MadTV: The Fascinating Facts Behind Fox’s Rowdiest Show

The comedy sketch series inspired by Mad magazine was first broadcast on October 14, 1995, as a one-hour show that ran on Saturday nights on Fox. This was the show gunning for Saturday Night Live when the show faced its own struggles in the nineties.

Outside of the two shows featuring sketch comedy, MadTV was very different from SNL as the show actually pushed boundaries. Not only that, but the show was responsible for kick-starting the careers of many actors/actress, along with some memorable sketches that proved to be the show’s best moments. Basically, people were either watching SNL or this back in the day.

Where It All Began

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SNL was slumping faster than the Titanic and Fox jumped on the opportunity. The venerable humor magazine, Mad, was used to create the hour-long sketch comedy show. However, the publication’s founder, William M. Gaines, hated television and didn’t want an adaption of the magazine that’s been running since 1952.

After Gaines died in 1992, music legend Quincy Jones scooped up the rights to the magazine, which resulted in the comedy series being created by Fax Bahr and Adam Small. After Bahr and Small left the series at the end of the third season, the series was handled by QDE and WB Television Distribution.