Paul Scheer Is Recreating Old TRL Segments In An Absurd New Webseries

TV gives comedians endless amount of stupid shit to poke fun at. Remember TRL, née Total Request Live? It had its moments of greatness, but it also had a lot of plain stupid segments, and also Carson Daly was/is a giant sentient potato. Which is why it’s great that comedian Paul Scheer is now ripping on the teenager-friendly MTV staple (which ran from 1998 to 2008) in a new web series cleverly called Scheer-RL.

You can watch the action on JASH’s YouTube channel. It’s not unlike what Scheer did with the Arscheerio Paul Show, which of course is a riff off of old episodes of the Arsenio Hall Show. Part of the fun is that the celebrity impressions are actually terrible: See, for example, Kumail Nanjiani doing Mariah Carey. He’s riffing on a real TRL spot that happened in July 2001, which you can see here; I think the fact that Nanjiani’s impression is so bad, combined with the fact that the crazy shit he’s doing is pretty much what Mariah did LIVE on TELEVISION once, makes it even better. Scheer-RL also did Marilyn Manson; people who take themselves super-duper seriously all the time are much more fun to clown on. Scheer did a 98 Degrees spot too, and again, the impressions aren’t great, but the series is fun. I honestly don’t think we can have enough comedy that points out the utter absurdity of television. RIP , but this’ll do for now.