2gether

2gether, stylized 2ge+her, premiered on MTV as a TV movie on February 21, 2000. Cousins Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn created it as a satire of New Kids on the Block, NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys at the exact moment those bands owned the charts, and they wrote many of the songs themselves. A manager named Bob Buss (Alan Blumenfeld) assembles the group to fill the required niches: Jerry O'Keefe, the Heartthrob (Evan Farmer); Chad Linus, the Shy One (Noah Bastian); Jason "Q.T." McKnight, the Cute One (Michael Cuccione); Doug Linus, the Older Brother (Kevin Farley); and Mickey Parke, the Bad Boy (Alex Solowitz).

The music was the trick. The actors sang, TVT Records released a soundtrack album on February 15, 2000, and it climbed to No. 35 on the Billboard 200, with filler from two more fictional bands, Whoa! and Unity, mixed in. None of its singles charted, but "U + Me = Us (Calculus)" did not need to. "It took on a totally unexpected life of its own," MTV programming president Brian Graden told the Deseret News that August; the video "was downloaded 1.2 million times in two weeks," the soundtrack went Top 40 with "like, four songs on it," and fan sites sprang up. Britney Spears took the group on the road as one of the opening acts on her Oops!... I Did It Again tour, which ran from June 20, 2000, to January 18, 2001, and they played their several dates in character. "Like any good programmer, I'm willing to beat a good idea absolutely to death," Graden said.

So 2ge+her: The Series premiered on August 15, 2000, a half-hour sitcom shot in Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia: 13 episodes that fall, then six more in February and March 2001, one of which never aired. A second album, 2gether: Again, came out on August 29, 2000, and reached No. 15 on the Billboard 200. Its lead single, "The Hardest Part of Breaking Up (Is Getting Back Your Stuff)," peaked at No. 87 on the Hot 100 that September and got several days of airplay on Total Request Live, and the album's "Every Minute, Every Hour" was co-written by Howie Dorough of the Backstreet Boys, which is about as far inside the joke as a parody can get.

Michael Cuccione had been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at nine, in 1994, and the treatment that saved him, including a bone-marrow transplant and radiation around his heart and lungs, left him with permanent respiratory damage; he had already founded a cancer-research foundation in his own name. He was hospitalized with pneumonia on December 4, 2000, and died in Vancouver on January 13, 2001, eight days after his 16th birthday. "That was a big blow to everything," Kevin Farley said. "Everybody was so sad that it was hard to continue after that." The cast and crew decided not to go on without him, and the final episode aired on March 19, 2001. In late 2011 the surviving members talked publicly about a reunion concert, and in January 2012 MTV reportedly approved a revival; the songs, meanwhile, never left the internet.