120 Minutes
MTV's late-night alternative-music show, two hours of videos the daytime rotation wouldn't touch, from Hüsker Dü and Morrissey to the world premiere of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." For a generation that stayed up for it, the 1990s hosts Lewis Largent and the encyclopedic Matt Pinfield were the gatekeepers of what counted as cool.
120 Minutes was conceived in 1986 by Dave Kendall, a newly hired MTV producer, and first aired on March 10, 1986, at 1:00 a.m. Eastern. A rotation of VJs fronted it until Kevin Seal became the first permanent host in 1987; Kendall himself hosted from 1988 to 1992. In its first decade the show was where you saw Kate Bush, the Ramones, Morrissey, Kitchens of Distinction and Hüsker Dü, and it gave Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video its world premiere in September 1991. A weeknight companion, PostModern MTV, ran from 1988 to 1990, and the mid-1990s brought a more mainstream spiritual successor, Alternative Nation. In 1991 two CDs came out as Never Mind the Mainstream: The Best of MTV's 120 Minutes, whose Sex Pistols pun happened to echo the title of Nirvana's Nevermind, released at nearly the same moment.
The 1990s hosts are the ones people remember: Lewis Largent from 1992 to 1995, then Matt Pinfield, a New Jersey radio and club DJ whom MTV hired in 1995 and who stayed until 1999, when Dave Holmes took over. The show was influential enough that Garbage found their singer there: Steve Marker spotted Shirley Manson on 120 Minutes in the video for Angelfish's "Suffocate Me." A 1998 Atlantic album, 120 Minutes Live, gathered in-studio performances by Oasis, Weezer, PJ Harvey, Björk and Radiohead.
By the late 1990s the playlist had drifted toward Staind and later Sum 41, and in 2000 the slot was sometimes given over to reruns of The Real World and Loveline before MTV dropped the show that summer. It returned on MTV2 in 2001, back to its original sensibility, slid into later and later time slots from 2002, and was cancelled without announcement on May 4, 2003; in the final episode host Jim Shearer sat with Kendall and Pinfield, and the last video was Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Kiss Them for Me." Pinfield brought it back on MTV2 as 120 Minutes with Matt Pinfield on July 31, 2011, and that revival ran until February 2013. Largent died in March 2023 at 58.
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