Miley Cyrus did her best to shock the audience of the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night, and according to most, she succeeded. Whether she was stripping to her underwear, grinding on a foam finger or twerking with giant teddy bears, Cyrus left jaws on the floor (though not in a good way.)
Just to make things more fun, Sunday was also Miley’s dad’s 52nd birthday. Happy birthday, Billy Ray!
Media reaction to Cyrus’ bump-and-grind veered between disgust and sadness.
On MSNBC, Morning Joe co-anchor Mika Brzezinski was not amused by the performance at all. After showing a clip of the performance coming out of a commercial, Joe Scarborough and the other panelists were joking about it, but not Brzezinski, who called it “really, really disturbing.”
She went on: “That young lady, who is 20, is obviously deeply troubled, deeply disturbed. Probably has confidence issues, probably an eating disorder. And I don’t think anybody should have put her up on stage. That was disgusting.”
Real Time host Bill Maher took to Twitter to comment: “Haven’t been in a strip club in awhile, but good to see nothing has changed.”
On NBC’s Today show, guest co-anchor Brooke Shields, who played Miley’s mum on “Hannah Montana,” called the performance “desperate”.
“I don’t approve,” she said, speaking in her capacity as Hannah Montana’s mum. “Where did I go wrong?”
“I want to know who’s advising her and why it’s necessary,” Shields went on. “It’s a bit desperate.”
Today show co-anchor Willie Geist characterised it as “a big Disney over-correction,” citing Britney Spears as another example of a sweet kid actor who felt the need to oversexualise herself to show that she’s no longer a child.
The crew on Fox & Friends also trashed the performance, with guest co-host Anna Kooiman commenting on the performance: “This was just raunchy. This wasn’t sexy. There wasn’t any talent.”
The Parents Television Council also got in on the outrage, issuing a statement from director of public policy Dan Isett that said: “MTV has once again succeeded in marketing sexually charged messages to young children using former child stars and condom commercials — while falsely rating this programme as appropriate for kids as young as 14. This is unacceptable.”
Perhaps the one celebrity whose reaction to the performance is still in question is Will Smith, whose family’s supposed shocked reaction to Cyrus was tweeted widely. However, the audience shot was actually the Smith family watching Lady Gaga open the show.
Viewership up 66 per cent
The 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, which featured a much-criticised performance by Miley Cyrus and a brief reunion of the boy band ‘N Sync, drew 10.1 million viewers Sunday night in the US, according to Nielsen, up 66 per cent from last year.
The telecast garnered a rating of 7.8 in the network’s core 12-34 demographic, up 47 per cent from 2012. The event is the top cable entertainment broadcast of the year in the 12-34 demographic.
Viewership of the event took a nosedive last year. The 2012 telecast, which competed with a speech by President Obama at the Democatic National Convention, had a total viewership less than half the size of 2011’s still-record tally of 12.4 million.
Sunday night’s event also blew up on social media.
Miley Cyrus’ medley of her We Can’t Stop and Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines, in which Cyrus displayed her twerking abilities, danced with a foam finger and stripped down to her underwear, generated a record 306,000 tweets per minute, beating the reaction to Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance.
