The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards came and went on Sunday, 27 September at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, and the most telling detail of the night was not who won, but who did not bother to show up at all.
Madonna opened the ceremony and, two and a half hours later, closed it as its dominant figure, collecting three of the night’s biggest awards along the way. In one of her acceptance speeches, she noted that she had opened the very first VMAs some 43 years ago. According to NBC Los Angeles, it was her first performance at the show in 23 years. The callback landed, in theory. In practice, it exposed the VMAs’ central problem in a single sentence.
The Absentees Said More Than the Winners
The VMAs used to function as a kind of cultural debrief on the summer just gone, less a trophy ceremony than a live demonstration of who was making noise on the charts and in the streets. Artists moved heaven and earth to be in the room because the room mattered. That contract feels broken now.
The artist with the new longest-running number one song ever (Ella Langley) was not there. Neither was Adéla, whose song has been inescapable on Reels. Don Toliver’s ‘E85’ has been one of the year’s most discussed tracks; no performance materialised. Outside of host Snoop Dogg and a Gunna feature verse on his new country-rap duet with Shaboozey, hip-hop was barely present. For a format that once treated rap and R&B as its beating heart, that absence is hard to explain away.
Madonna’s set did at least swing wide in its guest list, Debi Mazar and Fab 5 Freddy alongside Sabrina Carpenter, Charli xcx and Sombr, a range that covered several decades of pop in a single performance. It was one of the better things on screen all night, which is precisely the issue.
What the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards Actually Delivered
The performances that did happen were, on their own terms, mostly solid. Yung Lean’s set stood out. Kacey Musgraves delivered a Dolly Parton tribute that cut through the evening’s general inertia. Nirvana gave a well-received speech. Taylor Swift was present, and her video ‘The Fate of Ophelia’ took home Video of the Year, according to the show’s official results on MTV.
None of it felt urgent. The broadcast had the texture of an evening that had already decided it did not need to try very hard. Artists used to manufacture moments at this show (controversies, collaborations, spectacular failures) because the audience was watching and the stakes felt real. Last night, most of the artists the audience actually wanted to see had apparently decided the stakes were not real enough to justify the journey to Los Angeles.
The show also started 20 minutes late, pushed back by an overtime football game on CBS. Remarkably, the delay barely registered, a measure of how little live tension there was to disrupt.
There is something quietly deflating about a show hosted by Snoop Dogg, with Madonna as its anchor and its emotional centre, positioning itself as the pulse-check on What’s Hot Right Now. That is not a slight on any of them individually. It is a description of a broadcast that has not yet worked out how to make the artists who are actually shaping the moment in 2026 feel like they cannot afford to miss it. Until it does, the seats will keep emptying and the absentee list will keep saying more than the running order.
