The MTV sketch comedy show The State ran for a mere 24 episodes between January 1994 and August 1995. And if you weren’t a teenager or young adult during that narrow window of time, odds are you’ve never even heard of it. But the show left an enormous cultural footprint and launched the careers of some of the greatest comedic minds working today, including Thomas Lennon, Michael Showalter, Kerri Kenney-Silver, Ken Marino, David Wain, Ben Garant, and Kevin Allison, and ultimately led to Wet Hot American Summer, Reno 911!, Children’s Hospital, They Came Together, and many other brilliant films and TV shows of the past few three decades.
The new documentary Long Live the State, premiering this week at the Tribeca Film Festival, goes back to their roots as an NYU sketch comedy troupe in the Eighties, and traces their entire saga to the present day. It features new interviews with all 11 members of the group.
“I’ve been a fan of The State since my freshman year in high school when the first season premiered,” Long Live The State Director Matthew Perniciaro tells Rolling Stone. “I was just so inspired by their courage to be weird, unapologetic and different, which was something you just didn’t really see on TV at that time. I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina as a kid who didn’t always feel like I fit in with those around me, but I knew that if I met someone who liked The State and they got it the way I got it, then those were my kind of people. It had a significant impact on my life and it’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for many years.”
In this exclusive clip from the movie, the group remembers the grimy city they encountered when they first arrived at NYU. “New York in the Eighties was intense, in every way, in the best possible ways, and the worst possible says,” says Kenney-Silver, who landed the role of a lifetime earlier this year in The Four Seasons. “There was so much happening.”
The experience of making their own show for MTV directly out of college was a whirlwind. And when it ended, the group wasn’t always on the same page about how to carry forward. The tension peaked when only a subset of them signed onto the Comedy Central show Viva Variety. In putting the film together, Perniciaro discovered that they all remembers things a bit differently.
“You can have 11 people in a room, all witnessing the same thing and they all have different memories of what happened because that’s how they perceived it,” he says. “I wanted to make sure the film embraced how different members may have felt differently in each of those situations and give people their own agency to discuss how that felt to them on a personal level, instead of one unified public statement.”
The difficult years are largely just bad memories for the group now, and they remain close friends. They even went on tour a couple of years back when the SAG strike shut down Hollywood, and they suddenly had space on their calendars.
“The State is like a family,” says Perniciaro. “They love each other like a family, they’ve fought with one another like a family and they’ve shared some of the most important moments of each of their lives with one another, the same way a family does. To be in one another’s lives from such a young age and for such a long period of time now, over thirty-five years, it really couldn’t be any other way and that’s what I wanted this film to be, kind of like a family scrapbook that not only celebrates the work they’ve created together, but the people behind that work.”
www.rollingstone.com
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