“The seeds of marriage equality … were planted on MTV,” the actor Wilson Cruz says during the special. “I don’t think it’s exaggeration or hyperbole to say that Pedro Zamora changed the world.” It probably isn’t. The power of TV to build empathy for groups that have been marginalized seems clear, and academics have generated reams of analysis over The Real World’s impact. A 2008 Brookings Institute paper even credited the show with shifting attitudes against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, a policy that would be repealed a few years later.

As The Real World’s popularity spurred the network to move away from music videos to reality and scripted programming, LGBT people remained in the mix. Dating shows like Next and soaps like Undressed and Teen Wolf contradicted what Vito Russo’s seminal 1981 book The Celluloid Closet called “the big lie” about queer people: “that we do not exist.” And they did so in a way that passes what GLAAD coined as “the Vito Russo test,” especially the criteria that LGBT characters “not be solely or predominantly defined by their sexual orientation or gender identity”—they were just other players in the drama, or other singles getting “Next”-ed.

Another category of programming that MTV is now touting is its documentaries. The True Life series has been both celebrated and criticized over the years for swinging between episodes about, say, heroin addiction and episodes like “True Life: I'm Horny in Miami.” But the show has continually spotlighted individuals who fit each letter of “LGBT,” including a series of episodes about the coming-out process. There have also been non-True Life documentaries like Laverne Cox Presents: The T-Word in 2014. These programs highlight how MTV’s charge to appeal to teens—for whom the day-to-day banalities of growing up are a topic of total fascination—allows it a special window into queerness. People don’t have to be all that unusual to get an hour of TV devoted to their story.

MTV’s typically stunt-packed award shows, the Video Music Awards and the MTV Movie Awards, exemplify how activism, ratings-grabs, and celebrity PR can often coincide. The 1999 VMAs, where drag queens modeled Madonna’s outfits, and the 2013 awards, where Madonna presided over a crowd of gay and straight weddings, make it into the Proudest Moments highlights reel; thankfully, perhaps, her kiss with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the 2003 VMAs did not. We’re also reminded of Brokeback Mountain winning a Movie Award for “best kiss,” Lady Gaga walking the red carpet with an entourage of discharged gay soldiers, and Miley Cyrus bringing queer homeless youth and RuPaul’s Drag Race contestants to the VMAs stage.

In every instance, you can see the desire to be transgressive and distinctive for branding and rating’s sake dovetailing with the social project of increasing LGBT visibility and humanization. The Proudest Moments doc is unapologetically self-serving, peppered with talent from the network’s payroll delivering testimonials about MTV history, often with stiff, propagandist fervor that seems coached. What you don’t see is any mention of the network’s pre-Real World days, when the M in MTV really stood for music—an era that many mourn but that the present network would clearly be fine with young viewers never knowing happened (perhaps relevant: the clip that went viral after David Bowie’s death showing how intolerant early MTV could be). Proudest Moments implicitly defends the frequently maligned all-reality-TV-and-soap-opera era of the channel, asserting its political importance while conveniently allowing viewers to forget the existence of, say, Jersey Shore or The Hills.