First off, MTV has moved the show to a 3:30 PM timeslot -- I guess so the kids who are coming home from school can watch it (God, I feel so freaking old), but I liked it better at noon, when I could watch it during lunch. Then they got an entirely new set, which isn't the end of the world, but it used to be dressed to look like a funky little loft space with knickknacks and whatnot cluttering up the place and an audience sitting to the side. Now it's done up like a proper (i.e. boring) talk show, with a big long couch on a long skinny stage and the audience right in front of the couch, which allows for strange camerawork that jumps to different views and odd angles. And the talent has to walk down this gigantic pathway to get to the couch, eating up valuable talking time.

Oh, and did I mention that the formerly hour long show has been condensed to a half hour, which makes the entire thing whiz by at a dizzying pace? Seriously, it's frenetic. I know that kids supposedly have short attention spans, but this is pretty ridiculous. Today's show crammed in an interview with Gerard Butler, Jessica Szohr from Gossip Girl and a performance by the weird band Tokio Hotel. Alexa barely got out the questions for Butler, and definitely didn't give him a chance to answer them.

The shortened time frame means that most of the goofy games she used to play with the celebrities are gone. She managed a couple quick quiz-like questions for Butler, but that was about it. I was dying to see Jessica Szohr have to eat something disgusting, but it never happened. It also means that there aren't a ton of random internet videos (just one by my count), no goofball Twitter pictures from fans and my favorite segment (and the one I was not-so-secretly dying to be a part of) -- Alexa ragging on celebrity news with a guest comedian -- is completely gone. She got off a comment about ShePratt and that was about the sum of it. Basically everything that was unique and special about this show has been eliminated in order to make a crazy TRL-like program without the music videos. Basically there are celebrities and musical acts for the teens in the audience to go crazy over and scream about, and that's the sum total of this show that used to be one of my favorite guilty pleasures.

I still adore Alexa and her fabulous fashion-forward wardrobe, but I'm not sure I can tolerate this screechy, jumpy mess for long. I'll give it to the end of the week and then it's back to filling up my lunch break with internet videos on my own and harassing the interns for music recommendations.