Mark Pellington Revisits His Youth, and the Beginning of a New Information Age, in ‘This Is Buzz’

On April 22, 1990, viewers tuned into MTV were introduced to the future of information dissemination, though they had no way of knowing it at the time. On a Sunday night, with almost no advance publicity and no context provided by the network then known for music videos rather than “Jersey Shore” and “Teen Mom,” MTV dropped a 30-minute current affairs program called “Buzz.”

As would be the case for its subsequent episodes — 13 of them before MTV pulled the plug on the experiment — the premiere only aired once with no repeats, so if you didn’t watch it or tape it as it aired, you were out of luck. During its brief run, the series acquired a devoted cult following and earned rave reviews, but by the 2000s, it had fallen into obscurity. The series doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, or a list of episodes on IMDb.

In its moment,…