The Worst We Can Find by Dale Sherman

Hey! I have a tag for things having to do with TV! I'd almost forgotten that, and haven't used it much in recent years. But it is appropriate here, so I dragged it out of the vault.

The Worst We Can Find  - subtitled "MST3K, RiffTrax, and the History of Heckling at the Movies" - is mostly a history of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV show, but it starts before that show begins, with details of other people doing similar things in the years before, and other influences on what everyone abbreviates as MST3K, and runs on after the show's 1999 cancelation to cover what the major forces behind the show did afterward, much of which (spoiler alert!) also involved making commentary over bad movies.

It was written by Dale Sherman, who has a long career in mostly media-related non-fiction: Amazon tells me this was his sixteenth book. And it was published by Applause, which - back in the dim misty days when I worked in publishing - focused more strictly in works on stages rather than screens, but has always been a respectable and solid outlet for material about the performing arts.

I found Sherman a bit of a meat-and-potatoes writer, gathering all of the obvious material in a solid, readable manner but without putting a lot of spin or new details in. There's an extensive list of sources at the end; it looks like Sherman ran down basically every interview or media mention of the show, and also did an impressive job of teasing out the multiple strands of influences. I don't think he did any original research or interviews; I doubt an Applause budget runs to such things.

This is a 2023 book, so it's still current, covering through the three seasons of the resurrected show on Netflix and via crowdfunding on their self-created Gizmoplex. There are other books about MST3K, but this one looks to be as definitive as you can get.

Not to retell his story, but Sherman starts off with a long chapter about other people who heckled movies professionally, or made commentary on movies and similar media properties, mostly through the '70s and '80s. Then he details how the small, struggling TV station KTMA in Minneapolis needed programming in the late '80s, and staffers Jim Mallon and Kevin Murphy turned to local comedian Joel Hodgson. Hodgson, with some input from the others and from his eventual fellow cast-member/puppeteers Trace Beaulieu and Josh (later J. Elvis for TV credit purposes) Weinstein, came up with the concept: a guy was stuck in space with two robots, forced to watch bad movies by mad scientists back on earth as part of a vaguely explained experiment.

KTMA broadcast one season of the show in 1988-89, and almost immediately - not because of the show - fell apart. But the cable industry was booming, so MST3K went national on first the Comedy Channel, and, several years later, found a second home on what was then the normally-spelled Sci-Fi Channel for its last three seasons. All in all, it ran for just over a decade and made nearly two hundred episodes, which, as the creators tended to say, isn't bad for a puppet show from the midwest.

I'm a fan of the show, obviously, which is why I got this book to begin with. I don't know it if told me a whole lot I didn't know or couldn't find elsewhere, but it put everything together in one nice package, covered the show from before the beginning to after the end, and had a very Minnesota-appropriate even-handed, let's-everybody-work-together tone throughout. And that's darn-tootin' good.