Her 15-minute video performance piece "Made for Television", self-produced in 1981, ran on the WNET-PBS series "Alive from Off-Center". Her satiric featurette found her playing close to 50 roles in a "channel-hopping" series of visual bites parodying television programming game shows to TV films to televangelists. As art critic Sarah Valdez described it, "a bewigged Ann Magnuson consecutively inhabits, at a rate faster than any channel surfer could keep up with, an outlandish, uproariously unfortunate range of female stereotypes". It was later released by HBO Home Video together with the Cinemax cable-TV special "Vandemonium" (1987), in which Magnuson starred in a mostly solo stage piece with appearances by actor-singer Meat Loaf, performance artist Joey Arias, and actor-monologist Eric Bogosian. Magnuson also co-hosted "Alive from Off Center" during its 1988 season, taking over from fellow performance artist Laurie Anderson, who had hosted the series the year before.