While still a nostalgic font for Generation X and millennials, MTV as it once was is officially dead and the television landscape and pop culture overall is all the worse for the loss. For much of its existence the basic cable network defined what was hip for teenagers and young adults in the United States. This extended to the 2000s as MTV’s various channels leaned more into original reality television programming to great success. Many of these shows highlighted the young and beautiful, often with healthy amounts of melodrama, while others were led by celebrities of the era.

Whether it was MTV bringing modern slapstick to the masses or reality shows providing their own soap operatic stakes, MTV had a robust programming line throughout the 2000s. If you were a teen with cable and any interest in the zeitgeist, you were at least aware of what MTV was producing at the time. For millennials looking back at the era, there are a handful of series that stand out as truly entertaining shows MTV had in its programming lineup. 

These are the 10 best MTV shows from the 2000s ranked, exemplifying what the cable channel’s output during the decade.

With its depiction of the rich and soap operatic, “The O.C.,” named for its Orange County primary setting, is one of the best teen TV shows of all time. The year after the show’s premiere on Fox in 2003, MTV launched the teen-centric reality series “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.” Running for three seasons, the show centered on a group of senior and junior students at Laguna Beach High School. The series featured plenty of romantic entanglements between the teenage ensemble, including a love triangle between Lauren Conrad, Kristin Cavallari, and Stephen Colletti.

While there are rumors and reports that much of “Laguna Beach” was scripted or staged, the show is still thoroughly entertaining. That sense of reality show verisimilitude with the sweeping California oceanside setting made for enjoyable sun-soaked soap opera. MTV tried to follow up the success of “Laguna Beach” with a pair of spin-offs, learning that the show’s appeal was in its first season’s main cast in the process. Blending reality series with the teen drama of its inspiration, “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County” established a formula that MTV followed to great effect.

If “Laguna Beach” highlighted the messy interpersonal relationships of teenagers and young adults in Southern California, “Jersey Shore” did the same for central New Jersey. The series revolves around eight housemates living together in a rented home in Ocean County, New Jersey. Embracing the guido/guidette lifestyle, these young adults were eager to party and frequently found themselves in complicated romantic misadventures. The second season took the action to South Beach, Florida while the fourth season was largely set in Florence, Italy reflecting much of the cast’s Italian heritage.

Premiering in 2009, “Jersey Shore” became a late 2000s phenomenon for MTV thanks to its memorable ensemble cast. Cast members including Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi and Jennifer “Jwoww” Farley became popular television personalities in their own right. MTV doubled down on the series’ success with several spin-offs, though none with the same level of longevity as “Jersey Shore.” A trashy television good time powered by its outsized cast, “Jersey Shore” is the definitive MTV guilty pleasure of its era.

Of all the “Jackass” spin-offs, the best of the bunch was the travel wildlife series “Wildboyz” which premiered in 2003. “Wildboyz” starred Chris Pontius and Steve-O, with both hosts co-creating the series along with “Jackass” co-creator Jeff Tremaine. Running for four seasons, the latter two of which airing on MTV2, the show had Pontius and Steve-O traveling around the world and interacting with local wildlife. True to the wacky duo’s usual antics, this often involves the various bestiary being used to inflict slapstick pain and scatological gags on the hosts and their guest stars.

“Wildboyz” feels like the natural continuation of “Jackass” and without the self-indulgence of its sister spin-off “Viva La Bam.” The show features plenty of familiar faces from “Jackass,” each who link back up with Pontius and Steve-O like no time has passed at all. The show also works as a beautiful, if nonsensical travelogue, with many episodes taking place in breathtaking locales around the globe. As Chris Pontius and Steve-O continue to steer the “Jackass” franchise’s future, it’s “Wildboyz” that deserves its own revival.

After the success of “Laguna Beach,” MTV developed a continuation spin-off series initially centered on one of the prior series’ stars, Lauren Conrad. Debuting in 2006, “The Hills” followed Conrad as she pursued her dream of entering the fashion industry in Los Angeles. The show expands its scope to feature Conrad’s housemate Heidi Montag and their friends as they live it up in the City of Angels. After Conrad’s departure from the show during its penultimate season, she is effectively replaced by her former “Laguna Beach” co-star Kristin Cavallari.

“The Hills” is an all-around improvement over “Laguna Beach,” tightening its focus and upping the melodrama between its young and beautiful characters. The show proves that the core appeal to the reality series is in Conrad and Cavallari’s personalities and the interpersonal shenanigans that they get into. The series would spawn its own set of spin-offs, including another continuation series, “The Hills: New Beginnings,” in 2019. The ultimate realization of the staged reality that began with “Laguna Beach,” “The Hills” embraces the glamor of its wish-fulfillment premise.

The granddaddy of all MTV reality series and much of the reality genre at large in North America, “The Real World” ran steadily through the 2000s after premiering in 1992. The show featured a group of young adults from various parts of the country moving in together in a shared home with different cities each season. As the ensemble learned to live together, romances, rivalries, and friendships formed, driving much of the drama and intrigue with each rotating cast. The decade’s first season took place in New Orleans while its last, airing from 2009 into 2010, was set in Washington, D.C.

