaz from July 6, 2006 to September 28, 2012, the pairing a second generation of viewers grew up on.
Through all of it, 106 & Park stayed BET's highest-rated show — the network's flagship for the entire span when a video premiere was still an event you scheduled your afternoon around. The final episode aired December 19, 2014, by which point YouTube had swallowed the premiere and the countdown alike. What survived is the memory of appointment television at 106 & Park: hands in the air on a Friday, two unknowns battling for a freestyle title, and the loudest studio audience on TV.
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