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of American Bandstand, airs every afternoon at three-thirty from the MTV studio on the second floor of the Viacom Building, at Broadway and 45th Street, directly above the Naked Cowboy’s patch of concrete. The outer wall of the studio is made of glass, so the studio audience and the performers, and the million or so kids watching at home, can see out to the street, and the people on the street can see in. When the Baha Men, or the Backstreet Boys, or Busta Rhymes, or No Doubt perform on the little bandstand, the camera shoots over their shoulders at the Pepsi billboard across the street featuring Britney Spears wearing a red garter saucily over her hip, or Pamela Anderson vamping for Pony, or Nelly at the Virgin Megastore. You could say that MTV is giving those brands—the human ones as well as the institutional ones—a free ride, or you could say that those brands are so central to MTV’s identity that the show is exploiting its connection with them. The implicit message is that TRL is coming to you from the head office of the brands you love.

But the show has a much more complicated relationship to Times Square than that; or, rather, it offers a much more complex version of Times Square than is conveyed only by the billboard forest. Every weekday afternoon, usually starting around three, the show’s adolescent fans, often with their parents, begin to gather on the sidewalk below the studio. On a low-profile day, just a hundred or so kids will stand under the studio; on a big day, the fans will fill the space inside the police barricades on the pavement, and then spill over to the sidewalk in front of Toys “R” Us, directly across the street and a good two hundred feet from the glass wall. When the Backstreet Boys came, in the fall of 2001, an estimated five thousand people choked the sidewalks, and the police were forced to close several lanes of traffic on Broadway. The crowd is real, their passions are real, and Times Square is reality itself; the relationship with the fans on the street gives TRL a special sense of authenticity.

But from the point of view of the crowd, it’s the show that’s real. The kids, and their parents, have parked themselves on the sidewalk in order to participate in a world they’ve only experienced indirectly, on TV. The show wants access to the crowd, but the crowd is only there because it wants access to the show—because it wants to be part of TV. The high point of the show comes when a star walks over to the window, strikes a pose or mimes a greeting or plays air guitar—and the crowd screams as one, and the kids frantically wave their hand-lettered signs: “I love you, Ashanti!” “I am your fatha’, Ja-Rule.” Sometimes a star even descends from the electronic realm to their own. Mariah Carey once waded out into the crowd and nearly caused a riot. And so there is a continual back-and-forth between the “inside” world of the show itself and the “outside” world of Times Square.

Total Request Live is staggeringly popular for a program that appears on cable television in the middle of the afternoon; and there is little question in the minds of the people responsible for the show that the feverish crowd on the street has a great deal to do with the program’s cachet. And the fact that it was a happy accident adds to the program’s air of uncalculated calculation. Bob Kusbit, the senior producer, says that when Viacom, the parent of MTV, first moved to Times Square, MTV executives thought the second-floor space overlooking the street would make a fine gym. Even when the studio was built, and TRL was launched as a live show featuring music videos (that was in September 1998), Times Square was expected to serve as a picturesque and demographically appropriate backdrop. “We never said, ‘Come on down to Times Square,’” says Kusbit. “It just started to happen where you looked out the window the first week of the show and there were twenty people standing outside with a sign saying, ‘Hey, Carson’”—for Carson Daly, the show’s thoroughly adorable young host—“or ‘Megan Says N Sync Is Number One.’ So we invited somebody