When ‘Mad TV’ Challenged ‘Saturday Night Live’ for Sketch Comedy Supremacy

In 1995, Fox had a proposal for the Emmy and Peabody award-winning news anchor Ted Koppel: Play Alfred E. Neuman, the venerated idiot of Mad magazine fame, for their new late-night sketch comedy series Mad TV.

“We’d welcome Ted at any time,” said Mad TV ’s Fax Bahr, who co-developed the show. “Next to David Letterman, he’s the clearest look-alike.”

It’s not likely the veteran broadcaster would have accepted the invite, however flattering it may have been, but that was beside the point. Irreverence was part of the fabric of Mad TV (sometimes stylized as MADtv), which was was taking the rare step of locking horns with sketch comedy giant Saturday Night Live.

Any other year, the ambition might have seemed futile. But in 1995, SNL was suffering from a critical drubbing, declining ratings, and an overhaul of both cast and crew. It was also 20 years old. From the point of view of Fox executives, SNL was suddenly vulnerable. And toppling it using another comedy icon—the gap-toothed imbecile Neuman—seemed plausible.

What the people behind Mad TV didn’t anticipate was that Fox would attempt to undercut them at every turn.

The Usual Gang of Idiots

Mad spent much of the 20th century as a pillar of American satire. It debuted in 1952 as a comic book before switching to a magazine format to avoid comic industry censorship. Creator Harvey Kurzman and the publication’s editorial staff skewered pop culture, advertising, and politics in equal measure. Occasionally, they’d brush up against the authority they were mocking, as was the case when obviously phony $3 bill currency with Alfred E. Neuman’s face invited scrutiny from the Treasury Department in 1967. (They needed only to refer to the FBI, which was already maintaining a file on Mad’s countercultural humor.)

But attempts to franchise Mad out were largely disappointing. A 1974 animated television special went unaired. A 1980 film directed by Robert Downey Sr., Up the Academy, was intended to be produced under the Mad banner in a manner similar to the National Lampoon films. The end result was so bad that Mad publisher William Gaines pulled the Mad endorsement, though someone in the film still appears wearing a Neuman mask.

Gaines, who once controlled EC’s line of incendiary horror titles, was therefore reluctant to cede much control to ancillary partners. He accepted no paid advertising for the magazine, fearful it would dictate editorial content; he kept anything Mad-related from television due to an overall dislike of the medium.

Much later, an older Gaines agreed to meet with producer David Salzman and partner Steven Haft, who wanted to license the Mad brand for a sketch series. Whether Gaines gave his personal blessing is unclear, though when he died in 1992, his estate granted permission. The deal may have been aided by the fact that Mad was by that point a Time Warner property; Salzman’s QDE company, which he operated with music producer Quincy Jones, was doing a lot of business with the entertainment giant. (With Salzman, Jones would become an executive producer of the show.)

Salzman, however, wasn’t interested in a page-for-page tribute to Mad. While certain tenets of the magazine would be in place, like Neuman and Spy vs. Spy, the publication’s iconography would largely be relegated to advertising or show bumpers.

“In no way are we attempting to translate the magazine to TV, because I don’t think it does,” Salzman said. “The magazine, to a certain extent, has a tried-and-true formula, in somewhat of a time warp, but it works. It’s geared to younger men and older boys. Our television show is for men and women … It has to be much broader, it has to be really ’90s and hip.”

Instead, Salzman enlisted Fax Bahr and Adam Small, who had worked on In Living Color, to develop the Mad brand for television in a way that avoided seeming like a clone of SNL. That series was doggedly topical, hitting on the news of the past week in sketches and the faux-news Weekend Update segment. Mad TV, which would mostly be taped in front of an audience, would rely more on cultural references that didn’t necessarily have an expiration date. An episode of Mad TV was more likely to have a Star Trek spoof than a sketch about the Unabomber.

According to Salzman, part of the challenge of producing Mad TV was inventing an ensemble from scratch, a process he likened to “putting together a sports team.” Performers Bryan Callen, Artie Lange, Nicole Sullivan, David Herman, Mary Scheer, Phil LaMarr, Debra Wilson, and Orlando Jones were an eclectic (and arguably more diverse than SNL) mix of stage talents, stand-ups, and actors.

It helped that SNL was largely in the same boat, having jettisoned several cast members and writers from the 1994–1995 season and attempting to integrate new performers like Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri.

“The cast has gotten too large,” NBC West Coast President Don Ohlmeyer said. “None of the characters have really broken out in the last three or four years. It’s time to bring in some fresh blood on the writing staff. These are all issues Lorne [Michaels, SNL creator] recognizes and is in the process of addressing.”

In the world of televised sketch comedy, SNL was a wounded animal, and Fox wanted to exploit it. “We felt it really was a time period that we could aggressively go after,” Fox President John Matoian said. After screening a pilot of Mad TV, the network ordered 12 more episodes.

Mad TV caught a big break when it premiered on October 14, 1995: SNL was airing a best-of compilation that night, not an original episode. And when the ratings came in, it was Mad TV that had taken the 11 p.m. to 12 a.m. time slot, beating SNL in 33 markets. Sketches like “Gump Fiction,” which placed the affable Forrest Gump in the violent world of a Quentin Tarantino-like film, were buzzy. So was an appearance by Kato Kaelin, a peripheral character in the O.J. Simpson murder trial.

