TV Reviews : MTV Looks at the twentysomething Generation

Tonight at 10 p.m., MTV trains its cameras not on rock stars but on its perceived target audience, America’s 21-to-25-year-olds, in the documentary “MTV Generation,” exploring a demographic of about 22 million young adults that the cable network is either self-flattering or self-defeating enough to want to claim as its very own progeny.

The history books may or may not dub this group “the MTV generation” with the same universality that their predecessors got pegged baby boomers. No better mass description has come along yet, which is part of the problem: The demographic in question, by almost unanimous admission, has no real identity of its own. So a social anthropologist can either document its members grappling with this very formlessness, as Time magazine did in an excellent cover story on the “twenty-somethings” earlier this year, or just wax anecdotal and dip into different subcultures, as MTV does here.

Generalities are elusive. Without a Kennedy assassination or a Vietnam war to help shape consciousness, older viewers may be surprised to learn what those among the early-20s set cite as impactful coming-of-age moments: the Reagan assassination attempt, or the Challenger shuttle disaster (which one kid, obviously raised on metaphors, says was “almost a visible symbol of the state of our nation”), or Live Aid (which one interviewee compares to Woodstock, with defensive self-consciousness).

Getting down to lifestyle specifics, off-screen narrator Kurt Loder introduces us to, among others, a Republican senator’s aide, a low-income Wisconsin couple whose idea of fun is four-wheeling in the mud, paid video game demonstrators, environmentalists, and a young man who founded the Assn. for the Advancement of Time, in a vain effort to persuade peers not to indulge nostalgia for the ‘50s, ‘60s and even ‘70s that they never really lived.

There are further glimpses of the political and apolitical, but all it really adds up to is the notion that this is one diverse bunch, which is something short of educational--if still a praiseworthy stab at serious, not entirely self-promoting programming from MTV.