“The Real World” was as consistently entertaining as ever as MTV’s premier reality series entered the 21st century. Some of the show’s highlights during the 2000s include its 2002 season in Las Vegas and its 2004 season in San Diego. The latter featured Jamie Chung as one of its cast members who went on to have a successful Hollywood career of her own. “The Real World” would continue into the subsequent decade but the show’s legacy felt diminished with more and more reality shows surfacing, before the MTV series finally ended in 2017.

Right around the same time Ashton Kutcher invited Bruce Willis to return to TV on “That ’70s Show,” he was also hosting the MTV series “Punk’d.” Premiering in 2003, the reality show had Kutcher leading a team of actors and a hidden camera crew to pull elaborate pranks on various celebrities. This ranged from temporary carjackings to red carpet interviews intentionally gone wrong, with Kutcher and his ensemble revealing the deception as their targets understandably lost their cool. The series provided early on-screen work for actors like Bill Hader, Dax Shepard, and B.J. Novak as part of Kutcher’s trickster crew.

Looking back, “Punk’d” was a clear precursor to other prankster premised reality shows like “Impractical Jokers,” just with celebrities as the principal targets. The celebrity-facing nature of it is half the appeal, seeing how these recognizable faces are suddenly thrust outside of their comfort zone. The show has been revived and remade intermittently since originally ending in 2007, occasionally moving to different platforms and hosts. But that original “Punk’d,” when the concept was still fresh, funny, and new, still stands as the premise in its purest form.

What is arguably the definitive MTV series, at least for the millennial generation, is “Total Request Live,” or “TRL” as it was commonly known. Initially hosted by Carson Daly, viewers voted on which music videos they wanted to appear on the show, ranked by popularity. Musical artists and actors would regularly make guest appearances on the series, occasionally performing in front of a live studio audience. The show’s original run ended with the conclusion of its 10th season in 2008, with guest hosts Seth Green and the All-American Rejects dismantling the set.

Though MTV featured viewer request music shows prior to the 1998 series, “TRL” perfected the format and became must-watch afternoon programming. If a musical artist was looking to make an impact in the United States with teens and young adults, “TRL” was the place to make an appearance. The advent of YouTube and other platforms to stream music videos marked the decline of “TRL,” a cultural diffusion that affected MTV as a whole. “TRL” had a definite formula and may not have aged as well as other shows on this list, but it was the hippest music show around for years.

Ozzy Osbourne was an absolute icon whose image extended far beyond the world of heavy metal through his solo career and work with Black Sabbath. The fan-favorite singer became a pop culture staple, with Ozzy Osbourne appearing in funny movie cameos highlighting his widespread recognition. But the biggest coup for Ozzy outside of the music industry was leading the 2002 reality series “The Osbournes.” The show spotlighted Ozzy and his family going about their daily business from their home in Beverly Hills.

“The Osbournes” really humanized Ozzy, no longer the bat-biting bad boy from the ’80s but a doting dad to teenage children. Though, like many other MTV reality shows, the situations involving the family feel scripted, there are genuine heartfelt moments throughout the series. This includes Ozzy’s wife Sharon undergoing treatment for her cancer diagnosis and various family members’ issues with substance abuse. Though the family would explore other ventures into television with varying levels of success, “The Osbournes” is still the pinnacle of their non-musical work.

Just as the ’80s and ’90s saw affluent homes spotlighted in the series “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” the premise got a more youth-friendly reimagining with “MTV Cribs.” Initially running from 2000 to 2009, the series had celebrities from various industries guide a camera crew through their homes. The series was meant to showcase a more personal side to familiar faces from movies, television, sports, and music in their natural habitat while highlighting their individual opulence. Often, these homes prominently reflect the personalities of each of their occupants, from personal recording studios to athletic facilities on-site.

As with most celebrity-focused shows, the quality of “MTV Cribs'” episodes is determined by the individual stars in question, but there are some genuine gems, especially for their respective fans. MTV gave the series a full revival in 2021 after bringing the show to other platforms in the interim. The show would also get imitators of its own, including “The LEGO Batman Movie” memorably riffing on “MTV Cribs.” A peek into the domesticity of some of the most popular figures of the era, “MTV Cribs” is a fun exploration of how these famous faces define home.

The 2000s MTV series that continues to have a flourishing legacy beyond the cable channel is the stunt and prank-filled reality show “Jackass.” Created by Jeff Tremaine, Spike Jonze, and Johnny Knoxville, the series has Knoxville and his crew as they carry gags and self-flagellating acts on themselves, often in public. These ranged from simple stunts, like various skateboarding tricks, to more elaborate setups, including cast members being shot from giant cannons. Knoxville and his merry men carried no shame, with the humor derived from this obvious painful and gross-out results, usually accompanied with them giggling in glee.

The show evoked the slapstick appeal skating videos had relied on for years, but packaged in bite-sized skits with that broadly entertained on a primal level. “Jackass,” in its original form, only ran with new episodes on MTV from October 2000 to August 2001, producing 25 episodes in all. After the show’s conclusion, “Jackass” has produced a line of movies making box office waves as it takes its signature inanity to the big screen. At the end of the day, “Jackass” understood that dudes rock on an intuitive level, celebrating the nonsensical antics that men get into just because.