(Despite being a near-omnipresent fixture on TV, Dyrdek is surprisingly elusive several attempts to contact him-through his agent, his production company, his website, ViacomCBS, and personal intermediaries-were unsuccessful.) Ridiculousness first premiered in 2011 and has shot 17 seasons to date, and Dyrdek has been a fixture on MTV for 14 years and counting. It’s certainly not that Ridiculousness is new or that Dyrdek is a fresh face. What is it about Ridiculousness that makes MTV want to run it constantly when Comedy Central, another ViacomCBS property, recently decided to cancel the similar Tosh.O? on Monday, when it finally went off the air in favor of Catfish: The TV Show. When I randomly checked in on the station one weekend in August, the show ran for more than 36 hours uninterrupted from Saturday morning through 3 a.m. Variety reported that during a stretch of 168 hours on MTV in late June, 113 hours of programming were gobbled up by Ridiculousness. Ridiculousness ranked 13th overall and was most popular in “rural Alaska, New Mexico and Montana, and least popular in Washington, D.C., Atlanta and San Francisco.” That tracked with the rest of the study, which found that only Duck Dynasty and The Voice were more popular in Red America zip codes.īut while Ridiculousness has been a regular winner for MTV for a while, it has lately been on so much that it has all but taken over the entire network. Apparently, consumers are willing to watch repeat programming with their memories fully intact.įour years ago, The New York Times ran a study about the 50 most-liked TV shows on Facebook and then mapped those preferences by geography. But unlike the protagonists of the sci-fi buddy-cop comedy, MTV and its parent company, ViacomCBS, have no need for a memory-wiping device. the next morning that MTV took a break from the show to broadcast Men in Black.

The night before I started hammering away at this story, I turned on MTV around 8 o’clock in the evening. Rob, if you’re reading this, I want you to know that I know that you contain multitudes and that it’s no easy thing to account for how you arrived at this unexpected and highly lucrative moment in your long career. It has been a very long time since Dyrdek was just a skateboarder, and he has made oodles of money since then as a reality show star. Actually, is he still a skateboarder? Is that how he identifies these days? He’s 46 now and Ridiculousness is his third show for MTV, following Rob & Big (RIP, Big Black do work for eternity, son) and Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory. Turn on MTV-on any day, at any time-and you’re likely to find an episode of Ridiculousness, a home-videos-ripped-from-the-internet-style show hosted by skateboarder Rob Dyrdek. Because while MTV moved on from Daly, it’s since leaned all the way into the idea of replaying shows on loop. Perhaps the episode didn’t precisely predict Daly’s fate- TRL went off the air in 2008, and Daly still has his hair-but it was pretty spot on about what would happen to the network itself.

“How excited can you be,” he whines to the camera, “about a video you’ve seen 58 times in a row?” He looks tired-physically, and with his gig. He has bags under his eyes and his skin is as gray as the V-neck he rocks along with an ugly mustard-colored plaid shirt. He’s gone fat and mostly bald, save for a thin patch of hair on the crown of his head that flows as a tributary into a mighty mullet along the base of his neck. Alas, while the imagined TRL of the future is still on the air, time has not been kind to Daly. He’s still hosting Total Request Live, better known as TRL, a once wildly popular program that promoted new music videos and featured celebrity appearances from artists in front of an adoring, age-appropriate crowd.

To Daly’s dismay, his career remains largely unchanged. In the sketch, we see 10 years into the future of MTV mainstay Carson Daly. In classic Dave Chappelle fashion, it is mean and telling and funny in all the right ways-and for more reasons than were initially intended. In one prescient episode from the first season, the show flashes forward to give us a glimpse of what eventually becomes of one of the most well-known television personalities from the turn of the millennium. There are lots of reasons why Chappelle’s Show is rightly hailed as one of the best comedies ever-including its uncanny knack for periodically predicting the future.

Mtv unplugged channel