Is he still humping a dead moose? Well, his days as a reference in Eminemâs lyrics are probably over. But in typical form for Tom Green, the comedian and host turns the camera on himself in This is The Tom Green Documentary (Prime Video), which considers Greenâs past â a career in shock comedy that began on Canadian public-access cable in the early 1990s, became a phenomenon with a move to MTV in â99, spawned an early 2000s movie career, and came complete with a brief celebrity marriage to Drew Barrymore â as Green, now 53, embraces his less crazy present. These days, Green has left his longtime Hollywood Hills home â which was also the studio for a Web-based talk show he filmed in his living room â for the quieter pace of life on a farm in Ontario, where he considers his legacy as he pets his dog and rides his horses.    Â
THIS IS THE TOM GREEN DOCUMENTARY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?Â
The Gist: In the late 1980s, as a 15-year-old kid in Pembroke, Ontario obsessed with hip-hop, skateboarding, and Late Night With David Letterman, Tom Greenâs parents allowed him to start doing standup sets at a local comedy club called Yuk Yukâs. But if Mary Jane and Richard Green ever regretted this decision, they didnât admit it. Not a few years later, when their son was placing them at the center of numerous shock-y bits for his public access variety show, like putting the severed heads of big game animals in their bed while they slept, or spraypainting a âSlutmobileâ mural onto the hood of their car. Not on MTV, where they continued to be comic foils for their sonâs Tom Green Show antics. And not now, in This is The Tom Green Documentary, where an older and bearded Green continues to needle them in his specific, loving way.
Greenâs comedy was always about creating laughs on the spot, from what or who was available, so it makes sense that his parents appear in this, his self-directed documentary, which also features longtime sidekicks/friends Glenn Humplik and Phil Giroux. With access to his own archive of analog tapes, Green also features plenty of that old gaggery, from the outrageousness-peddling of his man-on-the-street interviews to the gross-out stunts and physical comedy that would eventually define Jackass as a brand. The doc tracks how Green outgrew Canadian public access, went viral at the end of last century as the creator and host of MTVâs The Tom Green Show, and parlayed that into making even more of his dreams come true. Not only did Dave Letterman ask him to appear as a guest, but Tom Green ended up doing a run as one of Daveâs guest hosts.
âIt was like Iâd died and gone to heaven,â Green says in a voiceover. But as suggested by Hollywood Causes Cancer, the title of his 2004 autobiography, the universe has a way of challenging us at our most prolific. Greenâs early-2000s testicular cancer diagnosis was a personal wake-up call, though it also became fodder for a revealing MTV special that filmed his surgery. And while his 2001 marriage to Drew Barrymore was brief, it taught him further lessons about himself, and about the rabid nature of media overexposure. For his post-cancer, post-marriage, post-MTV reemergence, Green became centered around what he could create on his own. Like touring as a standup comic, but also establishing the format of a podcast, which when he started doing it was still in its infancy.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Eventually, Tony Hawk became a guest on and friend of The Tom Green Show. But Green also grew up idolizing the skateboarding legend and the scrappy videos Hawk was a part of via Powell Peralta and the Bones Brigade, an era of DIY video production that surfaces in the 2022 doc Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.
Curious about a cultural reassessment of Greenâs five-Razzy-winning 2001 directorial debut, Freddy Got Fingered? Decider has you covered.
And The Tom Green Documentary is also part of a growing wing of Tom Green content at Prime Video, which is set to include stand-up sets old and new as well as his own upcoming reality show, Tom Green Country. Why should a longtime television host shooting an unscripted program on the farm he has purchased in his older years only be something Jeremy Clarkson gets to do?
Performance Worth Watching: The doc makes a point to highlight voices from todayâs comedy and podcast universes. They all throw it back to Greenâs antics on MTV and his later years as a show host, and cite him as an influence on their own careers. Your Joe Rogans, your Eric Andrés, your Tom Seguras, your Steve-Oâs.
Memorable Dialogue: As he thinks back to how it all started, Green still sounds amazed that his local public access provider even granted a kid like him access to recording facilities and video equipment. But even more, he continues to sound inspired by the medium, and what it allowed him to do.
âGetting access to video cameras in those early days, it was kind of like a magical thing. Youâd shoot the video, and then youâd put it back in, and you watch it. And you sort of couldnât believe you were looking at yourself on the television.â
Sex and Skin: Even when he was humping dead moose for the camera or screaming âMy bum is on the cheese!â and becoming a viral hit on MTVâs Total Request Live, Green and his cohort were mostly keeping their pants on.
Our Take: âMTV took the place of what almost like the entire Internet does now,â Tom Green says in This is The Tom Green Documentary, and heâs very much not wrong. Loud and chaotic strings of Green comedy clips appear in the doc from those Y2K times, and capture a guy willing to come up with his own challenges and then do them, no subscriptions or smashing of a like button required. Greenâs unpredictable, spontaneous, and shouty sense of humor was both inviting and challenging â whether people loved him or hated him, the exposure remained high, as in top-ranks-of-influencers high â and while his creative debt to Letterman and Conan OâBrien is obvious and acknowledged, Greenâs gawky youth and manic commitment to his own vision both became significant to his unique take on confrontation as comedy.
OK, but Green is older now, though, so where does that leave him? It feels like this is the other big question at the heart of This is The Tom Green Documentary. Today, in the culture, what MTV used to represent has become diffuse. Most everyone has a device in their pocket that allows the creation of content to access an audience. With his doc, Green seems to be suggesting that he should get a little more credit for helping to establish that concept, and for refining in his unhinged way what that content could look like.
Our Call: STREAM IT. You can blame Tom Green for the movies he made, but can you blame him for podcasts, too? In This is the Tom Green Documentary, Green considers the legacy of his in-your-face comedy â both for himself and his career, but also how his often goofy vision of entertainment predicted and influenced the outrageousness-comes-standard, self-as-star tenets of todayâs social media.  Â
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘This Is The Tom Green Documentary’ on Prime Video, A Reflective Look Back For The Canadian Comedian, Host, And Instigator appeared first on Decider.