Saturday Night’s Other Comedy Show

The line outside Building 11 at Hollywood Studios’ Sunset Boulevard lot doubles back on itself twice as it snakes toward a door guarding the set of Fox television’s “Mad TV.” It’s a common scene for TV shows that tape before live audiences, yet it’s one that still brings a smile to Phil LaMarr’s face.

“When we first started, we had audiences full of busloads of Marines and people from rehab who were happy to just be out of the house,” says LaMarr, who has been with the show since its premiere four years ago. “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.”

Welcome to “Mad TV,” Saturday night’s other sketch-comedy series, an edgy and irreverent hour of slapstick and parody that has nonetheless remained one of network television’s best-kept secrets.

Slowly, that’s beginning to change. Now the show, which airs Saturdays at 11 p.m., is drawing laughs and an audience. One weekend this winter, for example, the show drew 6.4 million viewers, its best performance in more than a year. And for the season “Mad TV’s” ratings (2.6) and share (9) numbers among viewers ages 18 to 49, are about 20% higher than they were two years ago.

That’s still a long way from posing a serious challenge to NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” whose share of the late-night audience is more than twice as big. But it was good enough to win the show renewal for a fifth season, the network recently confirmed.

“It’s like the little engine that could,” says cast member Mo Collins. “It’s really pulling itself up a hill here and it’s paying off. We’re getting viewers now.”

The “Mad TV” story is more a tale of survival than of success, however. The show has endured seven cast substitutions, a major budget cut, a change in executive producers and a cancellation scare midway through its first season.

“When you’ve been in the business as long as I have, you think you’ve pretty much seen it all,” says executive producer David E. Salzman. “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.”

Yet the challenges have made the show better, Salzman insists. For example when Fox cut “Mad TV’s” budget more than 10% last spring, to about $700,000 an episode, Salzman wasn’t sure the show could survive. Skits necessarily grew longer because producers had to fill air time with fewer resources, and sketches that required costly special effects were dismissed out of hand.

Yet the show thrived.

“I think we did our best season this year,” he says. “Sometimes with less you can do more. It forces you to be really creative.”

It’s the last day of taping for the season and a kind of giddiness envelopes the set. After producing 25 shows in 23 weeks, the cast is looking forward to vacation--to a point.

“We’re all going to really love a break for about two weeks,” says Nicole Sullivan, one of three survivors from the first season. “And then we’ll all be calling each other, saying ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ ”

Although seven of the show’s 10 principal players have been with “Mad TV” for two seasons or less, the cast is very close. In fact, Adam Small, one of the show’s original executive producers, married someone he met on the set.

But the camaraderie is as much a coping strategy as anything else. Unable to rely on the network for support, the cast has turned to one another.

“I don’t even pretend to lie. We are definitely treated like the bastard orphan children of the network,” Sullivan says. “They tend to ignore us. We just don’t matter that much.”

“It’s kind of like, I imagine, going through boot camp,” adds LaMarr. “They just keep throwing stuff at you and then you survive. Sure it would have been great to have been coddled and treated like the network’s baby. I’m sure there’s a wonderful joy in that.

“But I certainly feel like any success we get, we’ve earned. Because we’re Fox late night. This is the ghetto of comedy.”

Nothing personal, the network says, it’s just business.

“I think everybody feels they’re not getting enough promotion, they’re not getting enough this,” says Mike Darnell, the executive vice president for alternative programming at Fox. “Based on the ratings and what the show cost, we weren’t making a profit. It was purely financial.”

A Little Stability in the Late Night

Still, what the network couldn’t do for “Mad TV,” “Mad TV” has managed to do for the network, which is provide stability. Late night has long been Fox’s programming graveyard, one littered with the remnants of such disasters as “The Joan Rivers Show,” “Chevy Chase,” and “The Wilton North Report.” Yet “Mad TV” has managed to establish a foothold, however small, in that troubled turf.

“We’ve never had a hit in late night,” Darnell admits. “In fact, we’ve had nothing but failures. But [I’m speaking only of] late-night Monday through Friday.

“This is our first time on a Saturday and, so far, we think we’re doing OK.”

The program has managed to carve out a niche by establishing itself as an alternative to “Saturday Night Live,” which has become a TV institution since debuting 24 years ago. While “SNL” is more overtly political and topical, for example, “Mad TV” dabbles mainly in pop culture, skewering the likes of Cher, Magic Johnson, Kenny Rogers and the moody WB network drama “Felicity” with frequent and merciless parodies.

The cast has also developed popular recurring characters such as Miss Swan, an English-deficient employee of the Gorgeous Pretty Beauty Nail Salon; the politically incorrect Vancome Lady; and Rusty, a painfully nerdy college student.

Still, the comparisons to “SNL” persist, which is unfair, says Lorne Michaels, longtime producer of the NBC program.

“From the beginning they’ve chosen to define themselves as better than ‘Saturday Night Live,’ newer than ‘Saturday Night Live.’ That seems to be how they’ve been judged and I think that’s unfortunate because they can certainly stand on their own,” he says. “[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’m sure they do what they do really well. I don’t think we’re that interested in parody. We’re more of a live variety show.”

Salzman doesn’t disagree.

“ ‘Mad TV’ is wall-to-wall social-observation humor and pop-culture parody,” he says. “That’s the philosophy. Ours is a strong point-of-view show and our point of view is very much a Populist point of view. Though not necessarily a popular point of view.”

The end of a long day is drawing near when Michael McDonald, the newest member of the “Mad TV” cast, suddenly snaps. Without warning, he spins tightly on his heels and begins pounding fellow actor Will Sasso senseless with a baseball bat.

And just as McDonald expected, the studio audience erupts in laughter.

The fact that one of the final tapings of the season features one of the show’s newest members fits nicely with “Mad TV’s” philosophy.

Although Salzman’s television pedigree runs deep--a former president of Lorimar Telepictures, he has created or produced more than 20 series and supervised more than 10,000 hours of programming--he claims to be exploring virgin territory with “Mad TV.”

“We’re taking an approach that has never succeeded in the history of these shows. We are taking an egalitarian approach,” Salzman says. “Our plan is over the course of a year to try to get everybody as close to equal time as we can.”

And it’s an approach most of the still-anonymous cast professes to support.

“It’s not about an individual saying who can get off the most [laughs],” says Aries Spears. “It’s about what gets the show off. In that, we all shine in our own way.”

And thanks to its place on the Fox network, which has a well-earned reputation for pushing the content envelope, the show’s parodies frequently spin off in directions the Big Three networks wouldn’t dare follow. One recent sketch featured a blood-covered Mike Tyson character chomping on the ears and punching in the faces of hapless bystanders while another featured a close-up shot of a cast member vomiting.

Back in Salzman’s office, across the parking lot and up a narrow stairwell from the set, a cardboard cutout of Mad magazine’s perpetual cover boy, Alfred E. Neuman, grins impishly from its place in the corner. Aside from its logo, an occasional cartoon and a bow toward the comic magazine’s irreverent style of social commentary, the show has largely abandoned its connections to the publication. It’s even outgrown its resemblance to Neuman, the David Letterman look-alike who never succeeded at anything.

“It’s spectacular how disregarded we generally have been,” Salzman says. “It’s forced us to be strong..

“[And] we clearly haven’t peaked. We’re expecting to do better next year.”