THE NEW YORK TIMES: Best and Worst Moments of the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards

What year did the MTV Video Music Awards celebrate on Sunday? It wasn’t exactly 2026. The annual awards show was broadcast from the Peacock Theatre in Los Angeles on CBS and MTV, the cable channel that stopped calling itself Music Television in 2010 and now relies on reality shows and movies. The ceremony was downright nostalgic for the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. That was when MTV was still a career-maker and gatekeeper for pop. In not always subtle ways, the show asked, remember when MTV mattered?

Its opening number was by this year’s most-nominated star: Madonna, whose career bloomed in tandem with MTV in the 1980s and who was performing at the awards for the first time since 2003. There was a tribute to George Michael, another staple of 1980s and 1990s MTV. The surviving members of Nirvana, whose high-school anarchy video clip for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” catalysed a punk resurgence in 1991, received the Video Vanguard Award from none other than Chuck D. of Public Enemy.

The host was Snoop Dogg, who first appeared on the awards show in 1994 when MTV was helping to mainstream hip-hop. And at least one award — a newly created one, for Artist Director — was guaranteed for Taylor Swift, an MTV constant since 2009 and the recipient of the most Video Music Awards through the years. She racked up one more: the 2026 video of the year for “The Fate of Ophelia.”

Madonna also took home new awards, including those for artist of the year, dance (her “Confessions II — the Film” video) and collaboration (“Bring Your Love,” with Sabrina Carpenter). She reminisced about performing on the first MTV Awards and being told, after wardrobe problems, that her career was over; clearly it wasn’t. But the award presentations were only brief interludes between the show’s main events: production numbers that strove to outdo video razzle-dazzle with live effort. Here are some key moments from the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards. — JON PARELES

Best Reason for the Show: Madonna

It had been 23 years — that’s more than Sombr’s lifetime! — since Madonna last performed at the MTV Video Music Awards, when she scandalized the easily scandalized world of the early aughts by smooching Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. This year, thankfully, she did not return quietly. Madge opened the show with a lengthy, star-studded medley of songs from her latest album, the triumphant “Confessions II.” She was joined at first by a charming and always on point Sabrina Carpenter, for a serviceable if somewhat disjointed rendition of their duet “Bring Your Love.”

The performance peaked in its second half, when Madonna and Charli XCX emerged from a set designed to look like a grimy club bathroom (one of many moments during the telecast when I found myself muttering, “this is on CBS”?) and performed their newly released remix of the “Confessions II” highlight “Danceteria.” Madonna held court as a wonderfully random, if-you-know-you-know group of intergenerational celebrities made blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em cameos: Debi Mazar, Julia Garner (once slated to play Madge in a scrapped biopic), the aforementioned Sombr, Fab 5 Freddy, Tony Ward, Andrew Watt (costumed as Keith Haring) and was that … Seth Rogen? Yes, it was.

Perhaps to make up for that 23-year absence, she just kept getting awards all night. Best collaboration, for the Carpenter team-up. Artist of the year. Best dance video, which she accepted from an amused Charli XCX and Troye Sivan. All in all, she seemed to have been onstage more than the night’s ostensible host, Snoop Dogg. The prospect of Madonna having so much live airtime on CBS might have made the censors nervous, but the most shocking thing she did was begin one acceptance speech with a dad joke: “First of all, I would like to thank my fingers, because I can always count on them.” At the end of their joint acceptance speech, Carpenter said it best, gesturing towards her unpredictable duet partner and simply concluding, in baffled awe, “Madonna!” — LINDSAY ZOLADZ

Best Prop: Pat Smear’s Cigarette

The surviving members of Nirvana took the stage to accept the Video Vanguard lifetime achievement award — for impact on videos and pop culture — in an orderly choreography. Dave Grohl and Pat Smear, wearing leather jackets, flanked Krist Novoselic as he delivered a dutiful speech honouring Kurt Cobain as “one of the greatest artists of all time.” Only Smear’s lighting and puffing away on a cigarette hinted at the playful chaos the band brought to the awards in the ’90s. Smear’s gesture, and his wordless amusement, made him seem like a time travelling punk, smirking at the future he’d been plopped into and wondering “what happened here?” — ELENA BERGERON

Best SNL Parody: Taylor Swift’s ‘Patient Zero’

Introduced by her friend and co-star Dakota Johnson, Taylor Swift accepted the inaugural Artist Director Honors award and debuted the video for “Patient Zero,” from her newly expanded album, “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore.” A cross between a sterile car commercial and a sexless “Fifty Shades of Grey,” it stars Johnson as the wife of an abusive husband (Colin Farrell), who blames her mysterious illness on drinking. Johnson is haunted by the ghost of Farrell’s former partner, played by Swift, whose tragic fate is revealed through flashbacks in a plot-twist ending that serves as a warning for Johnson to get out. The darkly slick look and self-serious vibe seemed like it would be interrupted at any moment by a laugh track. — LEILA SHERIDAN

Worst Everything: The George Michael Tribute

Sombr warbled through “Father Figure”; Raye, Teddy Swims and Adam Lambert karaoked some truly iconoclastic hits (as well as “Careless Whisper”) and … the less said about the performance the better. — ELENA BERGERON

Best Anachronism: Sienna Spiro

English songwriter Sienna Spiro, named best new artist, turns 21 on Monday, but she cultivates a vintage 1960s look, styled like a latter-day Petula Clark or Dusty Springfield. Her stage set was a giant turntable; she sang a torchy, lovesick ballad, “Great Expectation.” But her obvious musical model is more recent. Spiro has absorbed — and mastered — every tearful inflection, every tremolo and swell and break and sighing decrescendo, from Adele. That pop niche was waiting to be filled. — JON PARELES

Best Mass Movement: Yung Lean and Gener8ion

Yung Lean arrived onstage looking like he had just left detention for picking a fight. Dressed in a suit without a jacket, blood drops staining his shirt and a black eye on his face, he stole a Moon Person from backstage, threw a chair to the ground and smashed the statuette on the stage. Then he joined a choir of about 50 school-aged boys on bleachers in front of a redbrick schoolhouse, recreating the video “Storm,” a collaboration with Gener8ion, that imagines a lawless, teacher-less British boarding school in 2034, with Lean as ringleader and schoolyard bully.

Licking a melting, bright blue ice cream cone, Lean rapped from the centre of a set of bleachers with the schoolboys surrounding him snapping their bodies in different directions to create an angry sea of movement. When he stepped down at the end of the performance, Lean licked a gob of the ice cream and spat it at the camera, smearing it across the lens before walking off.

Unruly, yet precise in its strangeness, it was one of the night’s most captivating performances, with a fully realized world that felt bigger than the VMA stage. — LEILA SHERIDAN

Best Farewell: To Dolly Parton

Who’d have thought that an MTV extravaganza would end up extolling Dolly Parton twice? Kacey Musgraves appeared early, singing “I Will Always Love You” in a straightforward, self-effacing homage to Dolly Parton’s modest original. Then, collecting the show’s final award, for video of the year, Taylor Swift was winding up to thank “one person” who turned out to be not her new husband, but “the ultimate showgirl, Dolly Parton.” Swift praised Parton’s vivid storytelling and translated to MTV terms, “Listening to her songs, it was like watching the best music video you have ever seen in your life.” — JON PARELES