Michael Nesmith inheritance from his mother's Liquid Paper fortune in 1980 eased those concerns. In a 1980 interview with "Playboy", he said of that time: "I had to start telling little tales to the tax man while they were putting tags on the furniture." While Nesmith had continued to produce his compositions with the Monkees, he withheld many of the songs from the final Monkees albums, only to release them on his post-Monkees solo records. Nesmith did not participate in the Monkees' 20th-anniversary reunion. However, he did appear during an encore with the other three members at the Greek Theatre on September
Michael Nesmith which helped spur Nesmith's creation of a television program called "PopClips" for the Nickelodeon cable network. In 1980, "PopClips" was sold to the Time Warner/Amex consortium. Time Warner/Amex developed "PopClips" into the MTV network. Nesmith won the first-ever Grammy Award given for (Long-form) Music-Video in 1982, for his hour-long "Elephant Parts" and also had a short-lived series on NBC inspired by the video called "Michael Nesmith in Television Parts". "Television Parts" included many other artists who were unknown at the time but went on to become major stars in their own right. Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Garry Shandling, Whoopi Goldberg,