Recent years have seen a seismic shift in how the media perceive youth culture: The jaded, no-future Gen-Xer has been supplanted by the web-savvy, mindlessly optimistic member of Generation Y, a consumption-happy bunch with an insatiable appetite for the next fad. Crucial to this shift has been the trend-setting popularity of MTV's Total Request Live, a live viewer-request show that has helped reintroduce the teenybopper as a profitable demographic, become a crucial cog in the pop-star machine, and made a star out of blandly affable host Carson Daly. If much of the nebulous "alternative-rock revolution" of the early- and mid-'90s was ostensibly about focusing on music and rejecting the idea of music as a popularity contest, TRL is its antithesis. On TRL, popular music is a literal popularity contest in which quality is irrelevant and the top performers are disposable icons, ready to be replaced as soon as their novelty wears off. Crucial to the TRL mythology is the show's Times Square studio, a sort of pop-culture Mount Olympus where squealing young mortals prostrate themselves before the impeccably styled, prefabricated gods of everything pop. It's a fascinating cultural phenomenon, but you'd never know it from MTV—Inside TRL, a dull compendium of behind-the-scenes footage, live performances, and some of the sleepiest bloopers ever to grace the small screen. Those looking for dish or insight into the show's importance will come away disappointed, as the closest the squeaky-clean TRL crew (whose members look and act like undergraduate camp counselors) comes to dishing dirt is bitching about being stood up by Shannen Doherty and Norm Macdonald. Much of Inside TRL is inexplicably devoted to nuts-and-bolts explanations of how the show is put together. That should delight the show's target audience, which no doubt loves hearing about the technical aspects of putting on a live show but couldn't care less about Daly, who is seen mostly in clips. Of the six acts shown performing live in the TRL studio, including second-tier boy bands 5ive and 98º, only Stone Temple Pilots performs accompanied by anything as antiquated as musical instruments, a telling detail for a video that celebrates the triumph of marketing over art and style over substance.