The “perfect” series Eddie Murphy called the “the best show on television”
The lure of television’s ongoing ‘Golden Age’ has proven too strong for countless Academy Award winners, A-listers, icons, and legends to resist, but Eddie Murphy has shown precisely zero interest in involving himself in a TV series.
That doesn’t mean you can’t watch the actor and comedian’s latest offerings from the comfort of your own home. In fact, it’s the only place you can, with Murphy’s last six features being released exclusively on streaming services, which has kept one of his generation’s biggest stars away from the multiplex since 2016’s Mr Church, and hardly anybody saw it.
Since leaving Saturday Night Live in 1984, he’s never appeared in a recurring live-action show. He voiced Donkey in a few made-for-television spinoffs from the Shrek franchise and voiced Thurgood Stubbs in The PJs, but the closest he’s ever come to being a regular fixture on the small screen was when he reprised the role of Axel Foley in a Beverly Hills Cop pilot that wasn’t picked up, which he seemed pretty happy about.
However, just because he wants nothing to do with TV professionally, it doesn’t mean he won’t watch it in his spare time. Everybody has a show they’ll defend to the death as the greatest of all time, but not many of them would stake their claim on Ridiculousness, which is set to end in 2026 after being cancelled, not that he’ll be lacking in reruns when there are currently 46 seasons and over 1,500 episodes.
Murphy literally called it “the best show on television,” and while a long-running comedy show based on viral skits and sketches isn’t going to trouble many people’s all-time lists, the funnyman mounted a passionate defence for why he believes the Rob Dyrdek-hosted staple of MTV’s viewing schedule is the pick of the episodic bunch.
“We watch Ridiculousness a lot,” he informed Collider. “Ridiculousness is the perfect show. Ridiculousness is like a microcosm of the world. It’s like, ‘What’s going on in the world?’ Like, ‘This is what’s happening’. It’s these little quick snippets: ‘This is what’s happening in the world’. People are falling off stuff, and running into stuff, I love Ridiculousness.”
In even better news for the self-professed superfan, it’s never off of MTV’s rotation. “It’s always on,” Murphy added. “And what happens is you’ll be trying to find something, there’s nothing on. You’ll be like, ‘Hey, put on Ridiculousness‘. I’ll go looking for a Ridiculousness, too. Seeing someone running into a wall never gets old. I’ve watched it a lot.”
It isn’t high art, but if Murphy wants to spend his days watching as much Ridiculousness as possible, and it sounds an awful lot like that’s exactly what he does, then it’s not going to hurt anyone. That also means few people will be left as devastated by its cancellation, but it’s not as if he’ll be hurting for episodes when it passed the four-figure mark a long time ago.
Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, and the rest of the usual suspects can fuck right off; if Eddie Murphy wants to watch TV, it’s Ridiculousness or bust.
