“I see that math, I see the shows we are about to green-light, I see that landscape for the next few months — we’re stable,” he said. “How do I know that? I could be wrong, but I haven’t missed an estimate in the 12 years I’ve been doing TV.”

Robert Bakish, Viacom’s chief executive, said he was heartened by MTV’s recent results and credited Mr. McCarthy, who took over in late 2016.

“When Chris got in, he analyzed the situation, we talked about it and he quickly arrived at the conclusion that the programming direction was wrong,” Mr. Bakish said. “He reset the brand filter, cleaned out the pipeline and began building a new MTV that’s much more based on reality, unscripted and music content.”

There have been many strategic shifts at the network in the last five years: heavy investments in scripted programming, a hiring spree for MTV News, and a seemingly endless stream of dark and dreary reality series.

When Mr. McCarthy came aboard, he quickly killed more than 100 projects in development.

He regarded the decision in 2015 to pour resources into MTV News — which hired, among others, several prominent journalists from Bill Simmons’s old website, Grantland — as misaligned with the network’s mission and pulled the plug.

“MTV at its best — whether it’s news, whether it’s a show, whether it’s a docu-series — is about amplifying young people’s voices,” he said. “We put young people on the screen, and we let the world hear their voices. We shouldn’t be writing 6,000-word articles on telling people how to feel.”