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AV Club Piece Charts Evolution of Comedy Central Fascinating read by Julie Seabaugh at the AV Club looks at the creation and evolution of Comedy Central, with comments from Joel and many others who were there. 16 Replies to “AV Club Piece Charts Evolution of Comedy Central”Commenting at Satellite News
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To me, 1997-1998 was the high point of Comedy Central and it never really reached that level ever again, though there were still some highlights along the way (Primetime Glick in 2001).
Good look back! …and good comments at the article’s source.
Someone mentioned the “You’re Gonna Win…” channel ads, ha…I have all 3 versions within all of the old vhs copies of MST I still have. Fun stuff!
I remember CC had Bill Maher’s show back then, too…they’d run a Sunday a.m. update of that prior weeks shows. That was back before Bill revealed himself to be another xenophobic, war-mongering neocon supporter. Can’t stomach him these days.
Anywho, thanks for posting this.
It’s a terrible shame that the suits Comedy Central still insists on ignoring MST3K and how it kept the channel afloat for years.
It’s like Herzog knows he made a mistake, but insists everyone at the network pretend that it was a nothing show with nothing ratings that no one’s ever heard from again, and that Comedy Central only existed from 1997 on.
How I miss The Daily Show Mark I, when Craig Kilborn was the host and it was actually funny.
Glad to see Matt Stone from South Park putting MST3K up there with Monty Python in the article! There’s a lot to love that CC has put out over the years, but MST3K will always be my favorite. Herzog can most definitely bite it, though.
Craig Kilborn was way too nasty to be funny. (Like a certain other comic, the rule of “Never ENJOY telling the joke too much” still applies.) The smarmy-facetious field-interview segments, which now seem painful and dated, were meant to be the center of the show.
After Jon Stewart took over, one the comic guests asked “Whatever happened to that misogynist Aryan guy?”
But oh, I remember that first year of TCC, back when HBO immortalized every great 80’s standup comic, but every new cable channel wanted to see if they could replicate MTV’s formula of short videos and VJ’s, for viewers to click onto at random. I don’t know whether they showed more of Gallagher than they showed of that one same Beetlejuice clip over and over, but one year was pretty long-lived for the idea, seeing as how Ted Turner’s music-video channel only lasted a month.
That’s when TCC had to start showing the PD reruns little startup channels HAD to show back then, and that’s how we got the S1&2 ref jokes about Clutch Cargo, Supercar, Lancelot Link, Joe Besser on the Abbott & Costello show, and, basically, the kind of cheap obscure stuff they show on PlutoTV now.
In fact, with all the cable channels showing “Original Programming” because the other studios won’t send them anything, I’ve been watching PlutoTV because I actually miss the birth-of-cable days of random public-domain reruns, when new channels had to fill eight rotating hours a day.
dayymm, this is epic! wired should envy. (if you had missed it, maybe a year or so before the kickstarter finally happened, wired published a “mst3k oral history,” very similar format – worth looking up if you hadn’t read it already.)
big, great handclapping applause to julie seabaugh for doing this up! brilliant to do a history on cc… as mst3k is so inextricably entwined, it makes for such interesting reading (and i’m only maybe 1/4 of the way through at best now).
sure brings back some memories of the “dr. katz” era… and, saaayyyyy… “art bell” isn’t -that- “art bell,” is it?
Before there was South Park it was MST3K which made that network succeed. I hardly remember anything else on it from that time period. MST is the only show from that channel which mattered. I didn’t even watch MST at the time, but every time I channel surfed and clicked past the comedy channel/comedy central I would always see the silhouettes. It seemed as if it was ALWAYS on. Before South Park there is only one show from TCC/CTV/CC that needs to be discussed and that show is Mystery Science Theater 3000. The channel would most certainly have flopped without it.
Herzog: Matt and Trey from the beginning—and to a certain extent remain—the house upon which Comedy Central was built.
I really really hate this guy. MST3K built the house. SP just occupied it and kept it standing afterwords.
In the beginning, MST3K WAS the house.
Tommy Sledge wasn’t as funny as his act, Rachel Sweet maddeningly made you shout “DO something!!”, Alan Havey was cool for having the only other actual “show” concept on the network, and the Higgins Boys & Gruber looked like they’d started to wonder what the network had gotten them into when they were reduced to playing stooge for Lance Link and Follow That Bird.
