{"id":12829,"date":"2026-09-04T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=12829"},"modified":"2026-08-28T09:08:35","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T09:08:35","slug":"a-lost-signal-finds-its-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/a-lost-signal-finds-its-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lost Signal Finds Its Audience"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>8 Minute, 52 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEWS
\nThis Is Buzz<\/strong>
\n –    <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: <\/strong>Documentary, Music
\nYear Released: <\/strong>2026
\nRuntime: <\/strong>1h 35m
\nDirector: <\/strong>Mark Pellington
\nWhere to Watch:<\/strong> in select theaters, beginning September 11, 2026<\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW: <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>THIS IS BUZZ is at its best when it stops explaining how important BUZZ was and simply lets us see the thing. Clips from Mark Pellington and Jon Klein's short-lived 1990 MTV series arrive in bursts of voices, graphics, street footage, cultural commentary, music, political ideas, and images that barely wait for the viewer to catch up. After thirty-six years of increasingly compressed media, the strange part isn't that BUZZ now looks dated. It's how familiar its method of throwing the world at us all at once has become.<\/p>\n

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That makes Pellington's documentary more interesting than the usual reunion with an obscure television show. BUZZ lasted only 13 episodes and disappeared so thoroughly that even people who spent the era watching MTV may have only a faint memory of it, assuming they encountered it at all. THIS IS BUZZ has to introduce the program, explain why it mattered, and make a case that its visual language escaped into the culture even if the series itself didn't. Pellington goes about that in the only way that really makes sense for this subject: he refuses to make a normal documentary about an abnormal television show.<\/p>\n

The original BUZZ wasn't quite news, wasn't quite an arts program, and wasn't simply another MTV attempt to attach talking heads to music culture. Each episode took a subject and attacked it through collage, jumping among interviews, street voices, music, text, artwork and imagery rather than guiding viewers through a conventional report. William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Malcolm McLaren, William Gibson and other figures from the edges of art and technology could occupy the same half-hour as material gathered from ordinary people around the world. RuPaul appeared before becoming the institution we know today, another reminder that this little program had an unusual ability to be standing near something before mainstream culture got there.<\/p>\n

Pellington and Klein came from different directions, and that tension seems essential to why BUZZ happened. Klein brought a background in television journalism, while Pellington had been working in MTV's on-air promotions department, cutting together found images, sound, and text into short pieces that didn't behave like traditional commercials. Putting those instincts together resulted in something that approached current affairs with the visual grammar of experimental video art. It wanted information to be felt as much as processed.<\/p>\n

THIS IS BUZZ adopts that grammar rather than placing it safely behind glass. Editor Mairi Utno packs interviews, archival material, split screens, graphics and fragments of the original series into a presentation that often feels like BUZZ commenting on itself across several decades. At times it moves aggressively enough that individual ideas barely settle before another arrives. That's intentional, and anyone sensitive to flashing images or visual overload should know that Pellington isn't particularly interested in easing viewers into the experience.<\/p>\n

The approach also makes a stronger argument about BUZZ than some of the talking heads do. Pellington and his collaborators repeatedly describe the show as ahead of its time. After a while, the documentary can become a little too eager to convince us of that point. The claim is much more persuasive when an old sequence suddenly resembles the way TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and an endless news feed now place war, art, advertising, humor, politics and somebody's private life beside one another without giving us time to separate them.<\/p>\n

BUZZ didn't invent information overload, of course, and THIS IS BUZZ occasionally gets close to taking credit for cultural changes far larger than a 13-episode MTV experiment. There's some understandable self-mythologizing here. Pellington is revisiting something created when he was young, surrounded by people who loved the program, worked on it, or were influenced by it, so there isn't much resistance to the idea that they were making the future of television.<\/p>\n

A little more skepticism would strengthen the film. Hearing from someone who thought BUZZ was incomprehensible, exhausting, or simply wrong for MTV could have created a more useful argument about why the show disappeared. The documentary spends considerably more energy asking why the culture failed to recognize what BUZZ was doing than whether audiences had legitimate reasons for not connecting with it. There's an interesting corporate story underneath all of this about experimentation surviving only as long as a network is willing to tolerate it. That side of the history could have been pushed further.<\/p>\n

