As anyone who's tried to be funny for more than five consecutive minutes—or, say, has read about other people attempting it, like any of the many behind-the-scenes Saturday Night Live books and interviews that make producing 90 minutes of sketch comedy per week sound like an endless death march—knows, being funny consistently, for long periods of time, is hard. Which is why very few TV shows in the medium's history have ever attempted to do a nightly sketch show, with even those programs that do something similar, like The Daily Show,or some of the more comedy-focused late-night talk entries, carefully padding the goofs out with interviews to give everybody's brains a break.
Which is just part of what's so fascinating about reading a new oral history of largely forgotten syndicated nightly sketch comedy series The Newz, crafted by regular A.V. Club contributor Will Harris, for LateNighter. Talking to the creator, and most of the cast, of the short-lived series—which ran in syndication for seven months in 1994—it's a fascinating tale of young people trying ridiculously hard to create an enormous amount of TV comedy in a very short period of time, cranking out multiple half-hours of sketches every single week. (Was all of it golden? Well, rather than pass judgment ourselves, we'll just quote cast member—and future Who's Line Is It Anyway staple—Brad Sherwood, who asserted the series was one where "certainly you could hold it up to In Living Color or Mad TV," and leave it at that.)
As told by folks like cast members Sherwood, Nancy Sullivan, and Deborah Magdelena, and series creator Michael Wilson (a former SNL alum who conceived the show's breakneck pace), it's an energetic read that captures the energy of a ton of people hoping against hope that throwing themselves body and soul into a project could turn it into their big break. (It even has a built-in villain in the form of money guy Jim McNamara, who reportedly pulled stunts like trying to get the show's female cast members to strip for Howard Stern, before pulling alleged financial shenanigans that led to the show getting canceled.) Even if you have no memory of The Newz—or were, say, born long after it went off the air—it's still an interesting snapshot of creative types being let off the leash for a few delirious months, before the whole thing ended up crashing down.
