Mad TV Review Archive

Here's my archive of most of the episodes that I have reviewed in the past. I began posting reviews of Mad TV episodes to the Usenet newsgroup alt.tv.mad-tv on February 1, 1998. Since then, I have reviewed every first-run episode and quite a few reruns. In March 1999, I began the process of reviewing all the episodes which aired between October 1995 (when the show first aired) and January 1998 which I hadn't already reviewed. This project is not yet complete; nevertheless, the archive contains all of seasons four, five and six (so far), most of season three, most of season one, and a few episodes from season two. March 1999 is also when this archive was launched, making it (as far as I know) the first fan-based archive of Mad TV reviews on the World Wide Web. Also, note that beginning with MD-419, I started ranking episodes on a scale of 0 to 10. (If you can't rank it on a simple scale like this, why bother to critique it?) These rankings also apply to the older episodes I am in the process of screening, but I haven't applied them to all episodes although I probably will, eventually.

In most cases, any errors that I made have been preserved for posterity's sake (e.g.: I mistakenly identified Aries Spears as the actor who played Chris Rock in one parody; in fact it was Phil LaMarr. I also identified MD-304 as Dave Herman's last episode; in fact, he appeared for the last time on MD-306, although he last appeared in the credits in MD-305). Reviews are presented as plain ASCII text.

You will notice that at some points the text formatting seems to be a bit screwy; this is because I originally typed most of the reviews into Notepad for Windows with the Word Wrap feature on. This resulted in no carriage returns being inserted into the end of the lines on most of the reviews. I wrote a program to parse the files and insert carriage returns in appropriate places, but it was only about 80 percent successful. From now on, I'm using Edit under MS-DOS for all my reviews. (How cutting edge.)

Also notice that not all the reviews were reviewed when originally aired. This is especially true of the older ones, as I did not review ANY of the season one and two episodes when originally aired. Those that were reviewed later often contained different insights than those reviewed right after they aired; e.g. in my review of MD-101 I commented on how it was interesting to watch the "evolution" of the Vancome Lady, something that I couldn't have said when the show first aired and no decision had been made to recur the character.