MovieChat Forums > MADtv (1995) Discussion > How many successful stars came out of Ma...

How many successful stars came out of Mad TV?

posted 9 years ago by whipells
3 replies | jump to latest

I would say Key & Peele are the big ones right now. Also Phil LaMarr and Alex Borstein for voice-over stuff. And course Artie Lange is a pretty famous comedy personality as well. And you have people like Ike Barinholtz, Andy Daly, and Arden Myrin have been getting a lot of steady work, even if they're not necessarily household names.

I guess technically you can count people like Taran Killam (SNL) and Simon Helberg (Big Bang Theory) but I don't think most people would associate them with MAD since they were only on there for a very brief time.

Seems rather low compared to SNL which is a shame because this show had a lot of talented people I feel got overlooked by Hollywood because Mad TV was never respected as much as SNL for whatever reason. Stephnie Weir and Michael McDonald were just as funny as the people who came out of SNL from the last 20 years, yet they've been in relative obscurity since Mad TV ended.

[–] tayz9230 9 years ago

They had so many talented performers its a shame that not a lot of them are doing much.

Michael McDonald seems to pop up a lot in smaller roles like a character actor like in Spy this year. Mo Collins was recurring on Parks and Recreations for basically the whole run of the show and is most likely getting her own show on ABC sometime soon (http://deadline.com/2015/09/amy-poehler-comedies-abc-nbc-put-pilot-1201544701/

And Nicole Sullivan has done moderately well. She was on King of Queens after she left MADtv and had her own sitcom for a couple years.

But yeah off the top off my head not too many have gone on to huge success which is a shame. While I like some of the comedians to come from SNL, so many of them are garbage yet are in a ton of movies and are given opportunities from Lorne Michaels. There are so many MADtv actors that deserve a lot more recognition.

And on Key & Peele, it has always annoyed me that they are the ones doing the best post-MADtv. I thought they were good on MAD, but not anywhere near the leagues of McDonald, Weir, Collins, Sullivan, Wilson, Sasso and Borstein to name a few. They weren't the worst (the show had much worse at times) but not the best either.

No road goes on forever.

[–] klondike99 9 years ago

I thought Wil Sasso would have made it bigger and never would have thought Arte Lange would be the most noted.

[–] Theoden_of_ODU 9 years ago

A lot of them are character actors. They probably get steady work, just not high profile work.

I've found that a number of SNL folks get some pretty sweet opportunities, probably because of connections they can get with all the producers of the show within the industry, especially since a lot of their initial successes fall squarely on production companies, producers or other industry friends thereof that are tied directly to SNL in some way or another.

No, not the mind probe!