Fresh off the critical re-evaluation of his revolting film debut Freddy Got Fingered, Tom Green sat down with Graham Bensinger for an extended interview covering his life and career, up to and including the time he teamed up with Monica Lewinsky to troll every media outlet in North America.
They also discussed the early years of The Tom Green Show, and how he had to battle MTV over its content. Not because the network had a problem with potentially offensive pranks, like the time he turned his parents’ car into “The Slutmobile.”
Nope, they just didn’t want any hideously old people on the air. You know, like a 36-year-old.
Green explained that, when the show first began on Ottawa’s local public access channel back in 1994, he was still in college studying television broadcasting. This meant that he was able to edit segments himself, which quickly led him to the realization that Tom Green wasn’t actually the best part of The Tom Green Show. “It became apparent early on that the funny part wasn’t the thing that I was doing on the street, it was the people’s reaction,” Green explained. “(That) was the joke. It was the punchline, which was something that I really started to figure out in the editing room.”
Having that experience as an editor allowed Green to direct the camera crew to focus more on the bystanders while filming public bits. But when the show was picked up by MTV in 1999, they weren’t so into this idea. “When we first went to MTV there was a lot of creative push and pull in those first few months,” Green recalled, “because the MTV editors and producers would tighten everything up and they would cut all the reaction shots out.”
Worse, according to Green, “MTV at the time had a policy that they didn’t want anyone over the age of 35 appearing on camera on their network.”
While we have no way of confirming Green’s story, it is true that there weren’t a ton of older folks on MTV in the ‘90s, with the exception of Beavis and Butt-Head’s Hank Hill-like neighbor.
Green didn’t seem to be joking. He further claimed that this dictum proved to be a problem for The Tom Green Show because “all the reaction shots were from old people, because they reacted more. They were more confused by bizarre things. So I had to convince (MTV) to use the shot of the old lady, or the man on the street who’s over 35 getting mad at me.”
Ultimately, Green won out, and he was able to include shots of over-35s on his show. MTV didn’t even require him to air a disclaimer cautioning young viewers that some scenes might contain scenes featuring the inevitable ravages of age.