The Idiot Box is an American sketch comedy television series created by Alex Winter, Tom Stern and Tim Burns that ran on MTV in 1991. After the success of Bill & Ted, MTV hired Winter, Stern, and Burns to develop a half-hour sketch comedy show for the network. As the channel was still strictly music-oriented at the time, The Idiot Box was mainly a showcase for popular music videos, but with a series of sketches, fake commercials, and parodies shown in between. Therefore, although an episode ran 30 minutes, there were only 7 to 11 minutes' worth of sketches. Inspired heavily by the likes of Mad magazine and Monty Python's Flying Circus, the humor in The Idiot Box was rooted in absurdity and violent slapstick, often in the form of television and movie parodies and commercials for fake television shows (such as "Mumford the Yodeling Mutt" and "Who's A Total Idiot? with Tony Danza"). Each episode would end with a recap by the Max Headroom-esque VOTAR, "the future of television announcing", as he would criticize each of the sketches in the episode and occasionally quote lines from new wave songs. Winter, Stern, and Burns chose to cease production after six episodes and instead accepted a high-paying deal with 20th Century Fox to write and direct their own feature film. The result was 1993's Freaked, which featured the same brand of humor as The Idiot Box.

Recurring characters and sketches

Home media

Winter and Stern both expressed a desire to release The Idiot Box on DVD, but reportedly ran into troubles with MTV. According to an interview with Winter: "'I'm petitioning for it right now. I've been trying to get MTV to do it for years and it's just impossible. It's such a bureaucracy over there. I don't think there's anyone opposed to it but I just can't get anyone off their ass and actually deal with it. But I'm hoping sometime soon. There was a moment where Anchor Bay was actually going to get all of it on the Freaked DVD and then at the last minute MTV changed their mind.'" At a 2009 Los Angeles screening of Freaked, Winter elaborated that a big part of MTV's hesitancy to release the show is the short length of the episodes, which, when combined, clock in at just under 60 minutes' worth of material. An internet petition was created to get The Idiot Box on DVD and has since accumulated over 1,000 signatures. All six episodes are currently available for viewing on YouTube, along with a rare commercial and 'Best of' video, uploaded by Winter and Stern's official website. In the 20th-anniversary interview for their album Nevermind on Sirius XM, remaining Nirvana band members recalled that Kurt Cobain was a fan of the show.