11 items
Tina Fey turned her years running the Saturday Night Live writers' room into a live-action cartoon about a sketch show nobody at the network cared about. Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, Tracy Jordan and Kenneth the page won three straight Outstanding Comedy Series Emmys while the ratings never caught up — and NBC kept it on anyway.
Sacha Baron Cohen's mockumentary phenomenon: his clueless Kazakh TV journalist Borat rampages across America interviewing real, unsuspecting people, exposing what they'll say to a "foreigner." Spun off from Da Ali G Show, it was a critical smash, a quoting machine ("Very nice!"), and a diplomatic incident all at once.
The sketch show that owned the mid-2000s. Dave Chappelle's Comedy Central juggernaut turned razor-sharp racial satire and absurd characters into the most-quoted comedy of the decade — "I'm Rick James, b****!" echoing down every school hallway.
Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson as a struggling local band signed overnight by a label that hides subliminal messages in pop songs. It flopped in April 2001, with brand logos in nearly every scene and none of them paid for, and has since been reappraised as a cult satire.
Before Glee and Nip/Tuck, Ryan Murphy's first series put a cheerleader (Leslie Bibb's Brooke McQueen) and a school-paper editor (Carly Pope's Sam McPherson) under one roof when their single parents got engaged. The WB's candy-colored high-school satire ran two seasons from 1999 to 2001, gave the world Mary Cherry, and ended with a car hitting its lead.
The construction-paper kids from Colorado who never stopped talking. South Park arrived in 1997 as basic cable's biggest shock — then spent the 2000s proving it was television's fastest satire machine, with episodes built in days so it could mock the news while it was still news.
![Video thumbnail — STARSHIP TROOPERS [1997]– Official Trailer (HD)](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zPYuV_jGk7M/maxresdefault.jpg)
Paul Verhoeven's militaristic sci-fi satire based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel, starring Casper Van Dien as a young soldier fighting giant bugs in a fascistic future society. A visual spectacle that was widely misunderstood upon release but has become a celebrated cult classic.
Aaron McGruder's anime-styled Adult Swim satire about Huey and Riley Freeman, two Chicago kids transplanted with their Granddad to a white suburb called Woodcrest, with Regina King voicing both brothers. It opened in 2005 by declaring "Jesus was Black, Ronald Reagan was the devil, and the government is lying about 9/11," and it never got less confrontational.
A "well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot" in a flag-draped Eagle's Nest, four nights a week after The Daily Show. Stephen Colbert coined "truthiness" on night one, roasted the president to his face at the 2006 Correspondents' Dinner, ran for president, started a real super PAC and never once broke character — well, almost never.
A fake newscast that became a real ritual: eleven p.m. on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart at the desk, the day's news taken apart piece by piece. For a generation in dorm rooms and first apartments, this was how the 2000s got processed — and quoted at work the next morning.
Jim Carrey's first great dramatic turn: Truman Burbank is an ordinary insurance salesman who slowly realizes his entire hometown is a giant TV set and everyone he knows is an actor — his whole life broadcast 24/7 to the world. Directed by Peter Weir from an Andrew Niccol script, it turned a high-concept nightmare into a tender, unsettling fable that only looked more prophetic as reality TV took over.