The end of an era.
Two or three days ago, hard to tell which, I was sitting in a ballet-adjacent parking lot enjoying the hot drafts of Santa Ana whilst scrolling the news on my phone. There were many notable and important stories. The U.S. government shutdown stretching on and on, politicians on both sides of the aisle grandstanding while the poor and vulnerable get told to kick rocks, a continued U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean, experts suggesting a regime-change-style invasion of Venezuela days, if not hours, away and the revelation that Eddie Murphy’s favorite show is MTV’s Ridiculousness.
The Hollywood Reporter broke that little nugget context-free in a piece on the new documentary Being Eddie.
“Pursue peace of mind,” Eddie Murphy says in the trailer (below) for Netflix documentary Being Eddie. “If you’ve got that, then you’ve got it all.” It’s great advice. But then again, it’s coming from the guy who next says that Rob Dyrdek’s MTV clip show Ridiculousness is “the best show on TV,” so weight it as you will.
There was no circling back to when Murphy declared Ridiculousness the “best show on TV” nor why he thinks.
A very sad day for him, then, and those throughout the extreme sport universe as MTV announced, hours ago, that the program would be canceled after 14 years on air. According to TMZ, the decision came straight from the top as ownership is “working to reimagine MTV for the future and is going to be exploring fresh formats, different creative voices, and refreshed programming.”
Ridiculousness aired over 900 episodes during its run.
Rob Dyrdek’s as everyone knows, came up in the skate world, releasing his first signature show with DC in 1995, developing the world’s first “skate plaza” in 2005 and hopping onto music television the very next year with his reality show Rob & Big. He followed that hi with Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory and then Ridiculousness, the super hot clip show wherein Dyrdek and a cast of crazy cats oooh’d and aaah’d at viral mishaps.
Well, it’s all over now but Dyrdek is a multi-hyphenate, never willing to sit still so maybe he can get involved with that Venezuela regime change business, unless you have a better idea.