South Park didn’t come along until the Man Show/Crank Yankers era when Central was starting to form its “slob” identity–Brilliant, yes, but “guy” programming took a hit from the network that it never recovered from.
Our system didn’t get Ha!, but the “rival” channel started to sound like it had actual programming, with Mary Tyler Moore reruns. After the merger, the only thing TCC inherited from Ha! was the “Clash” game show, which was more respectable than that smarmy Greg Proops revival they tried to do. Ah, good times.
Back when all of the “new” channels hit the cable-waves, there were more “live” shows with hosts, in studios, that reminded you of your college dorms. FX had its host in an apartment overlooking New York. They would introduce the 20th Century Fox shows. HA CC and CC had live looking hosts and special shows that featured comedy clips form old movies and TV shows like Captain Nice. It had a feel of closeness and not the prepackaged Madison Avenue garbage ALL of them have on now.
I miss my youth.
I should clarify that CC had some good shows pre-1997, including MST3K of course. But there were just so many shows I was watching on CC during the late ’90s: Dr. Katz, South Park, Daily Show, Win Ben Stein’s Money, Make Me Laugh, Upright Citizens Brigade, Bob & Margaret, The Critic (re-runs), Canned Ham, The Tick (re-runs), classic Comedy Central Presents… dang.
Christmas break 1989 (age 13) I stumbled across The Comedy Channel for the first time. Night After Night with Allan Havey was my gateway. It felt like I might be the only person watching this and it’s quite possible I was. Those early years were some of the rawest, rudderless TV I’ve ever seen (before or since). I wrote letters to NAN and the Higgins Boys and Grueber and got return letters from the channel along with two (!) shirts.
The funny thing, I suppose, is that I didn’t really wander into the Mystery Science Theater until 1992 or so. Probably in the absence of Havey and Higgins and the fact that MST3K was really the only thing left of the early incarnation of the channel I finally felt obligated to check it out. I’m by no means the biggest MSTie on the planet but I was definitely a top fan at the time. I recorded the show nightly for several years and watched the tapes religiously.
The early Comedy Channel really shaped so much of cable that was to come when you think about it. The format of Allan Havey’s show influenced other talk shows. Nick Bakay leaving that show and going to Dennis Miller’s show prompted me, personally, to check out Miller’s show where I first saw one of my favorite bands (the Pixies). Havey did great stand up for many years after NAN was cancelled. Both Higgins brothers have worked in TV ever since. Steve Higgins is the announcer for Jimmy Fallon. Short Attention Span Theater might have been a prelude to YouTube, even if indirectly. Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (which I adored, still love Maher on HBO) really created a forum for fairly adult ‘news of the day’ discussion in the early 1990’s. Of course MST3K influenced popular culture in so many ways, no need to re-hash them here. And then the flagship show of Comedy Central now, The Daily Show, began in earnest with Craig Kilborn from ESPN. As much as I appreciate Jon Stewart, Kilborn’s style was unmatched in that setting, IMO.
It might have begun as an outlet for HBO Downtown to ‘try something new’ but, it really shaped television and post-TV even if accident.
I personally like to believe it was THE DAILY SHOW that kept Comedy Central afloat after MST3K left the network. i refuse to believe such garbage as South Park as being the key to a network’s success.
So much misinformation… I did love it when the KTMA crew riffed THE GODFATHER, though.
I remember that our system had HA!, but not Comedy Channel. It wasn’t until the merger that we got access to MST3K.
I recall that the programming on HA! was actually pretty good. I recall that they had SNL re-runs back when they were still showing clips from the Dick Ebersol era, and, just before the merger, they dug up the long-forgotten sit-com “Camp Runamuck”, and Heaven only knows how they found that.
The thing I remember most from HA! was a promo they did for SNL with Eddie Murphy as Tyrone Green saying (as part of his “Kill my landlord” poem), “C-I-L-L my landlord!” And the announcer goes, “Saturday Night Live, coming up N-E-K-S-T”.
Oh, does anyone else remember “Sports Monster”? It seemed like a successful show in the early CC days, but it seems to be forgotten now.