We set ourselves up for it with the reality show. You've seen me and Nick go at each other's throats on TV. They've got all these people giving their opinions on our marriage and how we handle it when they are watching an edited TV show.
It was actually the production group that ended up producing the show for us...Every musician, especially in the hip-hop community, you always make these show recaps or vlogs, and essentially what "Touring's Boring" was is, we tried to make our vlogs interesting and almost more like a TV show. That's how we got discovered by TV.
I've seen [Donald Trump] appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he's a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. But other people fell in love with him as a reality star. So does that mean that the entertainment industry is doing something wrong? I think reality TV answered that question a long time ago: Yes, it's doing something terribly wrong. But there's some great reality TV, and I'm not bagging on it completely.
Growing up, I remember watching TV, and I didn't see a lot of people who looked like me, especially someone who passed as a glamorous model on a mainstream TV show.
If I write a cop show, it's not up to me to decide how different it is from 'Law & Order.' I had screenwriters go on and on and on about how their cop show isn't like any other cop show on TV. They made very good points, and it absolutely doesn't matter. It's entirely up to the audience to decide.
I have lots of favorite shows, but not reality! I don't like reality TV so much. I'm saddened by people who don't show respect to each other and to themselves. It's horrible. Unfortunately, that's demonstrated a lot on reality television.
I love doing [stand-up]. I love making people laugh no matter how. Whether it's a commercial, or a TV show, or a reality show, or a talk show, or a special, or a book. However I can make people laugh, that's what I want to do.
Obviously Mad TV, SNL are one kind of show, whereas The State belongs to the kind of show that is entirely conceived written and performed by a set group that existed before the TV show.
The only difference in reality TV and the other TV is that the scriptwriters for reality TV are not union. I have been on reality TV shows. Believe me, my friends: It's not just improv and whatever happens when the cameras are rolling.
The idea was called Justin.tv. The idea behind it was, basically, to create our own live-video streaming show, like 'Big Brother,' about ourselves, these entrepreneurs trying to make a reality show. It was a little bit meta and we launched this show.
Being a stand-up comic, this isn't a stepping-stone for me; it's what I do, and this is what I'm always going to do. And even if I do a TV show, the only reasons to do a TV show is to get more people to know me to come out to my stand-up shows.
I kind of got into TV when I went to visit a show my brother was working on. Soon I got the second lead in a TV show.
I never thought of myself as being that good looking, I was an actor, people saw me on television, and then they start to think you're good looking because of that presentation. I was no better looking before the show, than after - and before the TV show I couldn't get a date to save my life. So what changed? Did I suddenly become more good looking? No. I got lucky, I got a TV show. That's what happened.
What is important for me is that the people who know me for real know Mario how he really is. People who don't know me, they read newspapers and they watch TV. TV is made to give a lot of opinions... so I can't show the real Mario to everybody.
I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, watching the Tony Awards on TV. Not just 'watching' the Tony Awards on TV - I would record them on a VHS tape and bring them in to school and show them to the other kids.
Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show. And that's what I think is the neat thing about TV: how alive it is, and how the writers respond to the stimulus that they're getting from the actual actors. Whereas a movie is more hermetically sealed.
In the voyeurism of Reality TV, the viewer's passivity is kept intact, pampered and massaged and force-fed Chicken McNuggets of carefully edited snippets that permit him or her to sit in easy judgment and feel superior at watching familiar strangers make fools of themselves. Reality TV looks in only one direction: down.