The film's excitement becomes infectious whenever it gets back to the work itself. There's something almost unbelievable now about seeing a major cable network give young artists money and airtime to make something this difficult to categorize. The people behind BUZZ were experimenting with form because they hadn't yet been given a set of metrics telling them exactly how long a viewer would tolerate an image before scrolling away.<\/p>\n

That distinction becomes one of THIS IS BUZZ's better observations about the comparison between 1990 and now. The original show's rapid editing anticipated the speed at which contemporary viewers consume information, although the intent behind that speed was very different. BUZZ wanted collision to create thought. The modern feed frequently uses collision to prevent thought by making sure another piece of content appears before we've had time to finish reacting to the last one.<\/p>\n

There's an irony in watching something from MTV's analog era feel less passive than the supposedly interactive media that replaced it. BUZZ trusted viewers to make connections without explaining each one, while today's algorithmic platforms are extraordinarily sophisticated at deciding what we'll see next. Pellington doesn't need to hammer that comparison as hard as he sometimes does because the archival footage makes it evident. What once looked like frantic television now plays like an early attempt to understand the condition we're all living in.<\/p>\n

The film also doubles as a reminder of what MTV briefly allowed itself to be. Nostalgia for the channel usually centers on music videos, specific VJs, or the endless argument about when MTV stopped being MTV. THIS IS BUZZ presents another possibility: a network aimed at young people treating them as an audience capable of engaging with art, politics, sexuality, technology and global culture without sanding everything down into a conventional news package.<\/p>\n

Pellington's later career makes the experiment easier to place in retrospect. The visual instincts visible here would continue through his music-video work, including Pearl Jam's "Jeremy," his collaboration with U2 around the ZOO TV era, and eventually feature films such as ARLINGTON ROAD and THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. THIS IS BUZZ doesn't need to turn into a career retrospective because the connection is visible enough. The young filmmaker playing with media fragments in 1990 clearly didn't leave those ideas behind when BUZZ disappeared.<\/p>\n

The documentary also benefits from not limiting its definition of influence to Pellington's career. The Edge and Adam Clayton help connect the show's experimentation to the broader visual culture surrounding U2. At the same time, artists, filmmakers, and media figures discuss the freedom of encountering something that didn't resemble standard television. Their enthusiasm sometimes contributes to the film's tendency to congratulate BUZZ. Still, it also helps explain why people who actually saw the series remembered it so intensely despite its brief lifespan.<\/p>\n

At 95 minutes, THIS IS BUZZ has enough material to justify a feature, although the first portion takes longer than necessary establishing the conditions that allowed the show to exist. Some of the prehistory could be condensed without losing the importance of Pellington and Klein coming together. Once BUZZ itself takes over, the documentary becomes far more alive because its subject is difficult to contain in conventional chronology.<\/p>\n

That unevenness keeps me from embracing the film as completely as the people making it clearly embrace the original series. The documentary is strongest as an act of preservation and rediscovery, weaker whenever admiration is taken as proof of importance simply because everyone onscreen agrees. It doesn't need to convince us BUZZ secretly changed television by itself. Showing that a forgotten program was experimenting with forms and questions that became increasingly relevant is interesting enough.<\/p>\n

What remains is a fascinating record of people being allowed to make something without knowing whether there was already an audience for it. That feels almost radical in an era when so much entertainment arrives pre-tested, categorized and targeted before anyone gets near a screen. BUZZ was messy, fast, political, artistic, and probably confusing to plenty of people who stumbled upon it in 1990.<\/p>\n

THIS IS BUZZ preserves that confusion instead of correcting it. Pellington looks backward without making a calm museum piece, letting the visual noise of his younger work crash into a culture that finally moves at roughly the same speed. The documentary may occasionally overstate how much one forgotten MTV program predicted, but watching BUZZ now makes one thing hard to deny: television briefly transmitted something very strange, and the rest of us eventually caught up to the frequency.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of ANTENNA RELEASING]<\/em><\/p>\n

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MOVIE REVIEWS This Is Buzz  –      Genre: Documentary, Music Year Released: 2026 Runtime: 1h 35m Director: Mark Pellington Where to Watch: in select theaters, beginning September 11, 2026 RAVING REVIEW: THIS IS BUZZ is at its best when it stops explaining how important BUZZ was and simply lets us see the thing. Clips from Mark Pellington […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12830,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/img\/0367\/0367650.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t