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MTV’s the State Look Back on Early Years in New Documentary: ‘It Was Intense in Every Way’

The new documentary 'Long Live The State' looks back at the career of the groundbreaking MTV sketch troupe The State.

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. 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.

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