Comedy Central has always been home to a variety of different comedy programs, and it has maintained its prestigious name over the years by broadcasting original programs like Nathan For You, Broad City, and Workaholics. These are original programs that keep people interested in the channel, and in the national spotlight, successful ones are able to amass huge fanbases, cultivate memes, and make their mark in the cable television space. For a while, The Kroll Show was one of these original programs. Created, produced, and starred in by Nick Kroll, this sketch comedy series was praised for its witty parody on reality television. However, a little bit of Internet research will show you that The Kroll Show isn’t airing anymore. What happened?
The Kroll Show’s Early Beginning
The Kroll Show premiered in January of 2013, being the brainchild of Nick Kroll, Jonathan Krisel, and John Levenstein. All three of these men brought a lot of comedy experience to the table. Kroll has had an extensive acting career, and he is perhaps most famous for appearing and writing for The League. Krisel has done a lot of writing for Portlandia and Tim and Eric, which are both wildly popular and successful sketch comedy programs. Levenstein also has a lot of writing credit under his belt, for programs like Arrested Development and The Inbetweeners. As far as talent went, The Kroll Show had everything that it needed.
The concept behind The Kroll Show was sort of unusual. The bulk of the novelty behind the show’s production comes with how the sketches are presented. Each sketch is meant to emulate the general style of different reality television programs. You’ll see a lot of shaky cameras, a lot of corny flashbacks, and a lot of fast-paced editing. Watching the show is intended to give the viewer the general feeling of surfing through different channels, and each episode offers different sketches for an array of different “shows”.
The Kroll Show’s first episode received 1.18 million American viewers, and positive reviews began to pour in. Publications like Entertainment Weekly ran reviews raving about the thread of acerbic wit that ran through the show’s satire. The show grabbed a lot of people’s attention, and Nick Kroll and company ran with it.
Making A Cultural Impact
Once they broke out of the awkward early stages, The Kroll Show became a bit of an obscure hit. The show attracted a lot of attention online, where clips uploaded to YouTube were able to gain millions upon millions of views. Several different sketches became popular online, like Wheels Ontario, a humorous parody of Canadian teen dramas like Degrassi. However, The Kroll Show’s most consistently viewed sketches would have to be from their PubLIZity series, which followed Nick Kroll and Jenny Slate as a pair of ditzy publicity agents. PubLIZity videos alone have earned The Kroll Show a couple of million views on YouTube.
The Kroll Show was also able to wrangle in an impressive arrangement of celebrity guests, as well. Over the show’s run, they were able to bring on entertainers like Brie Larson, Amy Poehler, Katy Perry, Seth Roger, James Franco, Zach Galifianakis, and many others. Popularity and public opinion of The Kroll Show continued to grow and improve. This comedy program was no joke. So, the show was seeing all of this success, and they had a fairly strong presence both on-air and online. What changed? Why did the show end? What’s The Kroll Show doing now?
The Kroll Show Now in 2018 – Recent Updates
The Kroll Show’s final season began in 2015, and its final episode aired in March of 2015. According to Nick Kroll, the show ended simply because the cast and crew decided that it was its time. In an interview with Vulture, Kroll said, “…[It] just became clear that we wrapped up a lot of the stories and characters that we had created, and felt like we had brought a number of them to their natural conclusion.” The team behind the show wanted to avoid a pitfall that is all too common among comedy programs, which is placing episode quantity over episode quality. As much as comedy fans will miss The Kroll Show, you can’t help but respect their decision to “retire on top”, as it were. For now, though, it looks like we may have to resort to watching reruns for a while.