Fox should have been elated, particularly given that ratings remained strong over the next several weeks. Though SNL often outpaced it—the NBC series regularly drew a 5.5 rating (or roughly 5.5 million households) to Mad TV’s 4.1—at times, Mad TV tied SNL in the coveted 18–49 demographic. But come spring, Mad TV would have to contend with the fact that Fox was also looking for alternative Saturday night programming.

Hello, Neuman

While Mad TV was in production, Fox had ordered Saturday Night Special, a variety special series with revolving guest hosts that was produced by Roseanne Barr. In the spring of 1996, Fox pre-empted Mad TV to air six Saturday Night Special episodes in a row, which seemed to indicate a lack of confidence in the sketch show.

Fox executives left little room for any other interpretation. “If Roseanne does great and Mad TV bombs, we would replace Mad TV,” Matoian said.

The experiment demonstrated that viewers preferred Mad TV, by a wide margin. Fox wound up ordering 25 episodes of the show for the 1996–’97 season while Barr’s show was not renewed. But the move foreshadowed what would become a recurring issue between the cast and crew of Mad TV and Fox: a perception that the network wasn’t all that invested in the show. Promotion was minimal; the series budget got trimmed, which meant that sketches ran longer to stretch resources.

“When you have been in the business as long as I have, you think you’ve pretty much seen it all,” Salzman said. “But this has been a new experience in almost every way. And it’s been really tough. We’ve never really caught a break with this show. If anything, we’ve had the opposite … it’s spectacular how disregarded we generally have been.”

Nicole Sullivan echoed Salzman’s point, albeit less diplomatically. “I don’t even pretend to lie,” she said. “We are definitely treated like the bastard orphan children of the network. They tend to ignore us. We just don’t matter that much.”

Fox executives admitted as much, citing the show’s budget against its revenue as one reason the promotion wasn’t there. “Mad TV is unfortunately going to always feel like the stepchild because it’s the one non-primetime show [on Fox],”executive vice- president of programming David Nevins said in 2001.

SNL, meanwhile, was entering yet another period of rebirth, having found players in Ferrell, Oteri, and others that were resonating with viewers. Critics retained a perpetual complaint that characters like Ferrell and Oteri’s cheerleaders were being recycled too often, but that was par for the course in sketch comedy. At Mad TV, there were plenty of appearances by Michael McDonald’s Stuart Larkin, a demanding man-child, and Ms. Swan, a character portrayed by Alex Borstein (who joined the show in 1997) that was sometimes criticized for perpetuating Asian stereotypes. Borstein said she based Swan on her own Hungarian-Mongolian grandmother.

Mad TV was also afflicted in some way by its sharpened parodies, which often left the people they were satirizing disgruntled. Rosie O’Donnell took offense to a sketch in which she was portrayed as a sexual predator. Others, including Drew Barrymore and Britney Spears, were said to be irritated: Nicole Sullivan told Vulture in 2016 that a bodyguard for Spears once “very not-so-subtly pushed me about seven feet away from her.”

Goodbye, Neuman

Despite Fox’s reluctance to back the show, viewers did. Into the early 2000s, Mad TV was consistently improving its ratings and building a loyal fanbase. “When we first started, we had audiences full of busloads of Marines and people from rehab who were happy just to be out of the house,” Phil LaMarr said in 1999. “Now you actually have people who have seen the show, recognize the characters, are happy to be here. And when a character comes out, you don’t have to hit the applause sign. People have actually seen it.”

The series would retain an eye for talent. Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele joined in the ninth season before launching their own sketch series, Key and Peele.

Still, little could be done to escape the idea the series was an afterthought, and come 2008, Fox simply stopped funding it altogether. Mad TV was canceled after 14 seasons.

The CW attempted a brief revival with a handful of original cast members as guest stars in 2016, which lasted a single season. Not long after, Mad magazine ceased print publication, further diminishing the brand cache in the public eye. (It has since resumed publishing original material.) But just as there’s no ignoring Mad's influence on American comedy, there's no denying that Mad TV did what few shows even dared try: Remain solvent for well over a decade against the comedy institution that is SNL, a show now entering its 50th season.

Television critics observed the shows held mutual sway over one another. Mad TV eventually relented and invited more guest stars on; SNL began relying more on animated segments like The Ambiguously Gay Duo after Mad TV’s holiday special satires (including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, in which the titular reindeer appears in a mafia-style Santa's workshop) caught on.

SNL creator and producer Lorne Michaels, who rarely commented on Mad TV, offered at least one extended thought on the competition in 1999. His conclusion? Mad TV wasn’t really competition at all. “From the beginning they’ve chosen to define themselves as better than Saturday Night Live, newer than Saturday Night Live,” he said. “That seems to be how they’ve been judged and I think that’s unfortunate because they can certainly stand on their own. [The shows] are compared because they’re opposite each other. But I don’t think in truth they’re similar shows. They’re primarily parody … I don’t think we’re that interested in parody. We’re more of a live variety show.”

Ted Koppel, incidentally, never did appear on Mad TV—instead, the show pivoted to an Alfred E. Neuman lookalike contest for its premiere. But a version of Koppel did eventually show up: Cast member Frank Caliendo portrayed him in a 2002 episode.

Read More About Mad Magazine: