The State
MTV's 11-person sketch troupe lasted four seasons and 25 episodes but launched half the comedy you loved in the 2000s. They wrote, acted, directed, and edited everything themselves — and left behind $240 worth of pudding.
In 1994, an 11-member sketch comedy troupe formed at NYU landed on MTV with a show called The State, premiering January 21. The collective was unusual: Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, Kerri Kenney, Ken Marino, Michael Showalter, David Wain, Robert Ben Garant, Joe Lo Truglio, and three more not only performed but collectively created, wrote, directed, and edited every sketch themselves. The show ran through 1995 — 25 episodes across four seasons, a short run dense with moments that stuck.
The sketches became cult landmarks: Barry and Levon, Lennon and Black's suave swingers, sweet-talking a mound of "$240 worth of pudding"; Doug, Showalter's teen rebel forever announcing "I'm outta heeere"; Ken Marino's Louie bellowing "I wanna dip my balls in it!" Barely anyone watched live, but the people who found it memorized it. By the cast's own DVD-commentary telling, MTV offered a guarantee of 65 more episodes — and the troupe turned it down to jump to CBS against their agent's advice. The network gamble produced exactly one special, aired in October 1995, and the series was over; the troupe's own FAQ still insists "the show was never canceled."
The real legacy wasn't on MTV at all. The cast scattered into the projects that defined 2000s comedy — Reno 911!, Wet Hot American Summer, Stella, Viva Variety — making The State the seedbed of a whole generation of it. The complete-series DVD finally arrived in July 2009, held up for years by music-rights problems — the pudding sketch, for the record, originally played out to Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing." For a show almost nobody rated, The State became one of comedy's most influential artifacts.
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