When they've shut down, you get more nervous. They react to that, and it's just this hideous shame spiral. Although sometimes that can be some good train-wreck TV. That's another reason it's definitely difficult - when you are just not connecting, and it's there for the world to see.

We were the ultimate consumers of the thing, and we thought, "Every college kid is going to go berserk. High school kids - it will introduce them to music they didn't know about. This is going to be a phenomenon." Plus, it seemed like it was insider-y, yet it was available to everyone. I thought, "Cable companies are going to be snatching this up." You think about the dreck that is on so many cable companies, of course they're going to love this. And we were just crushed that nobody cared.

I was working as a staff writer at Rolling Stone. I had a friend who worked at MTV, and she called me and said, "They're looking for VJs for this new channel. Do you want to try out?" I had zero TV experience, but I thought, "Well, what the hay."

The worst was I had little control in terms of smoothing out my questions and making myself look good the way I could in print. All the ums and uhs and rambling and apologies and hyenalike laughter at something that really isn't funny. You know when an artist will crack a joke, and you're like, "That's so hilarious," like, the fawning laughter that you can at least cut when it's print? It's just all out there, and it's really humiliating.

if your subject is an actor, he or she will also be shorter in person than they appear onscreen. This, also, you must keep to yourself. Even if you think you are giving their lack of height a positive spin, you aren't. 'You always seem larger than life in photos, but it's nice to see that in person you're just like us' might seem like a compliment, but what a star hears is 'You're stumpy, and you will lose jobs to taller people.

When they've shut down, you get more nervous. They react to that, and it's just this hideous shame spiral. Although sometimes that can be some good train-wreck TV. That's another reason it's definitely difficult - when you are just not connecting, and it's there for the world to see.

And when I say [M2 was] lo-fi production, it was so great and grimy. I was used to that world anyway, because we shot in bars, we shot in thrift shops, we shot on the street. And the bars, they would have just opened, and still there was barf on the floor and beer. We certainly kept it real. It was a small crew.